It’s all sheer greed, too. Paradox has fully embraced the model of releasing sequels with less content than their DLC-enhanced previous games after 2K showed the market had tolerance for it with Civilization. Considering how that already puts them ahead of the curve, it’s amazing that Paradox let this game come out in this state.
To be fair, I don’t expect the sequel’s base game to have more content than the previous game with all its DLCs, but I do expect the base game to have at least as much content as the previous game’s base game.
That doesn’t make it sheer greed; it’s what’s feasible to develop. A systems driven game like a city builder or a 4X game mean that you can’t just drag and drop old content in the new systems and expect it to work and look cohesive. Every fighting game launches with fewer characters than the previous version, and it’s not because it’s some conspiracy to delay dropping the SFV characters in SF6; it’s because swapping out the V system for the Drive system is a massive change, and the old characters take a lot of work to port over. Even the art style in Civ 6 is very different from Civ V. When you try to just copy and paste content between two different styles of art direction, you end up with nightmare fuel Chun-Li in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite.
Sure, but that was iterative, like Super Street Fighter II Turbo, as opposed to making Street Fighter III. Wherever they go with Smash from here, it will involve a systems rework and fewer characters.
The ways that they play differently are a few numbers tweaks and occasionally a new animation. It’s not the difference between Melee and Brawl or 64 and Melee.
The base game having less content than its predecessor isn’t the greedy part. It’s the fact that taking advantage of that market inelasticity wasn’t enough for Paradox and judging it acceptable to release a product in this state on top of that.
No, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
Everyone ran out of cash in this industry. Investment dried up, and they knew what state their game was shipping in. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong to be upset as a consumer either.
If we’re both going to be speculating here, I’m going with the more likely consideration for a publisher with record performance. In early August, they saw an early access game get its full release in an unfinished state to massive acclaim and sales (along with similar, larger trends) and decided to test their market with the same.
I don’t even have a dog in this fight; I’m not a city management sim fan. I’m just calling it like it is.
And perhaps that health is because by that point they already started releasing multiple games far too early for a cash injection, one of which ended with them cutting Harebrained Schemes loose. I’m also calling it like it is. I don’t see healthy companies sacrifice their long term fan base and development throughput for short term gains. It smells a whole lot like trying to stop the bleeding. As for assigning The Chinese Room to sequel a beloved RPG, I don’t even know where to start there.
I don’t see healthy companies sacrifice their long term fan base and development throughput for short term gains.
New to Capitalism?
No, hence my conclusions.
You’ve never seen a corporation sacrifice its long-term health to report short-term profits, to meet an upcoming quarterly report?
Ever?
I’ve never seen one I would call healthy.
Well, most people believe that all publicly traded corporations, healthy or otherwise, only focus on their next quarterly report profits, and that long-term strategy and growth goals are rarely if ever considered.
Granted, I’d much rather live in your world than mine, but I don’t think you’re correct on this one.
You don’t see Take Two shoving GTA6 and Judas out the door for profits now, for instance. Paradox abiding by the same MO to burn good will for multiple games and then getting developers off their books is a move you make when you’re out of better options.
You don’t see Take Two shoving GTA6 and Judas out the door for profits now, for instance.
And all the other corporations out there?
Remember your stance was that all healthy corporations would never sacrifice long-term health for short-term profits.
Paradox abiding by the same MO to burn good will for multiple games and then getting developers off their books is a move you make when you’re out of better options.
You’re not really addressing my point, but instead skirting around it…
Well, most people believe that all publicly traded corporations, healthy or otherwise, only focus on their next quarterly report profits, and that long-term strategy and growth goals are rarely if ever considered.
Our original disagreement was on if a healthy corporation would focus on the quarterly profits over long-term goals in the same way that an unhealthy corporation would. Your stance was that any healthy corporation would not.
Correct. We’ve seen tons of layoffs in this industry because their business models weren’t healthy. So they’ll make cuts, or push out games like Cities: Skylines II or Skull and Bones when they’re not ready or will do long-term damage to their brand because they need to take the least bad option, but meanwhile, Take Two and Nintendo can push back marquis products another few quarters because they’ve got a moat of security around themselves. At times, those companies were not, and one day will not be, healthy, but then they sacrificed or will sacrifice something or other in order to survive to be healthy another day.
So, just to confirm, your opinion is that no healthy corporation in any industry on this planet would ever focus on short-term quarterly reports and financial gain to satisfy their shareholders, over long-term goals and stability, yes? That only unhealthy corporations would do so?
I’d say it’s a sign of an unhealthy company, since their reports must be truthful but can present the rosiest picture possible. You don’t have to force this to be some absolutism. The rest of the industry came on hard times simultaneously to these games releasing unfinished, as well as games from their peers doing the same. I don’t think my conclusion is farfetched.
Not all corporations on the planet are unhealthy, but all focus on the quarterly report more so than long-term, if they’re publicly traded.
You keep focusing on a few game companies, where my original comment, and my recurring comments, are about corporations in general, as a discussion on Capitalism as a whole.
It’s well known and believed that all corporations that are public and that have shareholders focused primarily on the next quarterly earnings report and returns, and not long term results, regardless of their health.
I don’t think my conclusion is farfetched.
Your conclusion is purposely not answering the point I’m asking you, which is what this conversation is about.
It blows my mind you’re not willing to acknowledge that, which is why I keep interacting with you, trying to get you to speak specifically to that point, but you keep referring to just two game companies over and over again only.
You’re looking for an argument that I’m not interested in, and it’s not what this conversation was about. Paradox sure looks like it released some games early, knowing that they were underbaked, because they couldn’t feasibly keep delaying them to give them the time they needed. We can agree to disagree there and go our separate ways.
You’re looking for an argument that I’m not interested in, and it’s not what this conversation was about.
You’re purposely not answering the point of the conversation, and trying to label it otherwise is not an answer in and of itself.
The conversation was about healthy corporations focusing on short-term profits or not. Not one game company who’s unhealthy focusing on short-term profits.
I don’t see healthy companies sacrifice their long term fan base and development throughput for short term gains.
New to Capitalism?
No, hence my conclusions.
You’ve never seen a corporation sacrifice its long-term health to report short-term profits, to meet an upcoming quarterly report?
When corporations acting in their best interest also act in the consumers best interest, the system is working as it should.
Intent matters for individuals, not for societal systems like governments and corporations. Incompetent governments/corporations need to be removed just as much as evil ones.
He did finish it we saw it on TV and hated it. So now he’s not gonna do it because he knows no matter what he does we will hate it. He wrote himself into a corner
Yeah I remember some interview or something where he said the show just did a shittier version of the ending he wanted and it kind of killed his drive to finish. Imagine the adaptation being so bad it actually does ruin the source.
If he’d just say “It is over, no more books.” people would just move on. But him constantly stating that he’ll publish “next year” for 10 years years or so now is really annoying.
It is pretty comparable tbh. It is also the same for Elders scroll fans. Before Skyrim and before A Dance with Dragons both published constantly and both started publishing on the mid 90s, both published 5 times, both started publishing side project stuff.
Elders Scroll fans have it somewhat better though, not depending on a single person, who also isn’t the youngest.
I am also an Elder Scroll fan since Arena btw, so I am quite f…d.
I did not even know that a DLC came out. I am sure I would have if it was good news because streamers I follow would have tested it.
But it is so sad. I really liked cities skylines because it basically is what I wanted from sim city. But with a million mods it would always break at certain points and force me to stop playing. I had such high hopes with 2 but seeing this game at launch and now seemingly still broken is so… well I am not really sure how I (should) feel.
The good thing is, that I do not have to keep reading and researching but rather wait for some “news” to pop up in my feed again. So I can get back to forgetting about it.
This screams so damn fake. If they ever wanted to make a good game, they should have made it before releasing it, let alone prioritising DLC for a game they are more than aware of being borked at release.
I wouldn’t expect any different from Colossal Order, given its close ties with Paradox Interactive: they don’t care about making good games, they care about milking the players.
It’s not the devs who are to blame for this fiasco. The management who pushed for releasing unfinished product is. There were some people sitting in a meeting room who decided that it was a good idea to publish a worthless DLC. Change is needed at management level.
The apology looks like honest but some part of me feels like they are sorry because their strategy for ripping our wallets did not work as expected.
I’m not planning to buy any Paradox game in the future.
This was too late. Paradox’s in house development studio did the same thing with Victoria 3. Do something way too greedy (lock historical characters behind a preorder for a dlc that was already bad). Waited to see the backlash, and when it was too much, they make the bonuses free.
At least they’re doing something, but the dlc should have been pushed back at launch.
It’s not just greedy, at this point it’s blatant. The release itself was already bonkers, but they could have saved things by working hard on the base game and releasing additional free content. But this? How many “sowwy we fucked up, we promise to do better, buy our new 132 DLCs” will they pull before people stop giving them the benefit of the doubt?
I am actually planning on not buying anything more from paradox if they fuck up the launch of eu5, only dlc from current games (if they’re worth it/required)
This is why I stopped buying Paradox games and just pirate them if I’m curious. No way I’m getting trapped in a fomo cycle everytime they release a minor feature for $5.
I’m not hopeful at all. If Bethesda or Blizzard are anything to go by, they can keep messing up big time for years, maybe decades to come and consumers will keep coming back, begging to be disappointed once more. You’ll have more luck looking for alternatives out there in the ocean of indie games.
Yep. It will never change As long as gamers continue to buy from shitty companies, the companies have no incentive to change in any direction but worse. Bethesda is a brilliant example of it, how every game is more simplistic and devoid, and more reliant on randomly generated content than the previous.
Ubisoft is another example, with the outright hostility, hatred and downright contempt they have towards their own customers.
and they are both still multi-billion dollar companies, cause idiots keep throwing them tons of money.
These updates from C:SL team mean nothing, cause they keep doing stupid shit despite of their sweet words. Like they did with trying to sell DLC for a broken game. Their actions and focus speak far louder than any of their honeyed words.
I’ve hated Paradox ever since I bought CK2 and then realized how many minor features were locked behind $5 DLCs. I later pirated the game to play all the DLC and there is absolutely no fucking way that shit was worth what they are charging. Decided then never to buy a Paradox game again.
Compare that to the Factorio devs Wube. They released their game as a beta and then just kept updating it and adding features until it was done. Then they spent years fixing basically every bug in the game. As far as I know they never decreased the price or put the game on sale, and at one point they increased the price of their game because of inflation. Which honestly is fine, they made a great game and they are continuing to support the game, why decrease the price?
I know I’m coming off as a Wube shill but in my eyes they are ideal devs. Paradox in theory make really interesting games but in practice they poison them with shitty monetization strategies. If they just made games and added free updates for a while afterwards if they wanted to I probably would have spent a shit load on their games.
I’m ranting but as a side note, Paradox definitely abuses fomo. They make games that basically require you to watch videos of how to play and those videos inevitably mention DLCs which you then start wondering what you’re missing out on. That’s definitely what made me want to buy their DLC.
It is a shame they’re such a greedy company because, similarly to what you said in your 3rd paragraph, they make good games, some can be as good as games like factorio at times, but it’s always ruined by their dlc.
You mentioned free updates at the end, I believe they are doing that for victoria 3, but their first big expansion for the game, spheres of influence, comes out in June so we’ll see if they stick to that.
I love paradox games and have the money to by their dlc most the time and will keep buying the ones I want (because the beach dlc was too far even for the largest paradox shills) as long as the game’s stability and the free players are prioritised, unlike the way they have been treated in cities: skylines 2.
And yes, fuck paradox, shame their games are ruined by their greed.
CK2 was a complete game at launch IIRC. They just kept releasing new DLC for it for many years, much of which was outside the scope of the original game (playing as Arabic rulers, vikings, Indians, etc). I think that’s fine. Them selling music, portraits, and new models separately was kinda shitty though.
This team has been making the exact same game for multiple decades. Look at this developer’s game history. It is literally the same exact game redeveloped over and over every few years and then they repackage and resell the same DLCs for the new versions. What a con of a game dev.
So you think they’ve been making entirely new games for their entire existence? You don’t think it’s conny at all that literally all they do is make city builders and sell DLCs and then make a new one when interest dries up? Doesn’t seem very creative or innovative in my opinion it sounds like pure capitalism. Publisher is a microcosm EA.
The Beach DLC was distasteful, you still can’t even make convincing beaches with the terrain.
I’m very glad Paradox reversed course here. It sounds like they are starting to take seriously what it means to make a finished, solid game. Cities:Skylines fans are tired of half-baked shit.
I’m not convinced Paradox knows what they are doing as publisher. Millenia was similarly pushed out the door before it was ready (though in a better state than Cities: Skylines 2). And both games pushed out the door in the last week of the quarter in a transparent effort to boost their earnings. The shortsightedness of the publisher is now impacting their reputation in ways that will be hard to recover. I no longer consider buying Paradox published titles until they are at least a year old or have at least a few months of reviews showing they are solid (like AoW4).
We’re riding this wave over in the Total War community too. Broken game, weak and overpriced DLC.
We kicked off (and then all their other games managed to flop at once, so they came crawling back) and now we’ve got a notable amount more effort into the DLC coming at the end of the month, as well as price cuts, refunds and redoing of the bad DLC.
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but I’m seeing positive movements in general on legacy resting-on-laurels games.
Me too—I was saddened when r/CitiesSkylines didn’t take part in the blackout. A community for a game that became as successful as it is in part due to the hard work of unpaid third-party developers should have been at the forefront of the protests
forum.paradoxplaza.com
Aktywne