Space Nugget
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Their revenue is just $130m? Wow didn't realize they are that small fish.
That's almost ONE AND A HALF BILLION svensk kronor.
Their revenue is just $130m? Wow didn't realize they are that small fish.
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.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.First step towards breaking off from Steam.Paradox launch their own modding platform, with Xbone support: https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/
More like the second step considering they've had their own actual store since forever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think owning only 33% makes it internal.
On the codex,the rest is a desert of constant decline and mediocrity!Intelligent gamers are
why isn't there any, though?They need competition.
somebody should've popped out of the modding milieu, but unfortunately none have (?), or has Paradox itself absorbed the talent?new devs need some experience with grand strategies
Welp, it seems cancerous degenerate DLC policy works
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/
Those people are retarded....which will operate in Berkeley, California.
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.
why isn't there any, though?
coolwhy 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.
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".