Experimentation

[BjornB]

I'm back! Happy to see there hasn't been many pitchforks and guillotines being assembled while I slept

From what I can gather the main concerns with this whole thing are the following:
1. You are worried that we are looking to start doing subscriptions only (not only for EU, but for more future titles)
2. You are disappointed that we still haven't permanently lowered the prices of old content instead, as you feel this would be the preferred route to lower the entry threshold
3. Subscriptions changes the way you own your games
4. Not really related to this particular topic, but still iterated a lot: Concerns with how we've handled updates in the past (quality of expansions and what's paid/free)

My thoughts on the above:
1. Seems nothing I say will ease your mind about this, so I'll resort to my standard thing of we'll prove ourselves with actions instead of sweet talking. I hope you won't be disappointed.
2. A valid opinion indeed. But a lot of the discussions around it is based in pure speculations to be honest. I appreciate your feedback from your experience buying our stuff (thank you so much for that btw, I sometimes feel this gets lost in the discussions. But we are considering ourselves extremely lucky to have such a passionate and devoted group of people buying and playing our games <3), but I think that our discussions would be way more productive if speculations about the economic realities behind what we do was left out of the conversation instead of being accepted as facts and used as a foundation for further discussions. So for the sake of the quality of the discussion, please don't present speculations as truths, and take other posts presenting economics with a grain of salt. Sadly I can't talk about our financial results as we are a publicly traded company, and it's not really my field of expertise. But I know enough to know what's speculations and what's facts.
3. This I really can't say anything about. It's very much a viable concern and it's just a fact of subscription models. I guess it will just be a downside of it that can only be considered in relation to possible upsides, hopefully with the latter overtaking the former.
4. We've admitted that we've made poor decisions in the past, and we'll probably make a few more going forward. All I can say is that we hear you and we are really trying to improve going forward.

 

[BjornB]

Well, I'm one of the few people that got affected by this little update sadly. Whenever I launch the game, the game crashes after the logo screen appears. I had to roll back to 1.28.3 like some of the others in the technical help forum. So, it not affecting the players went out of the window.

I don't think I'm a paranoid guy either and do think I count as a long time supporter of PDS/X titles. However, I do feel you're deliberately vague about this still. What exactly could you be testing that would be relevant to the overall inquiry? You can already see who owns what DLC. You've already added notifications about what DLC would enrich your experience for specific tags or regions. You already get data based on what tags are most popular to play as, which idea groups people prefer to take etc. Aka, the possibility to extract data from the players is vast already. What data could you be looking for and through what means that weren't available yet?

Is it even legal to subject an entire playerbase without permission to such tests while providing so little information?

I'm not mad, but I am disappointed it did affect my game as I can't play it (and I have to host/stream a multiplayer game on sunday. Fingers crossed the issues are fixed before then) and a little suspicious about the overall vagueness. I don't mind if someone needs to get real technical here, but I do think the player base is owned more of an explanation.

I would like to suggest that you find a willing group for such a test in the future, but I figure such a small group would not be sufficient for the data you're looking for?

I have no idea what may be the cause of this issue for you, and I'm sorry it happened. The stuff added with the patch shouldn't have any such effects, and it doesn't for the vast majority of players :/ Please submit a ticket through support.paradoxplaza.com

"I would like to suggest that you find a willing group for such a test in the future..." - This is pretty much what we are doing. Not sure how you envision this will be going down?

 

[Alfray Stryke]

I think if it hadn't started with a cryptic message from Johan that amounted to " we are doing something, but pay no mind to what it is, just trust us", the flip out factor would not have been so big, but ok.

Bjorn is not Johan?

 

[BjornB]

I appreciate that you're trying to clear things up BjornB, but I'm disappointed that it is necessary in the first place.
You're always quite transparent about everything and now you come up with this vague announcement, which sounds to me as: 'We're doing something bad, but we're not telling you what it is'

Only when everybody is pissed off you decide to explain yourself. That's why I'm disappointed, I didn't expect something like this from PDX. (I'm referring to the way of communication, not to subscription model)
...

The reason for the vagueness is because the tests are rendered pretty useless if people know everything beforehand before being exposed to it. We fully expected everyone to have the full picture within hours from the test actually starting. But we would have preferred it if we could have a few hours of people "going in blind". We botched that obviously But we didn't try to do this out of malice, just to get better test data.

...

So that begs the question: how harmful to the bottom line would gradually reducing DLC prices really be?
That, of course, comparing to the potential new customers brought in which, not only would be paying for the game upfront, but would also expand the playerbase to buy future expansions at full price.

Just some food for thought.

This is a can of worms that I'm not so keen on opening. But lower prices does not necessarily translate into increased sales. Thus lower price in most cases will translate into less money which is a problem (I will not pretend it isn't an important factor).

There's a reason contracts exists. It is to ensure both parties agree on the words given and cannot retract on it, while everything said outside of it has no legal value. If needed, add to the EULA that the DLC model shall not be impacted, so it becomes binding, but this wouldn't cover future titles anyway.

When you have dealt with companies like EA or Bethesda, suffice to say that an announcement made by a community manager are of little value, even when the individual is respected for his job (because you are. Community manager isn't exactly the less stressful job ever). Ultimately, you are not the one making the decision, you are only communicating what is told by and to the higher up. I want to have confidence in you, as an individual, but this is negociating the future of a product with a company here.

That said, your company doesn't have the ill reputation of those two listed above, so hope that this confidence is well placed remains, there's still that.

Yeah, you are right that it's decisions being made way over my head. But you shouldn't underestimate the value leadership puts onto Community Sentiment. Sometimes there are financial considerations that take precedence, ofc.

 

[BjornB]

The current Humble Bundle seems to contradict your assessment.

Humble Bundles are usually not offered to make a profit for the company.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

That is being picky.

Apart one free unit, and I don't usually buy DLCs just to get new units unless they are part of a larger DLC, they are making NO CHANGES to the ways that you can acquire DLCs, and are just making it easier for new users to get into the game without having to spend a lot of money up front.

Currently I see the cosmetic reward for subscribing the same as the cosmetic reward for owning both EUIV and Imperator, but am keeping a close eye as I'm hoping this won't go badly.

 

[BjornB]

Going with that mentality, it's not an economic fact that subscription will have the intended effect either. You can spend months arguing over which model would be more profitable, but you're, at best, working with projections that rely entirely on consumers to prove you right or wrong. Pointing something out as speculation as a cause for discarding would, hence, apply to subscription model as well.

That, and the "lower old DLC prices", aside from being vastly more popular a solution, are not the only one presented. Bundling has been considered very little up to now, on top of the several other suggestions.

I'm not saying that it's wrong to think that lowering the prices is what you, as a customer, would think is best. What I'm opposing is speculations about the sales performance of certain content and doing X would make more money and state it as a fact. It's not limited to this thread or recent times. It's something that's always been going on, and it's unfortunate when these speculations turn into "facts" further into the discussion. I've seen it happen plenty of times. I have no problems with arguments about how our actions affect you personally however. Those are facts.

 

[BjornB]

And about that unit model:
It will not be subscriber exclusive. Most likely it will be included in the next expansion, but we might consider other options as well. In the spirit of transparency: It was considered as exclusive content at first, but it has been decided against since then. Go ahead and bring out the pitchforks if you like. It was a poor idea and that's why it was retracted.

//Edited as I felt this should be it's own post and not attached to a reply to something else

 

[BjornB]

... The more this thread continue the more muddy it becomes.
Is that really hard to see?

Please tell me what is still muddy. I'm trying to unmuddy things the best I can here

 

[BjornB]

Any other thing you might want to mention or we dig it up more by ourselves?
Another thread as an official statement on whats going on so far would help you I guess.

Not that I can think of. Like I said, we would have preferred for the whole picture to be visible before having to discuss details. I'm not sure in what way keeping things under wraps would in any way benefit the actual subscription service? I know that several of you believe this is out of malice in some way, but soon all of this would be revealed no matter what.

 

[BjornB]

Wait what? Source?

This is hardly a secret. But I think it can be overestimated how far down a CEO's involvement in specific projects go.

https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/en/paradox-interactive-to-strengthen-team-with-new-ceo/

 

[Alfray Stryke]

The profit-motive is the only reason companies do anything.

And that is one of the fundamental problems with capitalism in a nutshell

 

[Johan]

There you go, do this. Forgive my English, but F off with subscription MMO bull.... I hate being impolite, but this is a good old slap in the face.

Why is it a slap in your face to offer you access to ALL dlc for X money per month?

Is it somehow worse than insisting on you paying for them all first?

 

[BjornB]

Please remember that what we are doing right now is a test.

Some people have been requesting a statement on our plan for this, but there is none. Our plan is to run this test and see how it works out before thinking what this could mean for the future.

This thread is also getting a bit too long and things are starting to go in circles a bit, so please prioritize using agree and disagree on previous posts rather than repeating what has already been said. This way your feedback will be much easier to process. Thank you!

And as always. We appreciate your passion for this 7 year old game, it's invaluable to us. But please try to keep a constructive tone, thank you!