How Paradox treats its customers

[Anemetius]

Dear devs, do you really think it's fair to demand half the price of the full game for DLC (Overlord) that is full of bugs and flaws? For a while I was ready to buy, but thankfully the reviews on STEAM talked me out of it. Start testing your products before releasing them. I'm not going to pay for your mistakes.

 

[Bloodbat]

Dear devs, do you really think it's fair to demand half the price of the full game for DLC (Overlord) that is full of bugs and flaws? For a while I was ready to buy, but thankfully the reviews on STEAM talked me out of it. Start testing your products before releasing them. I'm not going to pay for your mistakes.

If they're going to make us do QA they could at least do an official beta, that way people who want to play early know it's going to be broken

 

[happyman40]

Dear devs, do you really think it's fair to demand half the price of the full game for DLC (Overlord) that is full of bugs and flaws? For a while I was ready to buy, but thankfully the reviews on STEAM talked me out of it. Start testing your products before releasing them. I'm not going to pay for your mistakes.

You do realise that the core of the update is free and automatically part of your base game update? You only have to pay to unlock specific functions / options if you really want them, but essentially most of the mechanics / quality of life updates and features are free. Like all updates and on going software development there will be bugs and balance that require adjusting.

As far as the price of DLC goes I think Paradox has struck the right balance. Release a base game at a reasonable price (waaaay below triple A pricing) then pay for the cost of continued development and features through non-mandatory DLC.

Everyone benefits from the development for free and if you want ALL the flavour / features of an update then you can pay else the game keeps getting additions and improvements you don't have to pay for.

This allows paradox to keep investing in interesting games that might not initially warrant the investment to risk developing a completely fleshed out 4X title and having to price it a premium to re-coup costs.

Most of the paradox titles I own I have paid more for in the long run with DLC's but have play soooo many hours in them that the average cost of gaming per hour is very low. Like I have only played 556 hours of Stelaris - Lets say the base game and ALL DLC cost $200 - that's 35cents per hour! That's pretty good value. Hearts of Iron 4 is like 995hrs and EUIV is only a meazily 335hrs. I don't hesitate or worry if I am going to get my moneys worth with a Paradox title.

So yeah. its fair to ask half price of the game for what you get in long run. You can just as easily get most of the benefits for free and buy the DLC when its discounted.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

I thought this was going to be a positive thread, tbh.

There are some release bugs, some more egregious than others, but they've publicly acknowledged them and are working to fix them. That's way more than most companies their size do nowadays.

Vassals are wonky and aren't working exactly as they should, but aside from the rebels bug, the release is playable. I'll probably hold off my weekend campaign until next weekend, but that's a mild inconvenience. I'm sure the big issues will be fixed by early next week.

So yeah, not the best launch, but it was okay + they're upfront with the issues. Can't complain too much about it.

 

[happyman40]

I agree with you but this doesn't address his post. He wasn't talking about the price itself, he just doesn't want to pay for a broken product and he's right.

But he's not being forced to pay and he's getting it mostly for free. If he doesn't want the update because he feels it's not tested enough and has bugs, them he can opt out of the update until he feels its ready. Not sure what there is to complain about other than having an expectation that all updates will never have bugs. To say the game is "broken" is a massive over exaggeration. You can say you feel disapointed that "so and so" seems unbalanced or "this aspect" is not working well - but it's not broken in the general sense of how the average reasonable person might use the term

 

[hangry]

Is the new revolt system great? No, but a lot of complains come from people who conquer primitives too early, don't declare martial law and don't resettle their own pops or conquer 20 planets in one war and wonder why they can't control the situation.

 

[Darroth]

but aside from the rebels bug, the release is playable

Not true. I can't continue playing without a hotfix.

 

[currylambchop]

There are some release bugs, some more egregious than others, but they've publicly acknowledged them and are working to fix them. That's way more than most companies their size do nowadays.

Heck, it's better than every major expansion release since Utopia. (not counting species/story packs since they don't have much changes, ergo far fewer bugs)

 

[Silens]

The outrage at how MegaCorp was released was understandable. Compared to that things are far better this time, as a) Overlord isn't half as buggy as MegaCorp and b) we're not even 48 hrs into the release, give them a bit of time to fix the bugs.

On a side note, I prefer the devs attempting deep and complex changes with a certain risk for bugs to shallow and cautious, but bug-free expansions.

 

[currylambchop]

The outrage at how MegaCorp was released was understandable. Compared to that things are far better this time, as a) Overlord isn't half as buggy as MegaCorp and b) we're not even 48 hrs into the release, give them a bit of time to fix the bugs.

On a side note, I prefer the devs attempting deep and complex changes with a certain risk for bugs to shallow and cautious, but bug-free expansions.

how much do u wanna bet i go back in time and look at utopia release date, and there are also thousands of people complaining?

 

[Northernwwater]

Yes, there are bugs! My neighbor declared a war even though there was a very clear truce between the two empires. Never saw that before.

 

[Skyfus]

Dear devs, do you really think it's fair to demand half the price of the full game for DLC (Overlord) that is full of bugs and flaws? For a while I was ready to buy, but thankfully the reviews on STEAM talked me out of it. Start testing your products before releasing them. I'm not going to pay for your mistakes.

I get that it's annoying, and I also wish they'd start back up their player volunteer program (just look at my forum signature); but they're pretty consistent at un-screwing their DLC over time, and CK3/Stellaris teams do seem genuinely surprised/apologetic when their release is absolutely scuffed.

The new features may be broken, but the game is still playable. If you really want to get on a soapbox about PDX and counter-productive marketing/design decisions, you should look at EUIV's Leviathan release. Tons of lag and crashes for a lot of people, people who could run it still had to contend with a lot of weird/broken AI and there were some features added which worked fine but just... made 0 sense. Like, imagine the new planetary ascension tier thing they added with the unity update, except it actually makes your planets weaker and there's another option where you can just increase your empire sprawl threshold for less cost.

On top of all of that, Leviathan was so absolutely botched that they ended up pulling people off Imperator to triage their cash cow. Imperator was actually reaching an enjoyable, playable state after the big rework and there were sizeable MP communities forming around it. Now it's permanently shelved. So many things had to go wrong, from internal push to release an unfinished mess, to not communicating at all with whatever volunteer testers remained.

Overlord release is aight. If it takes them a couple weeks to fix, I can just focus more on my final exams. Hopefully this is the final kick to start back up the beta VTs.

 

[grommile]

Not true. I can't continue playing without a hotfix.

While that is a serious problem and needs fixing, "the release is playable" is not the same thing as "zero people are encountering gameplay-blocking bugs".

We're not in the realms of EU3 5.0 (the initial release version of the Divine Wind expansion pack), where, among other flaws:

• EU3.exe was compiled for an unnecessarily high tier of CPU instruction set architecture, so wouldn't run on a lot of PCs that were otherwise perfectly capable of satisfying its performance requirements.
• the game was guaranteed to crash when Ming escaped Celestial Empire government (and there was a fairly good chance of Ming doing so).

 

[SectorsAreOkay]

For people living in relatively affluent countries, I don't get the outrage over prices. Dollar/euro/whatever per hour or gameplay, even with bugs, is at a far better ratio than going to a movie theater or a sports game or any number of other activities that cost money.

To be honest, if you don't feel the DLC is patched enough then don't buy it until it is. These are complex games and bugs are inevitable. I've seen few games of this level of complexity that don't have a lot of bugs when an update is released. The only one I can think of is factorio and they are the clear exception. But as other posters have said, PDX does release patches to fix the bugs at release, so just wait a few weeks until those patches have come out and then buy. Pretty simple, really. Screaming into the void about it isn't going to make them go away.

 

[SectorsAreOkay]

While that is a serious problem and needs fixing, "the release is playable" is not the same thing as "zero people are encountering gameplay-blocking bugs".

We're not in the realms of EU3 5.0 (the initial release version of the Divine Wind expansion pack), where, among other flaws:

• EU3.exe was compiled for an unnecessarily high tier of CPU instruction set architecture, so wouldn't run on a lot of PCs that were otherwise perfectly capable of satisfying its performance requirements.
• the game was guaranteed to crash when Ming escaped Celestial Empire government (and there was a fairly good chance of Ming doing so).

My favorite was Stellaris 1.6, which was supposedly a bug fix release. Wiz printed out like 30 pages of release notes to show how much work went in. And then when it was released, the game was in a worse state than before. Even so, we still eventually got to 1.9, which was pretty solid.

 

[akya]

Since Megacorp I think every DLC has been broken when introduced. Then community does the QA and bug testing and then in a cpl of months game gets to a stable stage, which only lasts till the next DLC. Best time to play stellaris is 2 months after the DLC release. I shouldn't really have bought Overlords just yet.

 

[SectorsAreOkay]

Since Megacorp I think every DLC has been broken when introduced. Then community does the QA and bug testing and then in a cpl of months game gets to a stable stage, which only lasts till the next DLC. Best time to play stellaris is 2 months after the DLC release. I shouldn't really have bought Overlords just yet.

Since before megacorp. That one was just particularly bad. I can't think of a single update, including the original release, that didn't gave bugs, flaws and negative feedback.

 

[Ludaire]

Ooh, when did the standard price of games drop to $40? I feel like it's been $50-60 my entire life! Awesome! Time to go buy some games for cheap!

Also wow, whichever company you do QA for must have stunning levels of quality. I'm sure most game testers would kill to be testing games at the level of quality Paradox has on release. Normally the time between prototype and a bit before the release, the game is hardly even recognizable! Having a game that's on the buggier end of release quality sounds like the heaven most people imagine gaming QA to be.

To be more serious, I understand the frustration with a game choosing a balance between polish and speed/features/etc. that's different from what you prefer. I also often wish that they'd spend a bit more time or scope back features a bit in favor of higher levels of polish. However, Paradox's price point is well within the norm for expansions for video games, and they provide an unusually large amount of the work that goes into expansions for free as part of the update to the base game. The level of polish on release day also hasn't drastically reduced or changed since the earlier days of Stellaris. Unless this is your first expansion, I don't understand why anyone would be surprised. This release has frankly been one of the more stable in my experience. I've only run into one major bug so far, and the improvements have been pretty great.

 

[Crysantos]

Dear devs, do you really think it's fair to demand half the price of the full game for DLC (Overlord) that is full of bugs and flaws? For a while I was ready to buy, but thankfully the reviews on STEAM talked me out of it. Start testing your products before releasing them. I'm not going to pay for your mistakes.

I haven't encountered more than 1 bug and while some mechanics need tweaking I really enjoy what I paid for (and I consider the pricetag to be okay for the additions). This feels far from a day 1 test and I think Paradox is actually doing a good job trying to fix bugs, QoL things (e.g. small fleet spam got dealt with this update) and even giving old paid content more value.

I understand frustration but highlight what you'd expect or what in particular turns you off - that will help them more than a rant about a product you haven't even bought.

 

[shadowclasper]

Thread like this pops every time paradox drops a new expac, and no doubt it will someday be justified for stellaris, like it is for a lot of paradox's other grand strats... But this ain't it yet