• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Honestly I am quite indifferent. I have no sense of ownership for this game as I play it on Steam. I paid for indefinite access, but no physical product.

There is a huge barrier to play EU4 as it probably feels prohibitively expensive for an old game, especially if you cannot know how long it will still be supported for.

As a rule I think renting (or buying on credit) anything that you are going to use either often over a longer period of time is a bad idea. But if you get to play EU4 for say $10 a month for two years, it is still cheaper than buying the full game.

I see it as a solution for where EU4 stands today (and old game with many DLCs).

Just make sure no mechanics, flavor or bonuses of any kind are limited to a certain payment method. I personally would not invest in a game that uses this mechanic. Then again this might attract another demographic so it might be profitable for you.
 
As a rule I think renting (or buying on credit) anything that you are going to use either often over a longer period of time is a bad idea. But if you get to play EU4 for say $10 a month for two years, it is still cheaper than buying the full game.

I see it as a solution for where EU4 stands today (and old game with many DLCs).

But that issue, that it's so expensive, is a problem the company forced. The DLCs are NOT worth what they sell them at. Right NOW, a Sub looks promising, cause the Company is forcing us to pay top dollar for broken, sub par, inferior junk DLCs. If DLCs were priced at what they were ACTUALLY Worth, most being $2-$3 at most, the game and DLCs would no longer be expensive, and a Subscription would quickly be costing you much more than the game and DLC combined!
 
  • 1
Reactions:
But that issue, that it's so expensive, is a problem the company forced. The DLCs are NOT worth what they sell them at. Right NOW, a Sub looks promising, cause the Company is forcing us to pay top dollar for broken, sub par, inferior junk DLCs. If DLCs were priced at what they were ACTUALLY Worth, most being $2-$3 at most, the game and DLCs would no longer be expensive, and a Subscription would quickly be costing you much more than the game and DLC combined!

Price fairness will always be a subjective. The full price is sort of high. On the other hand I pay that kind of money for a small city trip abroad. In terms of replayability EU4 has offered me a lot. I will admit it feels odd there's barely a discount on older DLCs.

Anyway, the principle still stands. Let's say every DLC is worth only $3, you could still run a sub for quite some time before it becomes more expensive than buying the product/indefinite access. I guess that's the "benefit" of having such a high total price due to a long history of DLCs.

As I said I draw the line at offering exclusives for a certain payment method.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
They can't even do that with overpriced DLC that rare ever goes on sale and never changes price even 5+ years later! It's stupid comment like this that makes me question if you buy DLCs blindly and have no actual idea what Content is in them. It takes 6 months, and hundreds of people buying a $20 DLC, just to make 5 Buttons and a few passive buffs, which are broken for the first 3 months?! Modders make even more content then that, with very few bugs they fix in hours, for free! How can Modders do BETTER for FREE than what actual Devs are doing for a JOB with most likely much higher than Minimum Wage pay 5 days a week for months at a time.

This is why a Subscription won't work, cause they will get steady income, and not have to actually change anything! They won't improve DLCs, they won't come out with them more often, they won't lower the prices! They are just sticking on a Sub, they never mentioned actually CHANGING anything or IMPROVING anything cause there is a Sub. We'll still be getting over priced, shitty DLCs with little content.



What I want, is better Quality DLCs. I would pay Full Priced $20 DLCs, if it was WORTH the $20s. THAT is the biggest Negative about it. Not that the DLCs are expencive, but that they should NOT be that expencive. As people have pointed out, look at the Humble Bundle sale that just happened. Hundreds of people buying the game now, myself included, now that the DLC prices are actually worth the content they have, which is just a few bucks.

As for Prediction, you can make a very highly educated guess, by looking at History, by following logic, and understanding that ultimate, the Company does not give a shit about it's players at all, and hasn't for years, and this 'test' is just to see how much hate and pushback they will get from the Community before forcing the system in place as the only way to play any of their games, old and new, and yes that includes updating the games to force them to play through the Launcher you have to Sign in to continue playing and then restricting access to accounts that don't have a Subscription.

And it wouldn't even be hard for them to set it up.

How sweet to be marked as a stupid answerer when you do not even try to understand the point of view :) The DLC quality is not an objective statement. For some users, some are good and some are bad. For other users, the list won't be the same. The only fair point is to say it's not easy to give dense and interesting content after so many years and so many changes on an already complex base game.
And despite the content of DLCs, light or heavy, quality or not, the simple fact to have devs working on such an old game without micro-transaction is expansive and far from rentability.

Concerning your guess well. It's a guess. And saying i clearly do not share the view you point as certain is an understatement.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
... Right NOW, a Sub looks promising, cause the Company is forcing us to pay top dollar for broken, sub par, inferior junk DLCs. If DLCs were priced at what they were ACTUALLY Worth, most being $2-$3 at most, the game and DLCs would no longer be expensive, and a Subscription would quickly be costing you much more than the game and DLC combined!
Noone of the 7 billion people on this world is forcing you or anyone other to buy anything. AFAIK this is still a willful decision on an individual level.

smh
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Noone of the 7 billion people on this world is forcing you or anyone other to buy anything. AFAIK this is still a willful decision on an individual level.

smh

True, no one is forcing me to buy this stuff. But even so, doesn't mean I can't point out the flaws, hypocacy, and try to make a much better product for others that could want to buy it and won't cause of these choices. The games already have a small enough community as it, no one in their right mind is going to go "Oh, a single player game I have to pay each month to access, as if it was an MMO? And what's this, the new content is always broken, downvoted by hundreds of people, and content is very slow to release? Oh yes, lets do it!" Sure, they might get some new players. But I highly doubt it will be very many. And whats more, a lot of the players that bought the games and DLC won't pay it, and won't be buying new games that add it, so the tiny community gets even smaller and smaller. The point of this 'Experiment' was to get new players, and a Subscription is not going to do that very well. There is a reason nearly every single MMO in the world with the very rare exception all cut off Subscriptions and turn to buy to play or free to play models. Even WoW, the top best sub MMO in the world, has less players and subs right now, than it has ever had in it's entire history and losing more and more by the month.

Price fairness will always be a subjective. The full price is sort of high. On the other hand I pay that kind of money for a small city trip abroad. In terms of replayability EU4 has offered me a lot. I will admit it feels odd there's barely a discount on older DLCs.

Anyway, the principle still stands. Let's say every DLC is worth only $3, you could still run a sub for quite some time before it becomes more expensive than buying the product/indefinite access. I guess that's the "benefit" of having such a high total price due to a long history of DLCs.

How sweet to be marked as a stupid answerer when you do not even try to understand the point of view :) The DLC quality is not an objective statement. For some users, some are good and some are bad. For other users, the list won't be the same. The only fair point is to say it's not easy to give dense and interesting content after so many years and so many changes on an already complex base game.
And despite the content of DLCs, light or heavy, quality or not, the simple fact to have devs working on such an old game without micro-transaction is expansive and far from rentability.

Concerning your guess well. It's a guess. And saying i clearly do not share the view you point as certain is an understatement.

Price Fairness and DLC Quality is not as subjective as you believe. We can simply compare it to other 'products' that are classed as the same things, DLC/Expansions, and the Price tag, and gauge how they compare in Content. There is also the Reviews, 250-500+ people for each DLC, all bringing down each DLC's Steam Review to Mix and Overwhelmingly Negative, with very few exceptions. We can also look to Mods, and see if they do something similar, how well they do it with a single person working for free for a short period of time, to gauge how much time, money, and effort the Devs must have taken. With those three factors in mind, you can objectively say most Paradox DLC's aren't worth the price and should have cost less.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
True, no one is forcing me to buy this stuff. But even so, doesn't mean I can't point out the flaws, hypocacy, and try to make a much better product for others that could want to buy it and won't cause of these choices. The games already have a small enough community as it, no one in their right mind is going to go "Oh, a single player game I have to pay each month to access, as if it was an MMO? And what's this, the new content is always broken, downvoted by hundreds of people, and content is very slow to release? Oh yes, lets do it!" Sure, they might get some new players. But I highly doubt it will be very many. And whats more, a lot of the players that bought the games and DLC won't pay it, and won't be buying new games that add it, so the tiny community gets even smaller and smaller. The point of this 'Experiment' was to get new players, and a Subscription is not going to do that very well. There is a reason nearly every single MMO in the world with the very rare exception all cut off Subscriptions and turn to buy to play or free to play models. Even WoW, the top best sub MMO in the world, has less players and subs right now, than it has ever had in it's entire history and losing more and more by the month.





Price Fairness and DLC Quality is not as subjective as you believe. We can simply compare it to other 'products' that are classed as the same things, DLC/Expansions, and the Price tag, and gauge how they compare in Content. There is also the Reviews, 250-500+ people for each DLC, all bringing down each DLC's Steam Review to Mix and Overwhelmingly Negative, with very few exceptions. We can also look to Mods, and see if they do something similar, how well they do it with a single person working for free for a short period of time, to gauge how much time, money, and effort the Devs must have taken. With those three factors in mind, you can objectively say most Paradox DLC's aren't worth the price and should have cost less.
No you really can't. That's your subjective opinion, and while I agree that certain DLCs are overpriced....cough Golden Century, neither of us is objectively correct.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
If DLCs were priced at what they were ACTUALLY Worth, most being $2-$3 at most, the game and DLCs would no longer be expensive, and a Subscription would quickly be costing you much more than the game and DLC combined!

That would solve the problem alright - in that there would be no DLC to buy if they could only charge $2 for what they currently charge $20. While I don't know the financials of Paradox, I doubt they charge a 10x markup on the FMC value.

Say they take 6 months to make a DLC. Say a programmer on a Swedish salary will take home aprox. $4.000 per month (before taxer), similar to what an entry level engineer salary is for my company here in Denmark.

At $20 per DLC sold, you would need to 1.200 copies to pay for 1 person to work full time for 6 months on making the expansion. If you sold the DLC for $2 - you get 1 programmers worth of content for every 12.000 copies that get sold.

The peak players on Steam for EU4 is sub 30.000 in any given week, so lets be generous and say there are about 100.000 people that would be willing to buy the DLC at $2. That means that you could afford about 8 people working on the project. Those 8 people would need to concept, code, model, test, balance and roll out the DLC. And even then the DLC would just break even - you would not even be able to pay for the company "infrastructure" such as HR, bookkeeping, rent of building, licenses for software, electricity etc.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
That would solve the problem alright - in that there would be no DLC to buy if they could only charge $2 for what they currently charge $20. While I don't know the financials of Paradox, I doubt they charge a 10x markup on the FMC value.

Say they take 6 months to make a DLC. Say a programmer on a Swedish salary will take home aprox. $4.000 per month (before taxer), similar to what an entry level engineer salary is for my company here in Denmark.

At $20 per DLC sold, you would need to 1.200 copies to pay for 1 person to work full time for 6 months on making the expansion. If you sold the DLC for $2 - you get 1 programmers worth of content for every 12.000 copies that get sold.

The peak players on Steam for EU4 is sub 30.000 in any given week, so lets be generous and say there are about 100.000 people that would be willing to buy the DLC at $2. That means that you could afford about 8 people working on the project. Those 8 people would need to concept, code, model, test, balance and roll out the DLC. And even then the DLC would just break even - you would not even be able to pay for the company "infrastructure" such as HR, bookkeeping, rent of building, licenses for software, electricity etc.

Your reasoning is correct in principle, but it is all a lot more expensive.

A programmer costs a lot more than his salary alone (office space, ICT infrastructure, HR, etc), and player's price is higher than Paradox' income (steam tax, marketing, etc.), plus successful games need to make a lot more money than they cost to compensate for failures in other projects.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Your reasoning is correct in principle, but it is all a lot more expensive.

A programmer costs a lot more than his salary alone (office space, ICT infrastructure, HR, etc), and player's price is higher than Paradox' income (steam tax, marketing, etc.), plus successful games need to make a lot more money than they cost to compensate for failures in other projects.

Oh yeah, my figures definitely don't account for nearly all the real costs associated - it was more a simple way to prove a point about the margins for a Paradox product not being 90%. :)
 
Your reasoning is correct in principle, but it is all a lot more expensive.

A programmer costs a lot more than his salary alone (office space, ICT infrastructure, HR, etc), and player's price is higher than Paradox' income (steam tax, marketing, etc.), plus successful games need to make a lot more money than they cost to compensate for failures in other projects.

But I have a question. Paradox has many games, a lot of them very simular with very minor tweaks. Sellaris, EU4, CK2/3, I:R, HoI4, and more. Is there 1 Dev Team for all of them, or 1 for EACH of them, and thus the company is paying for 5+ different Dev Teams, for basically the exact same code 5+ times with a different skin.

What's more, you're all assuming that the Dev for, say, EU4, ONLY gets paid by money made with EU4. This is flatout wrong. The Company, Paradox, gets paid by ALL of their games, and from that pool of money, they pay their employees. So even if 1 game fails horrible or sells cheap DLCs, it can still exist based on the Success of other games. This is how EA still exists as a company, people refuse to buy the more Predatory games, but then a 'good' game comes, such as SW: Fallen Order, which makes a lot of money and EA takes that money to fund more Predatory games. It's the same as how Youtube still exists even tho it's a netloss in money, it has Google feeding it money from other sources that make money for google.

So even if EU4's DLCs were lower, doesn't mean the pay to the Devs would get impacted. Cause if you believe that, and follow the logic in the posts above, then the Company should have cut the EU4 Dev Team many years ago when less people bought enough to pay them. And yet, they are still here.

Plus we don't even know if they sit down, 5 days a week, and actually WORK to create DLCs. With the lack of features and polish that even a single mod maker, can make faster, better, and less buggy in a few WEEKS that it takes an ENTIRE Dev Team 6+ months to do WORSE. Then are the actually worth their Salery? Are they actually working? Or do they only work for a month every 5 months to crank out the DLCs?

The Quality of DLCs doesn't match up to actual WORK by a Dev Team, unless they are really, really, and I do mean REALLLLY slow and screwing arround and not working 99% of the time they should be.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
... lots of unsubstantiated guesswork ...

You can find a lot of answers to your questions by looking at (listening to) the quarterly financial reports. That gives you the amount of developers (currently hundreds), the amount of money invested in their games (mostly by work of those developers on future projects), etc. etc.

I have followed those reports for years, I am weird like that because I have a grade in accounting and I find that fun. I have also a full professional career in software development, mostly as a lead designer on multi-million, year long projects, so I have some idea about the business. The first rule of development is that everything costs a multiple of the initial estimations even if you take that principle into account, and an order of magnitude more than the estimations of uninformed outsiders.

Paradox is a financially very healthy company with great profits, but they have also grown enormously, and a few years of Imperator scale fiasco's can bring even them down, as now they have large staff that must produce a lot of profitable content.
 
  • 1
  • 1
Reactions:
But I have a question. Paradox has many games, a lot of them very simular with very minor tweaks. Sellaris, EU4, CK2/3, I:R, HoI4, and more. Is there 1 Dev Team for all of them, or 1 for EACH of them, and thus the company is paying for 5+ different Dev Teams, for basically the exact same code 5+ times with a different skin.

What's more, you're all assuming that the Dev for, say, EU4, ONLY gets paid by money made with EU4. This is flatout wrong. The Company, Paradox, gets paid by ALL of their games, and from that pool of money, they pay their employees. So even if 1 game fails horrible or sells cheap DLCs, it can still exist based on the Success of other games. This is how EA still exists as a company, people refuse to buy the more Predatory games, but then a 'good' game comes, such as SW: Fallen Order, which makes a lot of money and EA takes that money to fund more Predatory games. It's the same as how Youtube still exists even tho it's a netloss in money, it has Google feeding it money from other sources that make money for google.

So even if EU4's DLCs were lower, doesn't mean the pay to the Devs would get impacted. Cause if you believe that, and follow the logic in the posts above, then the Company should have cut the EU4 Dev Team many years ago when less people bought enough to pay them. And yet, they are still here.

Plus we don't even know if they sit down, 5 days a week, and actually WORK to create DLCs. With the lack of features and polish that even a single mod maker, can make faster, better, and less buggy in a few WEEKS that it takes an ENTIRE Dev Team 6+ months to do WORSE. Then are the actually worth their Salery? Are they actually working? Or do they only work for a month every 5 months to crank out the DLCs?

The Quality of DLCs doesn't match up to actual WORK by a Dev Team, unless they are really, really, and I do mean REALLLLY slow and screwing arround and not working 99% of the time they should be.

Let's just both agree perception of DLC quality is highly subjective and neither your nor I can credibly say someting about the workload it should take.

Nobody assumed they are working only for EU4. There is a certain full-time equivalents put into a project and that translates into salary costs along many other costs.

Anyway, I really don't get what you are trying to do here? Are you trying to create facts based on ... nothing ... to conclude you almost owe cheaper DLCs?

The price label will solve itself as people will either buy it (and future products) or not.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
But I have a question. Paradox has many games, a lot of them very simular with very minor tweaks. Sellaris, EU4, CK2/3, I:R, HoI4, and more. Is there 1 Dev Team for all of them, or 1 for EACH of them, and thus the company is paying for 5+ different Dev Teams, for basically the exact same code 5+ times with a different skin.

They have a dev team for each game, yes. And people flow between those dev teams along with the shifting needs of the games. So a game like EU4 that "only" needs DLC will have a reduced staff, as they don't need the type of competencies required to build the game in the first place. It is also a reason why they like to do the graphics DLC, as they give their model artists something to do when the programmers work on getting the systems and code to function right. It is also why many games today have day 1 DLC - it gives the development team something to do when the main game is going through QA or the game is off to publishers/platform holders for approval. During that time they can't add new stuff to the base game (it needs to be locked for testing/certification), so they work on whatever they can get done in time for day 1. Sometimes this contents is sold, sometimes it is given away for free along with the launch patch to boost sales - depending on company practices. A lot of the time you hear internet rage about it being cut from the main game, because people don't understand that it takes time from a game is done in development until it is allowed to be sold.

So even if EU4's DLCs were lower, doesn't mean the pay to the Devs would get impacted. Cause if you believe that, and follow the logic in the posts above, then the Company should have cut the EU4 Dev Team many years ago when less people bought enough to pay them. And yet, they are still here.

Make no mistake - if the EU4 DLC stops being able to recoup the cost of making it, Paradox will not continue developing it. This is basically video-games 101 and I can't believe you have not seen this happen before. This is why studios like EA are so aggressive about shutting down major online games if they flop. Something like Anthem costs a ton of money in servers and support to keep running, so when the game failed to attract a sufficient playerbase and people stopped buying the game, it turned into a financial liability pretty fast. As their image is already tarnished and the number of people who would get angry about it closing was small, they cut their losses and ran.

Luckily something like EU4 costs little to nothing for Paradox to keep up on Steam, but they will definitely not continue making content for it if they think it won't at least break even. They love their games, but they also have employees to think off. They can take some risks, like Imperator, but making content that no one buys is just a vanity project. Victoria II is beloved by the community, but I think even the forumites realize that new DLC for such as old game would sell pretty poorly, even with all the love from fans and devs.

Plus we don't even know if they sit down, 5 days a week, and actually WORK to create DLCs. With the lack of features and polish that even a single mod maker, can make faster, better, and less buggy in a few WEEKS that it takes an ENTIRE Dev Team 6+ months to do WORSE. Then are the actually worth their Salery? Are they actually working? Or do they only work for a month every 5 months to crank out the DLCs?

The Quality of DLCs doesn't match up to actual WORK by a Dev Team, unless they are really, really, and I do mean REALLLLY slow and screwing arround and not working 99% of the time they should be.

They are a publicly traded software company, not a family farm. If they thought they could hire better/faster coders and more skilled developers, they would. Again - making mods on existing code is different than writing completely new code (that is specifically made mod friendly, by the way). Something like MEIOU and Taxes is super impressive, but has also been worked on since 2007. It has an active development team of 26 people and is actively absorbing other mods and their contents to grow - it was not made by one person in 7 days.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
I don't know if this was brought up yet(I did search brielfy), but without some sort of free trial, I don't see why any new player would consider paying for a subscription to a game with such a well known, large learning curve.
Personally I avoid subscriptions for just about anything when possible, as you generally end up paying more in the long run. I feel this would be the case for most players with EU4 - Either you spend tons of time with the game, making the subscription overall more expensive than purchasing the dlc on sale, or you don't spend enough time on the game to really need dlc in the first place.
I could be wrong though, but I just don't see why someone would willingly pay for a subscription for a single game when there are other options. Usually games that have subscriptions(mmos) don't have other choices. I guess this does somewhat depend on the actual cost of the subscription though. I feel most people(including me) are assuming something near the price of a typical mmo subscription.
 
I don't know if this was brought up yet(I did search brielfy), but without some sort of free trial, I don't see why any new player would consider paying for a subscription to a game with such a well known, large learning curve.
Personally I avoid subscriptions for just about anything when possible, as you generally end up paying more in the long run. I feel this would be the case for most players with EU4 - Either you spend tons of time with the game, making the subscription overall more expensive than purchasing the dlc on sale, or you don't spend enough time on the game to really need dlc in the first place.
I could be wrong though, but I just don't see why someone would willingly pay for a subscription for a single game when there are other options. Usually games that have subscriptions(mmos) don't have other choices. I guess this does somewhat depend on the actual cost of the subscription though. I feel most people(including me) are assuming something near the price of a typical mmo subscription.

I don't think you're wrong on the contrary. Making the base game free like today CK2 and have a subscribing offer for it's "full DLC" version would make sense.
It would make even more sense if we are not so far from EU5, but that's speculation.

Even if i would prefer having a "Studio sub" than a "One game sub". I might be wrong but i'm not really sure they would hit that much of an audience with a "One game sub".
 
Last edited:
  • 1
Reactions:
upload_2020-3-26_11-7-35.png


It's there. A bit too present if you ask me...
 
So how does it work? Do you get all the DLC once you hit a $ amount or get points to permabuy some dlc?

Or is it just indefinite subscription that corps love?