Paradox Know They Can’t Continue Like This
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- Опубликовано: 16 сен 2024
- Paradox are delaying games, telling us they won't cancel this one, and trying to regain positive momentum after a brutal year of failure.Read our latest report on Stormgate's rough early access launch & help support our mission: bellular.games...
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Read our latest report on Stormgate's rough early access launch & help support our mission: bellular.games/indie-stormgates-10-mtx-hero-frustrates-paying-players/
If they could add real time battles (homeworld style) to a Stellaris 2 it would rule....
Paradox sabotaged Sword of the Stars 2 way back when ... they have a history of being corporate parasites.
@@brokeandtired That would work in a singleplayer run. Not in a multiplayer one as one would be stuck in a battle and can't manage the rest of the empire that still runs in the background. Unless that took pause that is. Then it would work.
Man, Cities Skylines 2 and Star Trek Infinite were some huge disappointments, but outright canceling Life By You tells me that Paradox is in a tailspin right now.
Just waiting for the news that they canned the VtMB sequel. It'll be any day now.
@Narangarath we can only hope that abomination never gets released
Just waiting for the bankruptcy announcement.
@@andrewz6986 That may be the best case scenario, true.
I’m still hurt by how they treated us with imperator.
what they did to City Skylines 2 was criminal
It's sad and hilarious when you think about the state Sim City was in a decade ago and Colossal order swooped in. I'm still playing CS1 with mods and am not touching it's sequel.
what did they do anyways, and what's the state of the thing now? I'm not really a fan of the series, just curious
CS2 is actually an expected flop, thats why i didnt get much hyped. The fact that CS1 content is so huge, there is absolutely no reason for a sequel, or rather theres no need one for more than a decade atleast.
@@ErnestIsGamingit needed a sequel but on a different engine. It's sad that the Unreal Engine rumors ended up not coming true.
@@brown_recluse_human3458I’m actually really enjoying cities skylines 2. Colossal order has been doing a great job with fixing the game, and I’m hyped for custom assets to finally be released.
it's not by paradox good will that they refund the preorders without a delivery date but European law wich Paradox must follow as they are in Europe.
It's disgusting that the rules of other countries need to constantly keep American companies in line.
@@fransmith3255 Paradox is a Swedish company
@@fransmith3255 ... Paradox is Swedish though
@@the_courier9412 Is it? Not at all how Swedish companies usually function. For a Swedish company it's certainly acting very American...
@@fransmith3255 Oh lots of Stockholm tech companies have this kind of behavior. Spotify and Klarna to name the two biggest.
It's just one example, but the latest big expansion for Stellaris (The Machine Age) was actually incredible. It was high quality content that actually felt like it was worth the price. I hope Paradox can have more releases like that. They've sort of put themselves in this position where they release more DLCs than games, and that can work, as long as they keep the quality high.
Machine Age is bar none, the best expansion there has been for Stellaris (Utopia might be close). I think Paradox is trending in the right direction
To be fair, practically any franchise has more dlcs than games these days. I think you meant something akin to their dlc revenue is 20x times their game license revenue for almost ANY game they touch.
@@CandleLover69 because it's actually their game, Paradox needs to stop publishing they really suck at it
CK3s DLCs are all terrible and nobody will change my mind on that. Not a single one of them offer any new interesting mechanics or content, just more events and "flavor"
@@zackhawn5944 100% correct
Paradox are victims of their own greed.
Go greedy, get needy.
when to shit when they went public on the stock market
I ain’t paying £12.50 for a goddam Brazil focus tree.
Exactly... and not only that, some of their games are excessively complex for newbies. I tried getting into Total Warhammer Online for the first time and didn't think the effort of overcoming the 'learning curve' was worth the reward of playing a game that excessively charges us for small amounts of new content.
Didn't we just deal with that this summer with Creative Assembly?
I like some of Paradox games. but their business model is bad and anti consumer.
They constanty release broken bare bones and almost hold players hostage with promises to release more dlc in the future if they get enough sales. Or introduce gameplay poison as a free patch features and sell antidote as paid dlc mechanic.
they really are becoming a second EA at this point
lol, no
EU5 and maybe VM2 are basically the only lifelines these guys still have
@@Lem0nsquidgreat argument, i never thought of it that way
you forget the worst thing they do, they protected a DLC for hearts of iron in the most aggressive manner ever, they are lacking basic levels of self critical thinking. when they see a mirror to reflect upon themselves they will avoid it.
It's KSP 2 all over again. Publisher replaces the main dev team with their own inhouse team and then it'll get abandoned after a year with almost no content updates when the game flops due to performance problems.
Wait, what happened to KSP2?
@@olgagaming5544 take two shut down the entire studio and stopped updating the game, I believe steam gave refunds to a lot of people(?)
@@user-bb9un4nm6m lol, I kinda knew this game gonna be a BS, when they shown so many "cool features" in the trailer, the community went crazy and waited to drop KSP1 for KSP2. Yet, when you see KSP1's history, its years of bug fixes, adding small stuff from time to time etc. I didn't believe KSP 2 will come and suddenly bring 1000 of stuff in such a complex game like KSP and my prophecy was true, all they could do is kinda a poorer version of KSP lol.
@@olgagaming5544 It's development has been shutdown after Take Two layed off ALL of the staff from the studio. They've declined to actually officially announce its dead but all signs point to it.
I'm just surprised their reports and apologies aren't $30/page DLC's to an under-developed and poorly optimized table of contents that they called the "base report" and also sold for $60 while claiming was feature complete.
just pirate lmao
@@romaboo6218 I do, but it still leads to a fundamentally failed base game (see vicky 3)
@@THX-1138Vic 3 has less content than hfm of Vic 2. It's sad
Imagine taking a game with a simplist 2D artstyle that ensure the game can focus on its core concept (large scale prison simulation) at the lowest cost of production possible, and tell yourself "You know what this game need? A full 3d makeover!"
This speaks volume as to how insanely out of touch paradox is.
DEI destroys all. Yes paradox sucked on the dei coolaid
Their business model is releasing unfinished games and then make you pay in instalments to get the full version. Yes, they call them "DLCs".
Even then a finished game can take ages. Stellaris had performance issues in the endgame for the first 7ish years. Booster corvettes were seen as a bug but fixing it took like 4 years.
Concerning the guy who started that trend at Paradox, just joined Arrowhead (Helldivers 2 devs) as their new CEO. Doesn't bode well for the future of that game, especially with already having basic reskins padding out battlepasses n little else.
@@Druarkoh oh.
@@Druarkbro you are so far behind the curve it's not even funny.
HD2 has been going down the shitter since the railgun nerf.
@@adherry8142stellaris had performance issues after 2.0 and that was at least a year or so after release
Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines 2, Life By You and now Prison Architect 2... and let's not forget that they abandoned Empire of Sin, never giving players their second promised DLC WHICH PEOPLE PAID FOR.
Don't forget Imperator too!
"Too big to fail or get sued" that's sadly how it goes in the 2020's.
also victoria 3. seemingly eu4/hoi4 are the last great paradox games to release and it might well stay that way.
Feels kinda like SpongeBob and Nickelodeon. “Oh, it won’t be as profitable as EU4 or HoI4? Guess we gotta scrap it”
Also if a company wants a game shit canned, they’ll hold it back for quality.
If a company has a buggy game, they’ll realease and then fix it.
Wait, for real? How did Paradox not get a class action lawsuit for never delivering the second DLC?
I love Stellaris. In fact, I love Paradox games. I hate their DLC strategy.
I did avoid all Paradox games, because of their DLC hells. I did not buy one game from them.
It is baffling for me that they did even last that long with their sick, greedy tactics.
I have mixed feelings about Stellaris, I loved the empire creation but the game barely changes, hive minds and machine empires just get rid of the factions and food mechanics. CK at least throws random events at you from time to time, the mid-end game of stellaris is just a slog.
So, you want them to release a “new” game on a cycle like call of duty rather than continue supporting a game? If your not old enough to understand how the scene worked 20 years ago, then I’d understand how you don’t see things as being better at least with paradox dlc
Actual gameplay? Thats hundreds of bucks. Our heckin egalitarian eco utopia that is stronger than a late game empire? Thats free.
As presented and initially employed in CKII and EUIV, the DLC policy was an over all positive for all concerned and those ranting against it mostly showed that Steam's method of presenting such wasn't great and/or the complainers had no idea what they were talking about... (Admittedly, in CKII, they did have the bad habit of adding UI elements containing ads for the DLC to the base game which made it Look Like features had been removed from a complete base game to be sold separately if you bought the base game late, which was unfortunate as no such thing was taking place and the updated base game with no DLC was already a huge improvement on the already pretty good launch version).
Then Paradox started putting out a combination of games that weren't actually designed in such a way as to be properly compatible with the model and the quality of the DLC themselves went from mostly great with some that were only worth it if you cared about the specific focus of them and occasionally one that just didn't turn out so hot, to just constant disasters (including what was at the time the single worst rated Thing on Steam).
Personally, I defended their DLC model when they were actually doing it properly (it benefited both the developers and the players at that point. This changed later). Various Other things slowly lowered my opinion of the company though, and forcing the Very poor paradox launcher on all of their games and the incredibly poor treatment of cities: skylines players with regards to the problems that caused was what finally lead me to file paradox in with EA and several other publishers on my "do not buy" list.
Combat roblox? They dont need to combat roblox, the only thing that needs to combat roblox is the FBI
Gee, it's almost as if halfassing game after game and making 'tutorials' that are just 'play the full game for more than 2 hours so you don't get a chance to refund' are bad business decisions -_-
Stormgate is failing because no one wants an esports driven RTS game. I'd like to go back to the days of Age of Empires, Command & Conquer etc where the campaign and RTS experience itself was the main thing that drove sales.
Exactly building and micromanaging armies is way more fun than whatever the competitive scenes trying to do
As a kid I went for the campaign, and me and the boys would then pretend some of it mattered as we played against the AI players. The only whiff of esports I had as a kid were text write-ups I read one afternoon.
Age of Empires 2 is still fantastic in 2024
There's two games in particular that I really enjoyed from the RTS catalog: Star Wars Empire at War, and LOTR Battle for Middle Earth. Just being able to not only relive the epic battles from those movies, but being able to control the armies of them as well, like the Battle for Minas Tirith for example
It’s the same thing that happened with Dawn of War 3.
Even with the king of RTS esports, StarCraft 1/2, the vast majority of players only played the campaign and skirmish, with maybe a handful of mp games. You dont build a competitive scene top down by making it super hyper competitive, you make it bottom up by making a good game.
Started feeling a bit iffy about paradox back when they released the France DLC for Hoi4 which actually *removed* stuff from the base game just to put it in again with the DLC content.
I see their atrocious business strategies are finally catching up on them.
Hoi4 DLC is by far their worst DLC model because they have nothing to sell you but gameplay mechanics cause they let you mod focus trees
Yea I don't play Hoi4 or Eu4 I mainly play Vic3, Ck3, and occasionally like once a year I might play a game of Stellaris.
@@dingus6317vic 3 is pretty barebones tho but I guess building your economy is still satisfying
@@Insanepie True. I liked 'Colossus of the South' and the 'Spheres of Influence' updates, and If they update the war system a bit more and make more countries with playing paths I think it could be a really good game next year.
@@dingus6317 yeah it could end up being my fav but I wish the dlcs didn’t cost so much it kinda kills the hype :(
Speaking of paradox. Why are these publishers and studios intent on giving us a standard RPG, when we are directly asking for an Immersive Sim is baffling
Tbf, immersive sims are much, MUCH more difficult to make, even more so to make one right, and have much smaller customer bases.
@@Penguinmanereikel All valid points, which makes it twice as weird that a series whose first game is one of the quintessential immersive Sims is somehow having its sequel being developed like a damn dragon age game. I don't mind dragon age. They are good. RPGs, however, that's not what literally anybody thinks when vampire the masquerade bloodlines is mentioned
I still remember years and years ago, receiving an email from Paradox explaining their then-new business model. Now, when I see “Paradox”, I know to avoid - which is sad, because their games are otherwise exactly my kind of game.
Paradox? Ah yes.... code opimization? Throw it out of the window.
"Take it out and repackage it months later as a fully priced DLC"
Inb4 PA2 is canceled (even though they said it won’t be, “indefinite” just means canceled unofficially)
The fact Introversion isn't developing it is a red flag to me. Hell, the reason I was drawn to Prison Architect in the first place was Introversion's consistent output of unique, quality releases.
Right now I'm getting a "making Kerbal 2 without Squad" vibe.
@@Kant3nexactly. Plus this repeats the exact same patten as LBY. Delayed like 3 times. The final delay was a month prior to launch. It was then “infinitely” delayed. Then a week or so after the launch date prior to being “infinitely” delayed, it was canceled.
@@Kant3n Well they aren't developing it because they sold it out lol.
Remember when they said Imperator Rome was canned and that the stop in development was just a temporary thing until they sort things out ?
Pepperidge farm remembers
@@Kant3n Even the original Prison Architect was butchered when handed off to a new team. I tried to play it recently and its a complete mess!
Paradox's business model is cancerous and what baffles me is they saw the greedy behavior of other gaming companies like EA, Activision and Ubisoft and said to themselves "how can we emulate that model?". Selling their soul to shareholders instead of making good games for gamers is their downfall. And I absolutely love watching Paradox trip on their own shit.
"Selling their soul to shareholders instead of making good games for gamers is their downfall." unfortunately, the nature of capitalism encourages this behavior. we're told that if companies stop making good products and alienate their customers, they'll fail-but, as the examples you cite demonstrate, this isn't true at all. Paradox's practices have made them a shitton of money, and as long as the line keeps going up, they'll keep doing what they're doing.
Literally everything you're saying makes no sense and I have no idea how people like you live.
No one has a business model like Paradox. Literally no one.
@@fearedjamesassuming you're replying to me, i want to point out a couple of things:
- to be clear, i don't advocate for these practices. they're fucked. i'm just noting that failing to "make good games for gamers" doesn't equate to financial failure. (nor, for that matter, does succeeding in making good games for gamers equate to financial success, as many studios that have made great games and then gone broke can attest.)
- "No one has a business model like Paradox. Literally no one." if you're referring specifically to Paradox's endless DLC strategy, then sure, no-one does *exactly* what they do. but i'm referring more generally to the idea of Paradox prioritizing the numbers in their earnings statements over the quality of their output. they're certainly not alone in this respect: as the OP points out, EA, Activision and Ubisoft are all companies that are loathed to varying degrees by gamers, and yet make money hand over fist.
@@fearedjames (if you're not replying to me, then apologies--RUclips notified me of your comment as a reply to mine.)
Yeah the shame is that Paradox actually makes good games, but they've got such a cancerous business model.
One bug all these Paradox console ports have (Empire of Sin, Age of Wonders: Planetfall, AoW4) at least on PlayStation 'is when the autosave kicks in the game has a 1-in-3 chance of crashing. Even Age of Wonders 4 with the latest dlc n' patch has this tendency, theirs even this in-game save data recovery prompt that pops up.
I'm no dev but if the technical debt is massive enough that the only work-around to the problem is to implement a way to recover save data on the players side because you literally can't fix the problem without breaking everything else... Then maybe it's time to ditch the engine for something better.
Or maybe invest less in overpriced and oversaturated DLCs, and invest more in actual Quality Assurance.
Paradox has def become very anti consumer recently
Always has been
by "recently" you mean like... HOI4, Vicky 3, CC2, EU4, and those other things they published like Cities Skylines? They have been bad for more than a decade at this point.
They literally always were, literally check ck1 and it's launch reviews. Unfinished, buggy, no content. Seem familiar?
Recently? Lmao, always has been, been reading complaints for this dlc policy since the late 2000s.
Its like they didn't want to listen to the original dev team about the problems they were facing and that they needed more time, so they got another team in to try and make it faster and able to be shipped out on time... only to find out the hard way that such a decision just completely doomed the whole project as now you have a team that has no idea what they're dealing with, vs a team that at least had a rough idea of what they were dealing with.
I vowed never to buy a Paradox game again YEARS ago when I finally understood that the reason none of my recommended strategies worked in Stellaris were because those features were all in some DLC or other. And then they removed something else from the base game to put it into another DLC. Glad to see them eat shit for continuing to pull this sort of shit repeatedly. What they did to Cities Skylines is atrocious.
Devs did it to themselves. They're actually a fucking such a disaster of a company paradox killed DLC for their game
Same here. As much as I enjoyed CK3, Stellaris & HoI 4, I won't justify spending hundreds of dollars for DLC. Things that should be in the base game that they clearly either left out on purpose or removed.
When Paradox purchased Prison Architect, I logged into PA after not playing it for several years. My guards wouldn't follow their designated paths. Prisoners would die in solitary despite only being given 6 hour sentences. No one would do laundry, and I couldn't designate laundry rooms to cell-blocks. Blocks would remain in lockdown for 24-48 hours after I had rescinded it. RIOT guards would refuse to leave the prison, even days after a riot.
Deleted all mods, backed up all saves, reinstalled a fresh install, loaded up a brand new game to make sure there were no conflicts. I even double-wrapped walls around the entire map to ensure the code recognized that there was no 'exterior' prison area to fumble AI pathing. The exact same issues persisted, Prison Architect basically became unplayable. Explain to me how a game made by 2 guys worked perfectly fine for nearly 8 years, but as soon as Paradox purchased it, it was fundamentally broken?
@Shamino1 Double 11 fucked it up when they took over. Probably why thus game keeps getting delayed, and why Paradox fired them.
"burned by the industry at large" yep, that hits the nail on the head for me
I don't see why I should buy a game for $70, just to spend $300 on 3 dozen DLCs.
I have already diagnosed their issue as simple financial mismanagement. I even said such on their own forums.
Its far worse then that.... Paradox was a company I trusted and pre- Ordered from before Imperator Rome, that was pretty much the date where it was obvious that Paradox was no longer a small company of Gamers making games they enjoyed playing.... Complex, Deep, Fun games.... No it turned into a company dumbing down and simplifying their games to the lowest common denominator.... Imperator Rome was the first game they listened to the CASUALS and said Yep your right we will DUMB down our game to please you the consumer... And the moment they did that they lost all their old fans like me.....
Man I remember when Paradox was an small team making cool history games for us history nerds, god I miss those days, how far the company itself and franchises like CK have fallen
Yeah, i still play hoi 2 and 3, Victoria 2 and EU 3. have not touched the newer ones.
CK3 is their best current franchise game by far. 💀
Me sitting here wondering why Belgium, a PRIMARY WAR TARGET, never got a focus tree before an entire continent that was barely involved did.
This company, STG.
wait....what?!!
Yes, Luxemburg needs her focus tree!!!
Tbh, people were asking for years for a South American DLC because shit was stale down there.
And granted, it could have been amazing, but it was shit. No new mechanics, copypaste focuses, bugs, and a hefty price tag
Well tbf Belgium didn't fight that long in rl, 18 days was it. Better example could have been Finland which also took way too long to arrive, considering the unique nature of its involvement in ww2
STG? Sucks tangy grapes?
Average Paradox game costs 400$.
True. Just looked up. Stellaris bundle is 290,49€ with 10% discount. That's $317.
You either pick subscrition orr wait for 50%+ sales. And if you are picking it late you don't buy everything at once. If you are hardcore player of some title then you mostly play it so much that this cost is deserved. It hurts game tourists mostly.
No wonder PI is okay with Piracy, many of their players probably Pirate some of their games
@@Sanvone In some paradox games like stellaris you *have* to buy the DLC's because even if you don't own them the AI can use it and often completely breaks the game, also many mechanics that make the game interesting along with the quality of life stuff and balances are behind the paywall of DLC's.
@@SanvoneThey raised the subscriptions and they probably are gonna fuckin do it again.
Your closing point is very well made, and accurate. I have been burned by the game industry too many times and it keeps me and my money away from games that I otherwise would be very interested in and give a chance to. But I'm just not willing to risk it anymore. I've become very risk-averse as a customer. Increasingly I am playing older games instead of buying new ones. I've completely stopped backing Kickstarter projects as well, and I was fairly active on that platform once upon a time.
*When a studio announce a game indefinitely delayed, it gets removed off my list ..... Indefinitely!! 😂😂*
Publishers have trained their customers to not only never preorder a game, but never buy a game at launch. It's almost always better to wait a few months for a some patches to come out. Treating the 1.0 version of their game as "soft early access" is only hurting their sales.
Good example of their business model:
Crusader kings 2, original hoi 4 and so on were created not with the idea to monetize, but with a low budget. Right now we're getting the same release experience, but with 10x the budget and manpower
Experience is even worse because we have to wait for years until successor will outmatch the predecessor. I know that CK3 launch was better than CK2 however after four years CK2 had plenty of content while CK3 is still lacking.
EU4 still receives a new DLC's and we all know that EU5 won't outmatch the predecessor faster than 5 years after launch. Meanwhile PDX is a bigger and wealthier company today.
@@vf7058 That's true. CK3 is starting to feel fleshed out now with the new expansion coming but we had to wait over four years after release.
We will probably have to wait until 2030 for a good EU5 experience.
I wish PDX would realize that they need to stop releasing DLC packs for $20 that are almost required to play the game.
And if they want to make country packs, dont charge them as a content DLC. They tried to justify the time wasted on the South America pack and it was a nonsense post from start to finish. They could have fixed long standing issues with vanilla vs DLC gameplay bugs that never got attention but have been brought up on forums, reddit, even in steam discussion, but never touched. Hell, I was able to fix one of them with ONE LINE of code in a definitions file.
It really is sad to see them in a bad spot because that is going to put them at risk.
Edit: and for those wondering, you can fix the bug with BBA and Japan not skipping The Zero focus by copying the bypass clause in the national focus files for Japan and adding it to the block of code outside of the "is BBA enabled" block, and change "cv_fighter2" to "improved_small_airframe"
Yes it was that easy.
Those DLC prices are insane, i saw some stellaris videos and went to steam to buy the game+dlc, them i clicked the dlc list and the prices... Pirate bay it is.
This. I'm the target audience for a lot of Paradox's games, but I hate to do so much front-loaded research on what to buy before even beginning to play, if the cost seems reasonable. So I pick up one maybe every 4 years and only usually on deep sale with DLC bundled in (often when the next title in series has been announced). Pretty much all my friends behave the same. That consumer behavior has been forced on us by their model and it's very much a them problem that's been hurting their business for decades now.
@@adrianocs4 it's becoming a point where they want to see the subscription revenue over the content packs purely because if they run subs for long enough they will eventually out pace the DLCs for cost.
Assume you have 5 DLC that are all but required and change huge parts of the game, each for $20. $100 of upgrades for a $40 game is nuts but $5/month sounds reasonable. Until you remember that HOI4 release in 2016, 15 years after HOI3. Meaning if we expect at least another 7 years for HOI5, paying out that sub fee will end up costing you $60 per year.
The new DLC for CK3 even increased prices, costing more than half the base game.
I mean thats their entire business strategy and it ahs worked before.
The issue is moreso that they need to actually deliver compelling DLC for it to work. Which they really haven't been. It's just become less, more lackluster content across the board.
The biggest complaint I have with paradox isn’t that they’re selling dlc, it’s that they’re selling updates.
I lost trust in Paradox after Victoria 3 was released in the state it was in… Cities Skylines 2 only added on to that feeling, I don’t expect anything good from paradox anymore unless/until they actually release something good
Everyone seems to be forgetting about the community backlash of when Prison Architect 2 even got announced by its fan base. Then the developers proceeded to start deleting everybody's comments that said something even slightly negative about the game and that were critical of them proceeding to make a post whining about how people are attacking them personally and how they won't stand for it. I'm 99% sure that that has to do with the developers getting fired as they literally were attacking their own fan base
The "90% loss" is just a quarterly drop in revenue from a single project ... I looked it up myself ... the actual financial reports from Paradox Interactive show they are making boatloads of net-profits year-over-year .
oh like a paradox consider it unacceptable to gut a system and leave a bleeding hole in a game a later expansion can fill for more money.
With some of their games they gut some those systems to patch with expansion packs that were previous expansion packs, fucking stellaris...
Lets not forget to add "Surviving the abyss" on there Arc publishing line. Put it up for sale on early access just wanting to see if there was interest in it.
THE paradox that make dlcs 20 times more expensive than the main game? The dlcs that remove features from base game and lock them behind dlc paywall? And those dlcs are insanely overpriced considering the amount and quality of content they provide? Oh, I hope they will get MORE problems so they finally have a motivation to change.
>The dlcs that remove features from base game and lock them behind dlc paywall
Source?
@@fearedjames Any HOI dlc with focuses? If you don't buy it you will get a butchered version of it, even though before the DLC it had a normal focus tree. Or EU dlc that removes previous version, leaves an empty space for a button but there is no button cause you didn't pay for dlc? And even when it is a brand new feature, the game is rebalanced to have it so by playing without DLC you are now kinda screwed as there is no system that you were supposed to use?
@@kirillhaetsky3049 I'm sorry, what countries had a focus tree that was changed to a generic one before a dlc was made for them? Because as far as I'm aware, every single one maintains their original focus trees without dlc. Its just that very few countries have focus trees without dlc. This is heavily because it was an extension of older HOI design where only major countries had decisions and unique evens tied to them, because ultimately, its a WWII war game and there's only like 7 relevant countries. Later on they started using focus trees as more of an alt history experiment due to how much people liked it, and so made adding more focus trees a big aspect of the game.
EU dlc as far as I'm aware has never been rebalanced for any dlc outside one exception. The one dlc everyone criticizes on this is Common Sense, which locked development behind dlc (you could never change default dev values before outside events) while making it so every province could now only hold a certain amount of buildings based on their dev.
This doesn't really penalize you however for not owning common sense. It was a complete design shift from EU3 design. The most important part of this update/dlc patch was the change to how forts worked, so they were far more limited and did far more in warfare than before. On top of these, every building now had slightly greater effects than before.
I have never seen anyone ever complain about these changes, just the inability to develop regions, which you never could before. The AI also cant develop regions anyway if you dont have the dlc, so its not a rebalancing against people without it.
The thing is, dlcs fund this constant development of new mechanics, half of which end up added for free. And I would be very curious to what you think was ever a bad change in a free patch. Basically everything has always had positive reception.
@@fearedjames Idk how about you, but I hated forced puppet creation for colonial nations, even tho it was a free patch iirc. Or an added mechanics of having to give your land to social groups, I didn't play CK cause of that (don't remember tho, was it a DLC or part of it was in a free patch too). In stellaris the FTL mess and planetary redesign. Added research times in HOI with all those additional parts so you can research even less in your run. So yeah, the problem with "positive reception" - their forum deletes negative feedback so only store pages are relevant for this. And yes, I know that DLCs are their monetisation model, but they simply don't provide enough content to justify asking for that price. And if you missed a couple DLCs getting them is pricier than buying new games entirely.
And I didn't say changed to generic focuses, what I was saying they were half locked, for example Japanese one only had a historical branch without DLC that was smaller than their initial tree (iirc, cause it was long ago). I will not argue that for minors with generic tree any new tree was an improvement, I am mostly talking about majors here.
Yes, the common sense was the one I thought about, however I was pretty sure AI could develop, cause I remember they always had better development and for me the only way to develop was to capture their stuff.
@@kirillhaetsky3049 Yeah your imagining it with common sense.
The forced puppet mechanic imo I love so much its the only reason I cant go back to vicky 2 and EU3. Makes the games far more manageable.
You have the original game... make it in 3D.... Just make it in 3D!!
It is KSP 2 all over again!
Well at least the original developers of Prison Architect got paid for there licens!
Paradox was one of the few Mac developers with a good number of games developed for both PC and Mac yet cannot bring over current titles to Apple Silicon and some new titles have no Mac support. Quite a few of their studios seemed to have merged or dissolved outside of the ones mentioned in this story
Dude literally just got out of a job where I was expected to ship a product that I would not have been happy purchasing, it is demoralizing.
Pirating paradox games is morally correct
I don't want to give my computer AIDS and/or get banned by my ISP.
@@cat_city2009 Are you in Germany?
@@hudy2735
No, America.
@@cat_city2009 Up to now i only knew of germany being very draconic on the matter. The more you know.
@@cat_city2009lol naive boy just buy the base game and use creamapi
Is almost like introversion spent years, building the game out system by system. They used feed back from their early access players to make the game absolutely amazing. Paradox has no idea what they are doing at this point.
I think the entire industry has a not-infrequent "patch after release" problem, but also Paradox has sometimes not let stuff that could be fixed actually survive long enough to get that patch. They're killing projects right after release that could be saved (e.g., Lamplighters League) while pouring vast amounts of money into projects that should have been killed a long time ago because they're not fixable (e.g., Life by You).
Of course, sometimes they give something room to breathe (e g., CS2), but I'm really not sure they know what they're doing with anything outside of their core franchises, and those only survive because their DLC monetization model means they have to.
Paradox does not make games
They do DLC platforms.. it's bad like EA
My suspicion is a leadership that has terribly underestimated the importance of having a top tier engine specialist or two working on the core gameplay logic so that it can run at 5 million fps if you strip the graphics layer. If you have that kinda dude, you get games like Factorio, where you have literal millions of interactions every single tick and it runs smooth. If you don't have that kinda guy, you get stuff like the early versions of Hollow Knight (which I deem to be one of the best games ever made), where a 2d action platformer required a mid-end gaming PC to run, when it should have been able to run on a potato. (This wasn't fixed until it was ported to Switch, and that fixed a ton of engine issues)
I'd wager they made the game in such a messed up way that they might have to rewrite the entire underlying game logic, and that the team was let go because they consistently refused to believe the other team that this had to happen. When the game hit pre-release, the performance was so bad that leadership said they couldn't ship it like this, and then they got the message "but we can't change that". I suspect the co-developer team that has taken over probably made a huge sign saying "I told you so" and held it as the other company left.
I kind of want to play Paradox games, but all of their main releases are locked behind the cost of several AAA titles in DLC to be feature complete and I just do not feel like supporting that.
Yeah, I would be completely willing to overlook all of the bugs & optimization problems & blatantly unfinished content in later Paradox titles - if the game was 30$ not 400$. Paradox games would not be terrible 30$ games, they ARE terrible 400$ games.
I feel the same way, like I love stellaris and would impulse buy stuff from that in a heartbeat...but the price points do a pretty good job at preventing that.
I can play the base game all night, but I'm not paying $20+ a pop for dlcs that reviewers say half of it should have been in the base game from start. The species pack dlcs in particular are a joke as their standalone buys. They should have been bundled with the expansions for no increase. Basically they would need to consolidate their dlc's into 2-for-1 overall for me to consider buying one without a generous Steam sale
Then you are not suitable player of Paradox games!
The most popular Paradox games are those that has most DLCs!
I used to love them. Used to wait for each and every game they made so impatiently. Now I see their logo and I'm like "oh, those guys"
The fall from grace is massive for me.
To me Paradox started to slide, when they tried to make the grand strategy games too MP friendly. You can't balance a game that is supposed to be based on history that much.
Also EU4 mission trees.
DLCs in general I don't mind too much, somehow you have to pay for 10+ years of continued support and development, but they still have to be good and not just "let's do 3 DLCs of fluff for money"
9:20 Maybe Bloodlines 2 will have a cool atmosphere but, from the trailers, looks like it will fumble a key mark: Humor. So it might be a good Vampire the Masquerade game while being a bad Bloodlines game.
Btw, imho humor is so much rarer and thus precious than horror.
Honestly, the only thing Paradox knows how to make are map games
I love paradox games, but I don't love spending $999 on each of them
3:18 intercept games moment?????
What's this about the developer "mutually agreeing to part ways" (and possibly giving up their part of the profit) after all their work just before release?
I'm guessing the C-suite had brand new ideas about what they wanted to put in the game last minute, and they were renegotiating contract conditions/delaying their end of the deal until the changes were done, and probably giving the dev team an unrealistic new deadline; so the team said "f*ck that, you can just try finishing it with half the team now"
It happens all the time in engineering and design contracts: clients think they can just order whatever changes they want at whatever stage in a project and that it won't affect the hands-on workers' load at all.
Where Paradox falls, Hooded Horse rises.
Wow ty. Didn't know who they were looked em up. And they sound great. I'll start grabbing their games lol
Hooded Horse is great. They have some flops, but they have tons of great games.
Yup! Hooded Horse is awesome! Their games are great and always ready for release! I used to love Paradox, but now Paradox is just another EA. At this point, I would have to see a dev team as absolutely utterly stupid also if they decide to go with Paradox as a publisher, and assume that the devs are also pretty much idiots.
Hooded Horse are actually goated. The CEO publicly stated that he is well aware that not every project that comes forward is not going to make huge profits but, every so often you get a Manor Lords and make for everything else.
Great publishers attract great games devs, like the ones who made Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. It may not be same as C:S2 but makes some things better in its own right
They need to start showing some RPG elements of bloodlines 2 if they want that to be a success
Game Companies hate RPGs but love adding RPG elements. Let’s pray VtM2 is different!
Sorry but from what theyve shown and what the devs have stated, its not going to be a success
@@jeangreffsbp probably not. But one can hope lol
I was going to buy the new stellaris dlc. Then I saw the price, shite bricks, moved on to a different game.
@@Lenteshi not played it in years so I’d likely need to sell organs to catch up in DLC 😁
I dont think Paradox truly realize the situation they are in. In the past months I had two discussions with devs on their forum and Reddit. Or really more like heated argument. What stood up to me is how arrogant, out of their depth they are. And how completely deaf they are to their fans feedback. To them there is no issue at all because the money is still coming in. From their own words " there is no issue since the people continue to buy their DLCs".
They are in the mindset in which corpo suits believe everything is great until the company is in full scale bankruptcy. When it is too late to correct change & save the business. Meanwhile even hardcore fans are saying PDX anti consumer policies go too far, that is a abusive relationship and most purchased are motivated by a melange of FOMO, sunk cost fallacy and Stockholm syndrome.
Paradox troubles go beyond their publishing activity. Their internally developed games are getting more and more mediocre, their DLCs are utter trash, they have a nefarious company culture which confort them into believing they can ship trash and fix it latter with hotfix because they do consider as a due QA tester crew. And for all of theses reasons, the paradox brand has become notoriously toxic among PC gamers. They believe they can milk forever their audience with theses stupid 600$ games. They dont want to hear that their model is unsustainable, that CK2/EU4/HoI4 took their fans by surprise (me included) because nobody expected them to release yearly DLC for a whole decade and more. They are also blind to the way it has nefariously affect their capacity as developers : their recent games have all been mediocre at best. They simply lost the know how to ship actually great games. Instead we have a mish mash of a few DLC style features pretending to be full scale game while they are just a bland glorified DLC pipeline.
HOI4 is the last quality, comptent game they made. The rest including dlcs have been underwhelming.
Their business model is to release unfinished poorly designed games and sell random bits of the mutilated corpse over 20 DLC's. Entirely deserved.
was very skeptical of Stormgate and figures it would be mediocre. Also were the Ex-Blizzard Devs even apart of the Starcraft team? That is a very curious question i have
That's why I don't buy a game until I can get something I consider worth the money I pay. Early release is fine if the game as-is is worth the price. If it's never finished I've still got something I consider worth the price. And I don't spend any time getting invested in games that are announced but not released. Definitely a case of I'll believe it when I see it.
*Gives the sigh of a world of darkness fan* Welp, time to see what happens to the WOD IP if this keeps up.
the trouble with company announcements is that after lying (or...being so incompetent as to unbelievably not know their own project status) why would we believe anything they say...because it's the same "person" saying it (organization/group/leadership). maybe the only solution would be to bring a third party business whose brand value depends on being a competent neutrality to tell the public their assessment of project status...since company's own words are just noise.
Killed a promising Sims like game life by you rushed city skylines 2 then decided to charge DLC for a still unfinished game
Your comments and advice to the folks in the C-Suite is spot on, especially about the audience getting burnt out on all the disappointing releases in the entire industry.
Paradox dlc makes sims look reasonable
Wait, they killed LBY? Oh fuck off I was looking forward to that as well.
The Sims took roughly a decade back when games could be made in a few months, LbY was canceled after like 7 years of development, even though nowadays game development takes years
they didn't even give it a chance to overtake the Sims 4 dominated life sim monopoly
Yeah, I was pissed when they canned it. That was by far my most anticipated release of the year.
@@LoremasterYnTaris I was a little skeptical about how good it would be, but I was excited for any alternative to TS4. Luckily, Inzoi looks very good.
@@allenkennedy99 Aye, I tried out the character builder demo, and I'm pretty hyped for it.
@@LoremasterYnTaris Yeah I missed that. sadge.
I've been wondering why Hearts of Iron 4 hasn't had a dev diary for quite awhile and this video informs me a little bit why. There's definately been some sort of either shakeup in the hoi4 dev team, or they're laying low with their noses to the grindstone to hopefully avoid any bad happenings.
04:04: It's Paradox. We all know that they are cutting things out so they can sell it for years down the line, right? I mean none of us are ignorant on the topic, right? Paradox is primarily a DLC milling operation.
Age of Wonders 4 was their last great release, almost 1,5 years ago. Imagine that a small Dutch game company is saving their reputation.
If we go back several years the reputation of Paradox was "releases sprawling games that are buggy as hell, near incomprehensible to play, and which will only get good after weeks and months of fixes and expansions". So 20 years later it's great to see that basically nothing has changed.
When i started playing the first EU, Paradox was a nice indie company. When I started playing C:S, it was still reliable. Now it's just another Electronic Arts.
I am so scared of what's going to happen to FOUNDRY, ngl (for those unaware it's basically a 3D Factorio, unfortunately published by Paradox).
satisfactory is waaay better
@@Jakeurb8ty82 Yes, but I've played satisfactory to death already.
oh ! at the same time of the release of your video, I shared a video ont the heath state of Paradox Interactive following the delaying of the Release of PA2 !
We observe the same things explained differently !
So strong !!
Justice for Sword of the Stars II !!
RIP a real one. At least SotS original is still a rockin' game
City Skylines 1 price is 376,15€ with 9% discount. $411. What is this business model?
You can start a very small Warhammer Army with that
@@TheChremix ok
Paradox POV:
[ Economics check | Legendary ]: Failure
"What's elastic demand?"
Maybe if they stopped releasing DLC packs that cost way too much, they wouldn't be in the predicament they find themselves in. Even one of my all time favourites, Battletech, has the same issue. It's DLC costed too damn much and gave too little. For once, thank God for key resellers, because fuck paying those prices.
Don't even get me started on Stellaris either. Stellaris is a hot mess because of this exact issue, AND they even have the gall to suggest DLC you haven't bought in the game itself.
If I'm bothering to still play Stellaris, I'm getting keys. Paradox won't see a penny from me for as long as they insist on doing this shit.
PDX sells most of those companies the keys you buy. It's likely a way they get around the 30% cut from steam. Still always a good idea to get them cheaper.
dlc unlocker exists you know
@@NewbieFirst I didn't know, actually. Tempted to try that, but I also want to play MP with buddies on occasion, and fuck knows if they've got some kind of measure to counteract that. I'd rather just get keys instead, as I know they won't do shit about that.
Thanks for letting me know though. Kudos.
@@ogre7699 they can't detect it, the only games that can are Payday 2 and games with invasive anti-cheats like EAC
@@NewbieFirstPayday 2 detects it and puts a "cheater" tag on you, that's it 😂
I am happy to buy DLCs for a game in which I spent 100hrs or more. At least, minimum 60 hours. Paradox sells me an unfinished skeleton in which there's barely anything to do beyond the tutorial. That takes like maybe 10hours at most. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NEXT? I'm not buying a dlc after 10 hrs of gameplay and there's usually not enough mechanics in the base game for it to be fascinating. They literally destroyed their games with their model
Also crazy how they abandoned a perfectly fine game that does NOT need a sequel.
The way they abandoned Empire Of Sin is just not right.
They started releasing games that required 5 years of early access (read DLC) to become enjoyable.
I have solution to paradox finance system, just release every full patch of the game as an dlc with 20 euro price on it. Oh, wait they are already doing it on HOI4. Nevermind
Ever since they went public they've continued to be plagued by problems. Even until about 2020/21 they were fairly solid but something about CK3s launch and popularity with the new board (and therefore its massive profit-seeking shift in the dev cycle) sent shock waves through the whole company and they've just been making mistake after mistake. They are rapidly burning up what little public goodwill they have left, and even many veteran map painters are starting to get very uneasy about the way in which things are developing, mostly due to CK3s post-launch support and DLC cycle and the special journey Vic3 is going through. I'd like to hope that they can turn things around, and maybe someone in the studios can get through to the board and investors that what made Paradox so successful was its openness and honesty with the player base, and the loyalty that earned them - and the two-way dialogue that supported both ends of it.
Stellaris - particularly the Custodian team - are a good reminder of what Paradox can be in terms of openness and community engagement, and if they applied that in general (with a hefty dose for the CK3 marketing and comms lot) then I can see them saving themselves. If they carry on as is, then they are gonna burn through their player base real quick real soon.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the fact that Paradox is sadly taken a more profit seeking approach, thus losing far more popularity than they have gained (even forcing some of their loyal supporters to take on the high seas) I personally felt mixed, but learning towards a feeling that things will definitely change for the better, considering the fact that so fair their announcements have built quite a hype they know they have to live up to (i REALLY hope they're not gonna turn out like Cities Skylines 2) such as the new Crusader Kings DLC, Victoria 3, the final Europa Universalis 4 DLC, and the announcement of Europa Universalis 5, and actually creating the subscription based services for games that have way too much dlcs (which I guess is another massive issue with paradox)
Sadly I guess only time will tell if they're really going to turn back to the company that hit the right spot with every dlc and new game they released, or they'll just tbe the next EA
@@crazydoodle I hope they sort it out, Paradox at its best produces some of the best games out there. I think the new CK3 DLC will give us the answer one way or the other.
Paradox has destroyed the original Prison Architect IP. Introversion poured love and time into the game, now its been more than milked. hate how corporations sacrifice anything for profit, especially in an industry that thrives on creativity.
I have not bought nor played CS2, but enjoyed CS1, and have been keeping an eye on Paradox games in general.
Other comments have pointed out their greed, and anti-consumer choices by releasing unfinished games then holding it to ransom with DLC "fixes" IF it sells well enough. All valid.
There is another factor, I believe. Paradox "drives" the specification for what THEY want the new game to be. The developer is thus not allowed to do what they want with it, but are beholder to a corporation (NOT gamer heads) to "deliver". It is difficult enough to code games when you ARE passionate about the game you are developing. To do that when it is someone else's "broken" vision you are being compelled to follow, explains why so many developers abandon the Paradox projects they are hired to complete.
Paradox has to learn to be much more hands off, if they want their newly commissioned games to complete and succeed. But since most of those commissions are cash-cow generators of previously successful games, Paradox is not even tempting innovation nor risk, but cramping and frustrating creativity to the point where the thing that gets released is a bodge job to "get that mess out of the door" and call it finished, when everybody knows it is not.
I believe CS2 was a victim of this. The project was led by ONE person who had "the vision" - and presumably had sufficient charisma and appeal to Paradox management for them to buy into it. And the game as released followed that vision quite well, according to a recently published "interview".
That it was nothing like what gamers wanted, says much for how that one person kept Paradox happy with the management-speak they wanted to hear, while the coders were frustrated and lost enthusiasm.
The revised updates and recent "new path" suggests this operational mistake has finally been overcome, and the coders are now having a say in what the game should be.
Whether it is enough to save it, or be "too little, too late", only time will tell.
The greed of Paradox is visible in the way they took games to Steam, when previously they were sold without DRM policeman control. I loved Cities in Motion by Collosal Order. But was denied the chance to buy CiM2, since it became steam exclusive. (My reasons for never paying Valve to control the games I supposedly "own" are many and varied, and will fill an hour of reading. TMI for here.)
Even worse, was one game I bought and played (and greatly enjoyed) - Train Fever. When planes were added, and it was rebadged Transport Fever, was there any kind of incentive for me to buy the enhanced game? Nope. I had to pay full price, with no credit at all for the "90%" version I already owned. I refused that one, too.
I've seen other games with less overlap in their extended versions offering half price upgrades, but no, not Paradox. Every last penny.
Paradox still made a profit, so lessons might not be being learned. Which is a shame, because I like the kind of games they publish. I'm just not prepared to buy them on Paradox' terms.
There was a fear that the developer of CS2 (Colossal Order) might even be forced to shut down, because they had "failed" to deliver what Paradox wanted.
Which is ironic, since they delivered the game that Paradox had SPECIFIED. But it wasn't the money-making, golden review cash cow they had EXPECTED.
Which is all Paradox' fault, for not being aware that THEIR vision of a game is NOT the one that gamers and coders have.
That tragedy is still hanging in the balance. Fingers crossed.
Paradox has been trying a subscription service model for their games.
Will it work? Will they stick with it? I don't know.
I love the kind of games Paradox publishes. Unfortunately, having bought Stellaris, Cities: Skylines, and a few others, I realized that I will just never own the full game. I have the money, but I don’t want to spend it on DLC that could have been combined together for a cheaper price. I don’t want to have to make the equivalent of multiple payments per year just to keep up with a game I enjoy. So I don’t see myself buying another Paradox game anytime soon.
Unfortunately, basically no other company truly competes with their games though. There's a COUPLE exceptions here and there. Like, Shadow Empire is a great Paradox like game. Basically, I'd say Slitherine publisher is the only competitor around worth a damn.
I hate this trend (that Paradox is also a part of) of buying IPs from small studios and then putting some in-house studio that usually has little experience to make DLCs or sequels.
That's why I like publishing companies that actually support indie companies instead of just poaching IPs.
Gotta love a new video. Keep up the good work man. Always love listening to these videos
As much as i get annoyed by Paradox, I hope theyre not going out of business. Their games always scratch a specfic itch that i just cant fond anywhere else
Paradox has a major HR problem. Execs that don't know their customers that have hired loads of incompetent employee's that have in turn hired friends that have in turn given prestige projects with valuable IP's to no-name indie studios with an iffy track record and no finances to speak of. Hence the cancellations, employee intrigues and political controversies etc left and right plaguing paradox.