Reading between the lines of an interview with Galactic Civilizations designer Paul Boyer and Stardock CEO Brad Wardell, they seem a little anxious about maintaining the values that made Galactic Civilizations II the best game Stardock ever developed. They return a lot to the theme of their own naivete in the mid-2000s, the fact that they did some things with GalCiv 2 because they didn’t know any better, and stumbled into some magic.
Stardock have changed a lot in the last few years, and while they’re a more professional and knowledgeable group of developers now, they don’t want to lose the freedom they brought to Galactic Civilizations 2. As Boyer puts it, “You can kind of tell that there's a labor of love in there, and that causes people to get much more attached to it.... Nowadays everything’s just so polished down to the bare essentials. Players like to have something where they can feel like — I don’t know — like it's alive. Like there's stuff there to discover.”
Galactic Civilizations II remains one of Stardock’s biggest successes, to the point of being puzzling. “The sales of GalCiv 2 were actually higher last year than they had been in the year before,” Wardell says. “We've put some considerable effort in trying to understand that. That’s not how it's supposed to work, if you understand.”