Hello everyone and welcome back to another development diary for Europa Universalis 4. With The Cossacks released, we'll now be getting back to non-feature related development diaries for a while. Before I start yammering on, however, I thought I'd let you know that we're currently working on a hotfix for 1.14, due to be released soon(tm). In addition to the hotfix, we're also working on a larger bugfixing patch (as we always do after an expansion) that currently has no decided ETA.
Since the hot topic the day seems to be the pricing of The Cossacks, I thought I would go ahead and address the bugbear in the room by explaining how we (we being EU4 specifically) price expansions.
What's in a price tag?
A number of comments have emerged along the lines of 'Why is Cossacks, which has the same amount of features as Common Sense, $/€5 more expensive?" The answer to that question, quite simply, is that they do not have the same amount and size of features.
When designing an expansion, we make a plan for the number and size of features that will be in said expansion. We break up features according to the following classifications:
Mega - A mega feature that represents a very large time investment and a major change in how the game can be played, such as introducing new game modes. The Nation Designer and Random New World are the only mega features to date.
Major - A major feature that takes a large time investment and has a large impact on the game. Examples of these include Estates from Cossacks, Subject Interactions from Common Sense and the Army Planner from Art of War.
Medium - A medium-sized feature that takes about an average time investment and usually has a fairly large impact on the game. Examples include Development from Common Sense, Nahuatl mechanics from El Dorado and Horde Unity from Cossacks.
Minor - A small feature that can be implemented quickly and generally has limited impact on the game. Examples include Threaten War from Cossacks, Return Province from Common Sense and Selling Ships from Art of War.
We make sure that each expansion has a good mix of major, medium and minor features (with a mega feature instead of several major ones in CoP and ED) and then sum up the total number of features where mega features are worth 10 points, major features are worth 6 points, medium features are worth 3 points and minor features 1.5 points. This is then divided by price to create the actual value, which we ensure stays very close to the value for money in previous expansions (our highest 'value for money' expansion is Wealth of Nations owing to the low price tag, but it's only 5% more value for money than The Cossacks, for example). We never factor free content into the price - while Art of War came with a mega map rework, this had nothing to do with its $20 price tag, and neither did the Random New World rework influence the Cossacks price tag. We set our price purely according to the actual features you are getting for paying for them.
For those still not convinced, I'll make a quick comparison between Cossacks and Common Sense. Here are the 'expansion features' lists for each:
Common Sense vs The Cossacks
In total, Common Sense had 2 major features (Subject Interactions, Parliaments), 4 medium (Protestantism, Development, Buddhism, Devotion) and 6 minor (Free Cities, Remove Electorate, Pause Westernization, Dismiss Advisor, Government Ranks, Return Province) features. This gives a total of 33 points, or 2.2 points per $.
In total, The Cossacks had 2 major (Diplomatic Feedback, Estates), 7 medium (Advanced Change Culture, Build Directly to Army, Improved Espionage, Horde Unity, New Subject Interactions, Native Policies, Tengri) and 9 minor (Name Your Heir, Victory Cards, Concede Colonial Area, Distribute Spoils, Construct in Subjects, Threaten War, Forced Migration, Declare Colonial War, Raze) features. This gives a total of 46.5 points, or 2.32 points per $.
One final thing I wanted to mention is that The Cossacks, in addition to being our expansion with the single most paid content (Art of War had 3 major, 4 medium, 10 minor for a total of 2.25 points per $), also had a huge amount of free content, even if you leave out the RNW rework. The region rework took about a month and the interface reworks in country view and the interface rework to macro builder and country view took weeks and weeks of artist and coder time. In terms of actual team time spent on it, the Art of War map changes were far cheaper, as much of the work was done by our beta testers and map modders. Just because something isn't immediately visible on the map does not mean it did not take hard work on our part.
I think that pretty much wraps it up. You're of course free to think that our pricing model is wrong for one reason or another, but I hope you should at least be able to understand where we're coming from, and that we're not just setting our prices because we decided that we wanted to hit you for an extra five dollars this time around.
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