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.
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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.