I'm wondering if PDS doesn't find itself victim of its own success with HOI 4, having to compete with hugely popular alt-history mods, which are all free and only require the base game, while PDX needs to sell DLC to fund the ongoing development of HOI.But I do believe these kinds of development decisions come at the expense of what the Hearts of Iron series was originally meant to be about: WW2.
Let's look at some numbers:
- Estimated number of Steam users with HOI 4: between 2M and 5M as reported by SteamSpy
- Actual number of subscribers to the top 3 mods on Steam:
* Road to 56: 659,591!
* Kaiserreich: 530,363
* Old World Blues: 300,487
Obviously being a subscriber doesn't mean being an active player of the mod, but still, these numbers are impressive relative to the total user base.
Extrapolating and speculating, it's possible the population of players deeply interested in a pure WW2 game is dwindling and becoming too niche, and PDS has progressively shifted its focus to alt-history, at least in terms of content.
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