Experimentation

[King of Zoot]

Microtransaction loot boxes next.

 

[Arowan]

At the time of that post, about 50k bundles were sold on humble bundle. It shows that people want to buy dlc but that the full price is preventing them from doing so. Lowering the price is working.

Why is the most logical and customer friendly solution (owning the product) not chosen instead ?
It's easy to imaging the hidden motivations behind the subscription model.

 

[Hammerfell89]

So question... there will be the regular way to purchase DLC since I have already purchased all the DLC... So then having to pay for all them again in a subscription form seems like a slap in the face to me. I agree that for new comers the sub base will help ease the initial investment to play the game, but for us who have already purchased all of the DLC it doesn't make sense to buy into the subscription. Thoughts?

 

[Cancerofthehead]

For people speculating on the price, the below is what someone received. Wouldn't be surprised if part of their experiment was to test various dollar figures, though, and that is what needed to not be shared.

https://aion.paradox-interactive.com/www/termsandconditions/termsandconditions_en.html

 

[Commonblob]

At the time of that post, about 50k bundles were sold on humble bundle. It shows that people want to buy dlc but that the full price is preventing them from doing so. Lowering the price is working.

Why is the most logical and customer friendly solution (owning the product) not chosen instead ?
It's easy to imaging the hidden motivations behind the subscription model.

What does it matter how many bundles were sold if the sale price was $17? Let's be realistic, this was a once-off charity thing. Paradox isn't going to have regular "$17 for everything" sales.

 

[JiroDyne129]

What does it matter how many bundles were sold if the sale price was $17? Let's be realistic, this was a once-off charity thing. Paradox isn't going to have regular "$17 for everything" sales.

True, they aren't going to have regular $17 for everything sale. Which is kinda the problem. When they do the sale, they get lots of people buying it up for themselves or friends. But before the sale, they are desperate for new gamers and people weren't buying the full priced game and DLC. One gets sold, and the other doesn't. It doesn't take rocket science to do some basic 2+2 of knowing that if the game and DLCs were cheaper, such as a Bundle for all the DLC ever released for the game for $30, people would happily pay full price for the game and the extra $30 for all the DLC.

That's common sense. The issue, is that the company is very, VERY greedy, and want to extract as much money as possible in the worse possible ways, even those many people in the thread have already talked about many consumer friendly alternatives.

 

[Fallender]

I bought EU IV in presale. Did not play it alot because I did not enjoy the origin gameplay.
Now I assume I'm one of the targeted customers for this DLC-subscription.

Why would I buy it?
Because I could test the game with all DLCs.
Compared to the price of all DLCs I could play it without a big investment.
If I do not enjoy it, its only a few bucks.

Why would I not buy it?
I can play all DLCs with a host owning them.
Its kind of lost money if I buy a month and have no time to play.
Its kind of lost money if I do enjoy the DLCs.
I do not like subscriptions.

I did not buy it because I realy do not want another subscription for anything. If I could buy it for a day or even for a month without any further cancelation nessecary I would maybe be more intrested.

What could they do so that I'm subscribing?
If they would give me the DLCs for free after x times of subscription I would buy it.
For example:
First month = DLC 1, DLC 2 added for free
Second month = DLC 3, DLC 4 added for free
.
.
.
x months = all DLCs (excluding the last one) have been added for free


However I sill have the feeling Paradox needs to include the DLCs to the basic game after a sort of time. But if they would give it away within a subscription I would press the subscriber button.

 

[lolada]

I don't see the problem with subscription as long as we have the option to buy DLCs and play the game without any subscriptions afterwards. Its actually good thing for lots of new players that can't or don't want to buy all DLCs.

But I dislike subscription model and microtransaction thing in general... it inevitably turns into milking money and crap games. Companies think they can spam cosmetic items and milk money and eventually stop creating decent content.. or lower quality in any case. I hope this is not the first step towards that model.

For example if you subscribe you already get new cosmetic unit.. A year later.. subscribers have better interface.. and it goes on and on to worse user experience if you don't give money to company regularly.. Can paradox avoid the temptation ?! -_-.

For example i stopped playing SWTOR because of subscription system that didn't deliver.. since patches and balance changed weren't to my liking.. they lost most of players in a year or two so its not just me i guess. I think they added 10 million cosmetic items and invest 1000s of hours into developing online shop. Anyway.. if for example EU4 had subscription system only i surely wouldn't be subscribed because i really disliked changes in last two years. I play on and off.. pausing for months somtimes due to this.. but i still do buy dlcs.

 

[Inucroft]

All the posts seem to be here.

Between 11:50 and at least 00:15+ (GMT) staff posts were the only ones visable.

 

[jrgen3]

Between 11:50 and at least 00:15+ (GMT) staff posts were the only ones visable.

That happens when you click the "Show only Dev responses" button at the top of the page. If it happens again, there should be a "Show all replies" (or something similar) button there instead, that should fix it.

 

[MrNewVegas]

At the time of that post, about 50k bundles were sold on humble bundle. It shows that people want to buy dlc but that the full price is preventing them from doing so. Lowering the price is working.

Why is the most logical and customer friendly solution (owning the product) not chosen instead ?
It's easy to imaging the hidden motivations behind the subscription model.

Because the most customer friendly solution is almost always the least profitable.

 

[VineFynn]

Because the most customer friendly solution is almost always the least profitable.

That is only true and can only be true because customers fail to punish that behaviour. And storm-in-a-teacup outrage isn't punishment, despite whatever bs people sell themselves about them buying the product anyway not mattering because they "are just one person".

 

[Synge316]

For people speculating on the price, the below is what someone received. Wouldn't be surprised if part of their experiment was to test various dollar figures, though, and that is what needed to not be shared.

View attachment 540896

https://aion.paradox-interactive.com/www/termsandconditions/termsandconditions_en.html

That's a great price if it covered the DLC for all Paradox games. Bargain. I'm not sure how often they'd need to roll out EU4 specific DLC for it to be of interest just for a EU4 sub. Maybe if I was a new player, then it would be pretty good value. But as I own all the DLC already, I'd be looking for something else. But then, as someone who already owns the DLC I'm not the target audience for this - something I think a lot of people here seem to be forgetting.

 

[Jernau_]

I fail to see how testing a subscription model is a problem. Plenty of people in this forum have suggested it countless times and now that they try to test it, then its suddenly a disaster?
More payment options that appeal to different types of gamers are probably a good thing.

People really need to stop going into "the sky is falling" mode every time some small thing changes.

 

[redsimonDE]

A subscription model ALONGSIDE a regular pricing model with DLCs that improve on base game mechanics (one of the problems we have seen that it is always new options added, instead of deepening the core systems) would make sense for me if

1. it encompasses the whole Paradox catalog (because I don't see Paradox having a huge number of developers who deliver updates for just a single game on a high frequency i.e. higher than we have seen in the past)
2. OR it would be for a multiplayer game with servers for a huge number of people and again a high frequency of updates.

As Paradox isn't offering anything like the second option in the near future, this leaves the first one. Will you really ramp up the frequency of updates significantly just for EUIV? With all due respect, I doubt it. Offering the whole Paradox catalogue for subscription would mean people could try out the whole catalogue. Then they can cancel their subscription and buy what they really want to play.

Of course this still leaves us with the other dilemma, many DLCs that give a full game a price tag of hundreds of Dollars/Euros. The only solution for this is what others have suggested, bundling DLC at a lower price point. As you have done before with pure cosmetic DLC in CKII (before it went F2P IIRC), you can do it again. Mind you, I don't suggest you decrease the price to near to nothing for DLC. But a subscription model surely doesn't solve the problem with your grand strategy games, because they are a huge time investment and so you end up with high subscription fees, at which point it would make more sense to buy DLC, which leads back to the DLC price hurdle. It's like Ouroboros, the snake that bites it's own tail. From what I have seen you seem to have animosity towards the idea of reducing DLC price. You shouldn't. It's not as big a problem as you might think, if newly released DLCs become more attractive than they are now, but that requires what was lacking in the past, more careful DLC planning and more testing for less bugs at release.

 

[Atalvyr]

You're thinking in Terms of an MMO. Something you're meant to spend multiple months on, play with friends, and enjoy the grind that pads out the time, with the 'DLC/Expansions' being very massive with weeks of content for a more casual player. But a Single Player game is NOT like that. There are games I play reinstall and play for a day once or twice every few months for years. If it was a Subscription based, I'd have to fork over $10 or $15 every few months, just to play the game for a few days, then I stop playing and the rest of the days are wasted. After 4-6 times of that happening, it would have been more profitable to just buy the game full price. And that's just a semi casual gamer for older games. What about a gaming addict that plays for a full year straight? giving $120 to $180 a year, for a single player game. Why waste that money on a single game playing with themselves when they can get a MMO Sub for that and play with their friends?

First off - the majority MMO's charge for their expansions as well. So you get the joy of both the subscription and a buy-in to get the additional content. What we are talking here is either one or the other. Lets say you play the game 6 times per year. Based on current information, that would cost you $30 per year. Usually we have 2-3 EU4 expansions per year. This has gone on for 4 years at this point so with a subscription you would be out $120. If you bought the content on release, you would be out aprox. $200. You could pay for another 16 months of game time with what you saved. The benefit only really drops off once EU4 has no new content coming out and you keep on playing every other months for a couple of years afterwards. By this point, you could subscribe to EU5, most likely. Sure, if you decide that EU4 will be the game you will keep returning to until you leave the earthly plane, then you will lose on a subscription. But in that case, may I suggest you buy it instead? I bet there will be some discount on the game in 2030. Heck you might even be lucky and they will give it away like CK2 by then.

Now, lets say you are a new player, just getting into the game in 2020. You could fork over $170 in the current steam sale on EU4 content. That gets you everything up to this point, yours to keep forever. You pay that whether you drop off the game in 2 months or not. With a subscription you would still have saved money if you played for a full year before deciding the game was not for you, or the new shiny came out and you moved on. You would also get the new expansion when it comes out, which is not contained in the $170 buy-in.

I can only assume you don't play many video games, don't go outside very often, and don't interact with many people online when you come up with these kinda logistics and can't understand the issues. What in my older post about there being FREE Mods, that do what the DLC does but BETTER do you not understand about that the Development of these 'Official' DLC must be messed up! Either they are doing very little work, and thus it isn't worth what they are asking. Or they are spending so much money and doing so much hard work on such basic concepts, that the company should fire them for wasting money and time and hire actual Devs that know how to code and can code faster, better, and cheaper! There are free games that update with much more content than what a DLC from Paradox is likely to have.

Personal attacks are not productive, please do better. Mods will always be a superior value proposition. You have people give you stuff for free because they love making it - what is not to like? I will leave it to the devs to try to explain to you why things that look easy to you are hard to code. But with my limited coding experience I would make the educated guess that working with the base code of a game developed 5 years ago is harder than building content on top of said code. Making everything mod-friendly is a big focus for Paradox, so it is not like modders are making their own games. If it were that easy, I would assume they would do so and sell it - I am sure they would even make it only cost $2 as well.

I'm not just talking shit, you can GO TO STEAM and actually LOOK at Paradox Games and their DLCs! Or did you not actually research the games you were buying, and just bought them full price without actually knowing what you were buying? Did you just blindly go "Oh, a brand new DLC" and bought it instantly without actually reading what it actually had in it? I'm not talking 10 or 15 angry people, most of the Major DLCs for the games have 250-500 Reviews, and 90% of the DLCs for ALL of Paradox Strategy Games are Mixed or Mostly Negative! This isn't 'Sticking it to the Man', this is actually having common sense of not wasting hard earn money on something not worth it, and many people agreeing!

Again - please be an adult and stop attacking the man instead of the the argument. Saying that Steam reviews represent "common sense" is a stretch. Scrolling through the reviews of EU4 DLC and half the negative reviews reference the "Deus Veult" controversy.

----

As for 'Looking at F2P games', all those games you listed are Multiplayer Only, don't have DLC/Expansions, and you can't buy the games. They are 100% FREE to do EVERYTHING without a Subscription at all! The only thing you 'Pay' for, are useless Cosmetic stuff that has no barings on the game itself! It's a much better system than a Subscription! Why do you think the only 2 games you see with a Subscription now is Black Desert, which is heavily Pay to Win, all about massive grinding or spending hundreds and thousands of dollars to skip some of it, and WoW, which also lets you play the first 20 levels free in it's own Sudo F2P model.

Yes. And they have massive player bases that pay tiny amounts per-person, which add up to the money they need to keep things running. That was my literal argument? If there was any chance of EU4 getting the amount of players these games have, they could sell their products cheaper, spreading the cost of development on more people. As it is, the type of games they make have fairly small playerbases all things considered. That is why they cost more per person playing them.

As was suggested earlier - go take a look at niche games such as the Train Simulators and Slitherine games of the world, if you want to get real sad about how much you have to pay for limited content when you want to play something few other people care about. If you want value-for-money, follow the majority. Digital products cost the same to produce whether you sell to 1 person or 1 million people.

Hmm. You are correct... But that wouldn't be Worse. It wouldn't be better either as we wouldn't get a much official content. But as I pointed out, there are free mods that do BETTER than the actual DLCs. So we wouldn't actually LOSING anything, other than more ways to lose money. It would actually be a Win for us, as then we could spend the $150 to $300 on buying other games, or maybe on food, or on other Paradox games. It would be much better than Paradox having us Sub for EACH new game, draining $10+ PER game of theirs, which we might even be playing at the same time.

Is someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to buy these things you hate so much? You can, in fact, already spend your money on food instead of Paradox DLC. If they add nothing of value to the game anyway, why are you spending all this money on it? Why not just play all the wonderful free content available?

No, the only way I can see a Subscription working, is if it was a $15 'Paradox' Subscription, that allowed access to ALL their Games and DLCs. Not just a $10 sub for EU4, then another $10 Sub for CK2 and so on. And even THEN, it should be a system where it 'Saves' the Money you spend per month on the Sub, and can buy their games with that. So if you Sub $15 for 4 months, that's $60 you should be able to spend to actually BUY and OWN a $60 game. So if the Sub runs out, you can still access and own that game at least.

THAT would be a much better Sub system, and more fair.

That would be awesome value, yes. But would it cover what it costs to make the content? Otherwise it is as useful as suggesting they price everything at an even $1. A payment model has to work for both the content creator and the consumer. Otherwise there will be no content to consume in short order.

 

[LordofLight]

It shows that people want to buy dlc but that the full price is preventing them from doing so. Lowering the price is working.

Its extremely confusing that their plan for lowering the bar to entry is a subscription model instead of... lowering the price of DLC.... especially when its old...

Sure any sane individual would buy them on a discount but most newcomers dont think about that.

Yet for some reason paradox is giving the idea of a subscription model more serious thought. Its very confusing from that point of view.

"People are intimidated by the high price of DLC. What should we do to fix this?"
"Lower the price of DLC so its not that intimidating anymore? It does work when done."
"Subscription model sounds great."

I'm really confused as to how they arrived at the sub model.

On the other hand if it is like the sub model talked before, where the money you paid via subs is put into a sort of "fund" that you can use to actually buy the DLC later, or even other paradox games, then that's just a downright BRILLIANT idea.

 

[flogi]

My thoughts on the above:
2. A valid opinion indeed. But a lot of the discussions around it is based in pure speculations to be honest. I appreciate your feedback from your experience buying our stuff (thank you so much for that btw, I sometimes feel this gets lost in the discussions. But we are considering ourselves extremely lucky to have such a passionate and devoted group of people buying and playing our games <3), but I think that our discussions would be way more productive if speculations about the economic realities behind what we do was left out of the conversation instead of being accepted as facts and used as a foundation for further discussions. So for the sake of the quality of the discussion, please don't present speculations as truths, and take other posts presenting economics with a grain of salt. Sadly I can't talk about our financial results as we are a publicly traded company, and it's not really my field of expertise. But I know enough to know what's speculations and what's facts.

I mean its clear that we, making the point don't know what the outcome would be. But neither would you.
What is keeping you from bundeling up the base game and expansions and do an experiment for X months? I mean the humble bundle thing is great atm, never was there a bigger chance to get as much EU IV for as little money right now.
Doing this (earlier) would've been a much smaller risk than introducing a subscriber model.
The only real reason I can think about you not doing this, is that enough people still by the base game and DLCs for prices that are still very good for you. Good on you, but without taking a risk you never know how much a game could grow.

 

[LordofLight]

The only real reason I can think about you not doing this, is that enough people still by the base game and DLCs for prices that are still very good for you.

The funny thing is here... if the sub model prices are fair, and will later on apply to all paradox games. Then paradox might make less money off people.

Look at I:R for example. Instead of people buying it full price, they'd have subbed to it... but then canceled the sub because the game is bad. Thus they'd have made a ton less money off of it. But that of course depends on how much people are paying. Is it going to be like XBOX Pass? $9.99 a month? Because anything more will look... weird... on XBOX Pass you get access to ALL the games on that service. Yet with paradox it'd be for 1 game. Or maybe all their games but that's still tiny in comparison and would just be an awful price.

But here is the brilliant thing...

It is a hard balance to strike, its both a money and PR thing. I still really adore the idea of sub money going into a fund. That way people could even choose how much they want to pay a month, with a minimum existing. Why would they want to pay more? If they like the game they'd want the DLC sooner so they'd pay more money. Paradox gets more money, more people get access to the DLC. And this is a very good PR move on top of that.

 

[Belryuminus]

I know a lot of ppl already gave opinion here and mine wont have more value than another. However, if PDX ever makes stats from this topic i want to be part of it.

So here's my position :

One of PDX game specifics is to have an abnormal long exploitation life with active developpement and new content. It's even more valid for GSG but can also describe games like Surviving Mars, Battletech or of course Cities : Skyline that are receiving a huge bunch of DLC.

If it's easiest for cash flow reasons, easy acces for new players, and community managing to advance to a subscription model i'm OK with it.
But on the only condition that subscription would be a Origin Premier or a XBOX Pass like, with the WHOLE PDX catalog to access.
From my point of view, and considering what i would be ok to pay or not, It will never be worth the price unless all the existing and upcoming games are in that offer fo something not exceeding 100 € a year.

And even considering the PDX team explanations, i must say to you that i'm a little bit confused and disappointed that you did not come transparent and straight forward on that option. Would have been of a great interest to put that subject on public place among your community and discuss about it.

Best regards to you all.