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Paradox is the best company ever :love:

Turjan

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Paradox launch their own modding platform, with Xbone support: https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/
First step towards breaking off from Steam.

More like the second step considering they've had their own actual store since forever.
I know they have their own store, but I would not count this as "first step", because I think their store is only 3 years younger than steam itself.
More importantly, Paradox have their own launcher, and you don't get Steam keys for games you buy for that launcher. Having mod support is more or less necessary to make that choice more attractive.

BPBNT3x.jpg


You sometimes get these awkward posts on their forums, where some people ask why they cannot use a certain mod from Steam Workshop. They usually get some kind of evasive answer from support, and it's up to other users to clear up that, if they chose to buy on the Paradox Store and have the game on that launcher, they won't be able to have access to mods on Steam. Experience an unhappy customer.
 
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LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Paradox established a new studio Paradox Tectonic in California, led by Rod Humble, the former head of EA's Sims division. Suspicious of a Sims-like from Paradox: https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/...lead-of-new-development-studio-in-california/

Rod Humble Joins Paradox Interactive as Lead of New Development Studio in California
Newly Formed Studio, Paradox Tectonic, to Create Groundbreaking New Titles

STOCKHOLM and BERKELEY, Calif. – March 7, 2019 – Paradox Interactive, a publisher and developer of games that shake up the industry, today announced the opening of a new internal development studio, Paradox Tectonic, which will operate in Berkeley, California as the newest member of the Stockholm-based publisher’s team of studios.

The studio is led by Rod Humble, former Executive Vice President at Electronic Arts and former CEO of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life.

Paradox Tectonic will lead development of a brand-new game and IP to be published by Paradox Interactive, with details to be announced at a later date. It joins the publisher’s growing list of internal studios, including Paradox Development Studio in Stockholm, Paradox Arctic in Umeå, Sweden, the Paradox mobile development team in Malmö, Sweden, Triumph Studios in Delft, The Netherlands, and Harebrained Schemes in Seattle.

“Opening a studio in the California Bay Area puts us in the heart of one of the largest gaming and tech communities in the world,” said Ebba Ljungerud, CEO of Paradox Interactive. “Rod Humble and his team bring a wealth of experience and a studio leader who has led work on games that have shaped the industry several times over. We hope to have some earth-shaking news to share from the Tectonic team soon.”

“Our aim with Paradox Tectonic is to create open, fun, beautiful games which respect the players’ intelligence and enables their creativity, freedom, emotion, and sharing,” said Rod Humble, Studio Head at Paradox Tectonic. “Our studio structure is using best practices for modern development: a flat organization in a low-friction environment with a team of highly experienced domain experts. It’s a privilege to be reunited with so many world-class colleagues from so many triple-A projects, and the team and I are delighted to join Paradox and be part of driving the company’s next cycle of growth. Our shared values of quality and putting the customer first made Paradox the perfect fit for us.”

For more details about Paradox Interactive, visit http://www.paradoxinteractive.com.



He sounds like a grognard. According to him, currently the studio is pretty small and almost all programmers, employing a kind of code-than-talk approach.
 
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Space Nugget

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It joins the publisher’s growing list of internal studios, including Paradox Development Studio in Stockholm, Paradox Arctic in Umeå, Sweden, the Paradox mobile development team in Malmö, Sweden, Triumph Studios in Delft, The Netherlands, and Harebrained Schemes in Seattle.

Heh, no Hardsuit Labs. :eek:
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
It joins the publisher’s growing list of internal studios, including Paradox Development Studio in Stockholm, Paradox Arctic in Umeå, Sweden, the Paradox mobile development team in Malmö, Sweden, Triumph Studios in Delft, The Netherlands, and Harebrained Schemes in Seattle.

Heh, no Hardsuit Labs. :eek:

I don't think owning only 33% makes it internal.
 

Space Nugget

Guest
It joins the publisher’s growing list of internal studios, including Paradox Development Studio in Stockholm, Paradox Arctic in Umeå, Sweden, the Paradox mobile development team in Malmö, Sweden, Triumph Studios in Delft, The Netherlands, and Harebrained Schemes in Seattle.

Heh, no Hardsuit Labs. :eek:

I don't think owning only 33% makes it internal.

I wonder what's their plan regarding its fate.
 

Space Satan

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They do, but to have at least some competition new devs need some experience with grand strategies.
And it is that shitty assumption that grand strategies are a nice genre, while it is among the STEAM top concurrent players. Right now Hearts of Iron IV have 15 000 average-per-month players, while Fallout 4 have 10000 and other Paradox grand strategies almost never leave top 40. Monsters of strategy gaming like Civ V have 20000.
Yet almost everyone treat grand strategy genre like, I don't know, golf or train simulators. Goddamn people are ready to pay for DLCs and play half-broken Paradox games and still no one tries to get into grand strategy market.
Some kind of space strategies are the rare exception but even here things are bad,
 

normie

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They need competition.
why isn't there any, though?

the formula isn't a secret and people, currently stuck with what Paradox provides to scratch the itch, are begging for a mana-less, aztec-less take on the genre that'd really do it for them
new devs need some experience with grand strategies
somebody should've popped out of the modding milieu, but unfortunately none have (?), or has Paradox itself absorbed the talent?
 

Rahdulan

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Welp, it seems cancerous degenerate DLC policy works

It's not like that particular DLC approach is wrong, though. At the end of the day it adds a fuckton of new content to your game and if you like the game "cost vs enjoyment" is pretty high if you're buying along. When it becomes a problem is when you get into the game late or skip a few pieces of DLC only to have to buy a whole bunch at once. There's also nickel and diming at work, but I would argue most of Paradox's DLC is worth it. Most.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
https://www.paradoxplaza.com/news?aid=PDXCON-2019-Tickets-Available

New Games from Paradox Interactive to Debut at PDXCON 2019
Tickets Available Now at Early Bird Prices for Paradox Convention in Berlin

STOCKHOLM – May 7, 2019 – Paradox Interactive, a publisher and developer of games that defy convention, today opened sales of tickets for PDXCON 2019, the annual celebration of Paradox’s global community. This year’s event, occurring in Berlin, Germany on the weekend of October 18-20, 2019, will include exclusive activities and experiences for attendees — including the announcement of new games from Paradox and its partners. Tickets purchased starting today will be eligible for an “Early Bird” discount of 20% off, applicable to all available ticket tiers.

Prepare for the debuts by watching the debut of the latest PDXCON 2019 trailer, here:



This year’s PDXCON will see several world-first exclusives including hands-on game experience with Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. All PDXCON attendees, starting with holders of a Baron ticket, will get admission to the convention on Saturday, October 19, which includes access to all seminars, activities, game areas, and more. The King ticket will also grant admission during Sunday, October 20, where a series of special megagames, developer meet-and-greet sessions, and a LAN gaming session will be held. For those who purchase an Emperor ticket, an extra day on Friday, October 18 will be held, which will include an exclusive behind-the-scenes first look at Paradox’s newest games and biggest secrets.

Tickets and event details are available at the PDXCON website: https://pdxcon.paradoxplaza.com/


Colossal Order's new game? Romero's strategy game, it's going to be revealed at E3 anyway.

Also more console ports. (Seeing the logo of Tantalus Media, the port developer of Stellaris and Cities, at the PDXCON website.)
 

Space Satan

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Interim Report January – March 2019
First quarter 2019
  • Revenues amounted to SEK 238.3 (267.0) million, a decrease by 11 % compared to the same period last year.
  • Operating profit amounted to SEK 62.7 (140.5) million, a decrease by 55 %.
  • Profit before tax amounted to SEK 63.2 (140.5) million, and profit after tax amounted to SEK 49.3 (108.8) million.
  • Cash flow from operating activities amounted to SEK 156.3 (144.2) million, and cash flow from investing activities amounted to SEK -10.6 (-90.3) million.
  • By the end of the period cash and short-term placements amounted to SEK 378.7 (373.6) million.
  • Earnings per share amounted to SEK 0.47 (1.03) per share.
  • Revenues from the first quarter of 2019 are mainly attributable to Hearts of Iron IV, Cities: Skylines, Stellaris, Europa Universalis IV and Crusader Kings II.
Important events in the first quarter 2019
  • Three new expansions were released during the period; Green Cities and Parklife for Cities: Skylines Console, and Man the Guns for Hearts of Iron IV.
  • In February Stellaris was released for the first time on Console; Stellaris: Console Edition.
  • On March 7, Paradox announced the opening of a new internal development studio, Paradox Tectonic, which will operate in Berkeley, California.
  • On March 21, the new game Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 was announced, developed by Hardsuit Labs Inc. The game is planned for released in March 2020.
  • Steam Winter Sale took place December 20 to January 3.
Words from CEO
Our long-term growth journey continues

2019 has started at full speed and we have already passed several of this year’s milestones. The first quarter of the year has been characterised by a focus on long-term growth and expansion in several of our core areas. During the quarter, we invested more in both game development and marketing than we did in any previous quarter. Among other things, we carried out our largest marketing campaign ever when we announced the game Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. We have also gradually invested in building an organisation that will be able to develop and publish our growing game portfolio. Since the first quarter of 2018, we have grown from 287 employees to 423, i.e., by 47%. These investments in development, marketing and organisation need to be done well in advance of the games being released and thus before we get a return on these investments. This means that our margins are lower when we are in a strong development phase, an effect that will be very noticeable when we simultaneously have a quarter with fewer major game releases. It should be noted that all game purchases made before a game has been released are not recognized as revenue until the game is released.

The quarter’s revenues amounted to SEK 238.3 million, compared with SEK 267.0 million in the first quarter of 2018. The quarter’s earnings before tax amounted to SEK 63.2 million, compared with SEK 140.5 million in the first quarter of 2018. Our operations and our game launches are not seasonal, which means that a comparison of the financial outcome between single quarters from one year to another rarely gives a representative picture of the company’s development. The comparison between the first quarter of this year and last year is an example of this, where the first quarter of 2018 contained more major launches, including a new game, than the first quarter of this year, at the same time as our investments for the future have been at a record high.

During the quarter, we launched the expansion Man the Guns to our grand strategy game Hearts of Iron IV. The expansion broke the sales record for the game when, one month after launch, it had sold more than any other of the game’s previous expansions during the corresponding time. This development where game expansions break new sales records many years after the launch of their base games is something we have seen the past year with several of our games, such as Europa Universalis IV, Crusader Kings II and Cities: Skylines. We are delighted that our games continue to attract players and generate revenue for such a long time after launch. Long-life games and a business model that gives us continuous revenue during the game’s lifetime are central to our strategy.

During the period we continued our investment in games for gaming consoles – a platform that is increasing in value for us. In February, we launched Stellaris: Console Edition for Xbox One and Playstation 4. This is the first time we have launched a grand strategy game on console. The game has been received very positively by both existing and new players and creates opportunities for additional grand strategy games for console. We also released two expansions to Cities: Skylines Console – Green Cities and Parklife. Green Cities sold more copies during the first month after launch than any other expansion to Cities: Skylines Console previously made.

In March at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, we announced our upcoming game Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. The game is based on one of the brands we acquired as part of White Wolf. The game is developed by the Seattle-based studio Hardsuit Labs, of which we own 33%, and is scheduled to be launched during the first quarter of 2020. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is an important step of our expansion in the role-playing genre, an important growth area for us alongside strategy and management games.

During the first quarter of the year, we also increased our development competence and capacity by opening the doors to our new development studio Paradox Tectonic in Berkeley, California. The studio is led by game veteran Rod Humble and is currently developing a not-yet-announced game.

In February, we launched Paradox Mods, a further development of our modding platform that enables our players to share their own modifications of Paradox games to other players on both PC and Xbox One. That our players engage and participate in the development of our games through mods has been a contributing factor to the success of our games and is something that continues to be a central part of our identity.

April 25, we launched Imperator: Rome – the first new grand strategy game we have released since 2016. Imperator: Rome is developed by our Stockholm-based studio Paradox Development Studio and is now the fifth active grand strategy game in our portfolio. So far Imperator: Rome has exceeded our sales targets. Gaming press reviews have been very positive, however, we see lower user ratings than expected on Steam. We take this seriously; the game team is working on analyzing these reviews and reviewing their planned roadmap with them in mind. This is, in many ways, business as usual for us – our game development is always in close harmony with our players and we are extremely grateful for all the feedback on how we can make the game better.

In connection with the launch of Imperator: Rome, we reached another milestone on our growth journey – we passed ten million registered Paradox accounts! The growth of Paradox accounts is important as these form the basis of our ecosystem. Not least, they give us new opportunities to communicate directly with our players in a more personalized and relevant way. Players with Paradox accounts spend, on average, more time and money on our games than players without a Paradox account.

We look forward to the continuation of 2019 with great enthusiasm. First off are the expansion Green Planet for Surviving Mars in May and Urban Warfare for BATTLETECH in June. In August, we will launch the highly anticipated Age of Wonders: Planetfall, developed by Triumph Studios. On May 17, we also have our Annual General Meeting where I hope to meet as many of our shareholders as possible.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO
 
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Jugashvili

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It's not like that particular DLC approach is wrong, though. At the end of the day it adds a fuckton of new content to your game and if you like the game "cost vs enjoyment" is pretty high if you're buying along. When it becomes a problem is when you get into the game late or skip a few pieces of DLC only to have to buy a whole bunch at once. There's also nickel and diming at work, but I would argue most of Paradox's DLC is worth it. Most.

>buy Paradox game bundle
>forget to turn off obligatory Plebaton soundtrack
>shit-tier music starts blaring, ruining the atmosphere
 
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why isn't there any, though?

Same reason RTS is a dead genre. They're harder to make because of engine requirements. (that's the tl;dr for the below wall of text by the way)

If you want to make almost any genre of game, you can take a mainstream game engine with all sorts of support, whether that's Unreal Engine, Unity, CryEngine, or some other shit. You make your game, player controls a character, they move their character around the game world and do stuff. Maybe the camera is first person or third person, maybe it's 2D or 3D, but fundamentally the player controls a character that moves around the game world. Doesn't really matter if your game is a shooter or hack 'n' slash, has dialogue or not, RPG type character building or no, vehicles... the same engine will probably do just fine for all of that. Now consider RTS: all of a sudden the player's not controlling their character, they're controlling their camera, and issuing instructions to NPCs that the NPCs should follow, and constructing buildings, and managing an economy. It's a big shift and while a skilled company can probably make a character-oriented engine work with it, it's likely still very difficult for them because most RTS run on in-house engines. There's more reason for that, for example historically RTS tended to be P2P to deal with latency issues, and they had to be lockstep and completely deterministic, again for multiplayer reasons (most engines aren't deterministic, and even if capable of being made to act like it, it's probably too much of a hassle to make sure they work all the time). Even if some of that is less pronounced these days due to improving network infrastructure (I've heard that StarCraft 2 actually uses dedicated servers instead of P2P, but I prefer strategy games that are about strategy rather than coping with incompetently made interfaces so I don't follow the StarCraft series closely), it's still a concern.

All this is to say if you're making a strategy game you're probably going to be best off making your own engine. The problem with this is that making an engine requires you to have some genuine Neanderthal programmers on your staff, it's a lot of work and takes genuine skill to do right, and if you don't have those available then you're not going to get an engine. And, if you don't have that kind of programming team available, chances are you wouldn't be able to get a strategy game working very well in Unreal or whatever anyways. Most companies don't really have good programmers anymore, as advancing hardware capabilities and culture of allowing "good enough" pajeets in has led to the average programmer being pretty shit - hence the popularity of using a third party engine these days. So most developers are not going to set out to make an RTS.

Now go over to Grand Strategy and suddenly you're looking at the same problem but worse, because you're got something that's even more different from most games than RTS, now instead of controlling a character, or being a camera that gives instructions to various NPCs in the game world, your players are actually not even looking at a game world in that sense, they are looking at a map that has a sort of representation of places but the whole notion of an army actually "moving" to a space is just a representation, your game world could just as easily be represented as a text-based list, it's not an actual space. You're dealing with something very different from the structure of almost all other video games, and chances are any engine you think of, even an RTS-optimized engine, is not going to work too well with it. Paradox naturally uses their own engines, these being Europa Engine and later, Clausewitz Engine, and they used to license them out but then realized that it made more sense not to do so, because restricting it would make it harder for small, fledgeling developers to make something more popular than Paradox and force them to make good games in turn to compete.

Now I mean, you "could" make a strategy game in Unity or something. But it'd be pretty shit, and doubly so because people would be comparing it to strategy games from the 00s when hindoo incompetence hadn't overrun the gaming industry, the RTS genre was at its peak, 4X was doing well, and there was a lot of talent and budget going into making really good strategy games, most of which have aged well enough due to the genre's stagnation that players can and will compare your attempt at a Unity strategy game to the older titles as though they're contemporaries, and whatever you've made won't hold up. The same holds true for grand strategy. If you make a grand strategy game, it's not just going to compete with Paradox's newer catastrophes, it's going to be competing with older stuff from when Paradox was competent, like Victoria 2 - and it will have to be extremely good, or people will just stick to the existing Paradox games. Grand strategy is a lot like an MMO in that people tend to play them for massive amounts of time, again and again, sometimes even as the same country each time, and the whole fatigue and desire for a new game is nowhere near as pronounced as it might be for, say an RPG or a platformer. Where someone who's played an RPG to death might buy a different RPG and give it a shot, someone who's played Victoria 2 to death might decide "hmm this time I will play as Sardinia-Piedmont instead of doing the 10th Netherlands game in a row". Your game can't just be new and different - it has to be so good that it's worth "switching over", same as if you were trying to poach an MMO fanbase.

To actually have a competitor to Paradox arrive you'd need some reasonably wealthy publisher together with a highly skilled developer to decide to take a stab at that exact niche genre, with a willingness to make a high initial investment while understanding that the returns will never be extremely great, and that the most they can expect out of it is perhaps a consistent fanbase - and even then, they could still make a few small design errors that lead to people sticking to existing Paradox games. On top of that you'd have to have a developer willing to constrain themselves to developing a historical game, because the whole historical aspect is a big draw for the fans of Paradox games. Not that I think a fantasy or science fiction grand strategy would be impossible, but it might alienate more people than it would draw in, and it would also make it easier for developers to lose their vision of what a grand strategy is (this even happened to Paradox when they made Stellaris, which is a 4X), because without history as a guide you start getting tempted to balance things and reduce "railroading", but asymmetric balance of power, realistic instead of 4X-ish AI, and some degree of railroading due to a static map and its impact on geopolitics are all vital ingredients for a good grand strategy game.
 

normie

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why isn't there any, though?

Same reason RTS is a dead genre. They're harder to make because of engine requirements. (that's the tl;dr for the below wall of text by the way)

If you want to make almost any genre of game, you can take a mainstream game engine with all sorts of support, whether that's Unreal Engine, Unity, CryEngine, or some other shit. You make your game, player controls a character, they move their character around the game world and do stuff. Maybe the camera is first person or third person, maybe it's 2D or 3D, but fundamentally the player controls a character that moves around the game world. Doesn't really matter if your game is a shooter or hack 'n' slash, has dialogue or not, RPG type character building or no, vehicles... the same engine will probably do just fine for all of that. Now consider RTS: all of a sudden the player's not controlling their character, they're controlling their camera, and issuing instructions to NPCs that the NPCs should follow, and constructing buildings, and managing an economy. It's a big shift and while a skilled company can probably make a character-oriented engine work with it, it's likely still very difficult for them because most RTS run on in-house engines. There's more reason for that, for example historically RTS tended to be P2P to deal with latency issues, and they had to be lockstep and completely deterministic, again for multiplayer reasons (most engines aren't deterministic, and even if capable of being made to act like it, it's probably too much of a hassle to make sure they work all the time). Even if some of that is less pronounced these days due to improving network infrastructure (I've heard that StarCraft 2 actually uses dedicated servers instead of P2P, but I prefer strategy games that are about strategy rather than coping with incompetently made interfaces so I don't follow the StarCraft series closely), it's still a concern.

All this is to say if you're making a strategy game you're probably going to be best off making your own engine. The problem with this is that making an engine requires you to have some genuine Neanderthal programmers on your staff, it's a lot of work and takes genuine skill to do right, and if you don't have those available then you're not going to get an engine. And, if you don't have that kind of programming team available, chances are you wouldn't be able to get a strategy game working very well in Unreal or whatever anyways. Most companies don't really have good programmers anymore, as advancing hardware capabilities and culture of allowing "good enough" pajeets in has led to the average programmer being pretty shit - hence the popularity of using a third party engine these days. So most developers are not going to set out to make an RTS.

Now go over to Grand Strategy and suddenly you're looking at the same problem but worse, because you're got something that's even more different from most games than RTS, now instead of controlling a character, or being a camera that gives instructions to various NPCs in the game world, your players are actually not even looking at a game world in that sense, they are looking at a map that has a sort of representation of places but the whole notion of an army actually "moving" to a space is just a representation, your game world could just as easily be represented as a text-based list, it's not an actual space. You're dealing with something very different from the structure of almost all other video games, and chances are any engine you think of, even an RTS-optimized engine, is not going to work too well with it. Paradox naturally uses their own engines, these being Europa Engine and later, Clausewitz Engine, and they used to license them out but then realized that it made more sense not to do so, because restricting it would make it harder for small, fledgeling developers to make something more popular than Paradox and force them to make good games in turn to compete.

Now I mean, you "could" make a strategy game in Unity or something. But it'd be pretty shit, and doubly so because people would be comparing it to strategy games from the 00s when hindoo incompetence hadn't overrun the gaming industry, the RTS genre was at its peak, 4X was doing well, and there was a lot of talent and budget going into making really good strategy games, most of which have aged well enough due to the genre's stagnation that players can and will compare your attempt at a Unity strategy game to the older titles as though they're contemporaries, and whatever you've made won't hold up. The same holds true for grand strategy. If you make a grand strategy game, it's not just going to compete with Paradox's newer catastrophes, it's going to be competing with older stuff from when Paradox was competent, like Victoria 2 - and it will have to be extremely good, or people will just stick to the existing Paradox games. Grand strategy is a lot like an MMO in that people tend to play them for massive amounts of time, again and again, sometimes even as the same country each time, and the whole fatigue and desire for a new game is nowhere near as pronounced as it might be for, say an RPG or a platformer. Where someone who's played an RPG to death might buy a different RPG and give it a shot, someone who's played Victoria 2 to death might decide "hmm this time I will play as Sardinia-Piedmont instead of doing the 10th Netherlands game in a row". Your game can't just be new and different - it has to be so good that it's worth "switching over", same as if you were trying to poach an MMO fanbase.

To actually have a competitor to Paradox arrive you'd need some reasonably wealthy publisher together with a highly skilled developer to decide to take a stab at that exact niche genre, with a willingness to make a high initial investment while understanding that the returns will never be extremely great, and that the most they can expect out of it is perhaps a consistent fanbase - and even then, they could still make a few small design errors that lead to people sticking to existing Paradox games. On top of that you'd have to have a developer willing to constrain themselves to developing a historical game, because the whole historical aspect is a big draw for the fans of Paradox games. Not that I think a fantasy or science fiction grand strategy would be impossible, but it might alienate more people than it would draw in, and it would also make it easier for developers to lose their vision of what a grand strategy is (this even happened to Paradox when they made Stellaris, which is a 4X), because without history as a guide you start getting tempted to balance things and reduce "railroading", but asymmetric balance of power, realistic instead of 4X-ish AI, and some degree of railroading due to a static map and its impact on geopolitics are all vital ingredients for a good grand strategy game.
cool
 
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Paradox's Former CEO on DLC: "a fair and balanced way of releasing content"

Paradox Interactive is known for many things, which includes making quality niche games and unique historical experiences, but also for releasing a whole boatload of DLC for its most popular offerings.

Fredrik Wester, previously Paradox CEO, has decided to comment on this particular facet of his company, explaining why it is that he feels it's a "fair and balanced way to release content in the long term.

"Every time we release a DLC we also release a big update for free, which means that you get continuous upgrades of your game even if you choose not to buy any DLC," said Wester, adding that this would not be possible if they didn't release downloadable content as often as they do, which funds said updates.

Wester made a point of saying that players enjoying Paradox titles in multiplayer always get access to all the DLC that the player with the most of it has, which is a good way of dealing with playerbase fragmentation due to updates and content releases.

"I know this is not a flawless model and that a lot of new players get intimidated by seeing a game with hundreds of $$$ in DLC, however we also run deep discounts on all our games and DLCs regularly," explained Wester.

Adopting this DLC model allows for Paradox to engage in more experimentation and content-related craziness, according to Wester, which results in more interesting games across the board. Wester concluded saying that he is very much in favour of cosmetic DLC, which he feels is fair.

On a related, yet unrelated note, the former CEO of Paradox recently said that the standard 70/30 revenue split used by most video game marketplaces is outrageous, calling Epic's undercutting of this system "fantastic".

https://www.gamewatcher.com/news/paradox-ceo-dlc-comments-fair-content-release

 

JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Deep discounts that still make the full game with all DLC cost over 100 euros and I'm not even mentioning the overpriced DLC like CK2's ruler designer (which has negative review scores on Steam for how overpriced it is compared to what it does) which costs 5 bucks when all it does is add one new functionality. Also the amount of features offered by new DLCs never justify the ridiculous prices. A lot of full mid-budget indie games cost as much at full price as a Paradox DLC which adds 3 new features.

Look at the price of this entire game, which is constantly being updated by its devs:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/499660/Medieval_Kingdom_Wars/
And compare it to the price of a single DLC for CK2:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/756660/Expansion__Crusader_Kings_II_Holy_Fury/

Now, yes, Holy Fury is one of the better DLCs that actually adds valuable content to the game by adding new Crusade mechanics that make crusades more sensible than before, and adding new pagan reformation mechanics.
And yet...
Let's actually look at the feature list:

- Expanded Crusading mechanics
- Expanded Pagan reformation mechanics
- Inheritable bloodlines
- Warrior lodges (which work very similar to societies added by a different DLC)
- Random maps

A lot of these are either expansions of already existing features, based on existing features from other DLC (the warrior lodges), or very situational (random maps don't matter to most players, as most players prefer the historical starts, for example).
It's a good DLC, but is it really worth 20 bucks at its full price? Really? You can get entire games for 20 bucks. Some of the Total War games, like all the older ones (Rome, Medieval 2), as well as Empire, Shogun 2, Rome 2, can be gotten for around that price (the newer ones like Rome 2 only on a sale, but still; as of the current Steam summer sale Rome 2 is at 14 bucks). Civilization VI is at 14 bucks during the current summer sale. Civ V costs 30 without a sale, Civ 4 is even cheaper. The indie 4X Oriental Empires is at about 30 at full price, too.

Paradox DLCs have this thing where the substantial ones that add 3 or 4 new features cost almost as much as some full games. Is that really an adequate price? And in addition to that, flavor features like portraits, music, unit models etc are split off from the DLC and have to be bought separately. I don't like the DLC policy of the Total War games either, but at least the recent ones gave us entirely new campaigns with new factions and units and mechanics for 15 bucks instead of 20, and unit packs that add mechanically interesting new units for 5 bucks.
Paradox turns this up a notch: they sell a package of 4 new features for 20 bucks, new music for 5 bucks, new portraits for 5 bucks, new unit models for 5 bucks (and who even cares about unit models in a Paradox game lol, by all means those should be part of the 20 bucks DLC).

That's just fucking ridiculous. DLC is good when it brings new content, yes. Supporting a game 5 years after release is good, yes.
Selling 4 new features for almost the price of a full new game, and splitting off all the flavor stuff that should by all rights be part of that DLC into separate 5 dollar DLCs, is not.
 

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