1. "Sales team" doesn't apply to this industry as much, and as such your use here is ambiguous. Do you mean Paradox as a whole?
2. Your second point is simply wrong. The person(s) that does any research or analytics reports findings and/or makes suggestions to the board/CEO. As Fred stated, at the end of the day the buck stops with him. Now if your assertion is correct, being silent or outspoken is moot as regardless Fred would shift blame.
Your subsequent paragraph, if I am to be blunt, makes me wonder what kind of experience or knowledge you have of the professional world. Simply put that children's game you cite has no bearing or relevance here. Whatever department or person who is tasked with data analytics or whatever it is called for Paradox, will make a full report to be delivered to the boss. There will be no middleman, certainly with a company the size of Paradox.
As for your phrase "in silence," just so we are clear, I am only talking about negative reviews on Steam. Posting your grievances on this forum would not typically fall under silence.
Now truth be told perhaps the negative reviews had more of an impact on the reversal than anything else, I don't know this to be true but I would not object to such a claim. However, I still lean towards being opposed to such actions. People may claim that the action has a noble intent, that of warning would-be buyers of "possible wrongdoings" but I do not buy that, I believe it is done more out of malice, a desire to hurt the other party, in this case Paradox.
Finally, to address how Paradox would know the reason for the loss of sales, negative reviews on Steam are not the only outlet. This board of course, but also Twitter. Yet even in the case of true silence, any competent company should be able to figure it out. Brief hypothetical:
Sales of game X are done 20%. The person in charge tasks "Shtan" (The CEO speaks like Sean Connery obviously) to figure out why and report to him.
Shtan first looks at metacritic scores to see if they have decreased from the previous version of the game (game X could be EU5, or DLC for HOI4). They do not.
He then looks at Steam data. Fewer people are playing the game, yet those that do own and play seem to be putting in the same amount of hours as the last version. This tells Shtan it is not the quality of the product.
Undeterred, Shtan looks at similar games. Are their numbers down? Could just be a down period for the genre. Are they up? Our consumers may be going elsewhere, so our are competitors putting out a better quality product? But the metacritic and other data doesn't confirm this.
Finally Shtan notices that sales are not down just for this one game, it is company wide. Any analyst or person familiar with business can tell you, if you struggle to sell even when you have a good product it is typically due to 2 reasons: marketing or brand problems. Marketing probably wouldn't apply here, as Paradox is established and loosing customers. So there is a brand problem, when there wasn't previously. So what changed. Shtan needs time to think about that (spoiler: it was the price increase).
