I would like to see a change in Colossal Order's PR

[lrbaumard]

So I am hugely passionate about C:S, more so than most other games, but of all the PDX published titles it has the least community interaction in terms of its development. And this really bugs me.
An example: between July the 5th and October the 11th there were zero official announcements/ diaries etc. If we compare this to PDX studios e.g. EU4 a now old game, there were I think around 16 different diaries/ updates where they talked about what they are working on, what they are thinking about r.e. the state of the game etc
I know PDX studios have dedicated team time to PR, but i think this has added to the massive success and fan followings of the games. Colossal order isn't a small, low budget team anymore, C:S has sold millions of copies, excluding the DLC, they must be able to afford some development time to write a dev diary every 2/3/4 weeks.

So would i really really LIKE to see. I think bare minimum, a monthly diary talking about what the team are working on, what they think is going well, isn't going well. If you don't want to talk about a new expansion thats not yet announced thats fine; theres plenty else to talk about. Examples i'm sure people would find fascinating: mod support; C:S systems use over time; how to use the traffic system effectively looking at how it was designed; why some decisions i..e not to add MP (which i agree with btw) were made etc. etc.

I don't think from a fan or sales perspective, 8 dev diaries on the 8 days before release are a good use of PR time; its too short a time to either build hype or even allow input back into the system. I know examples where the PDX studio team have talked about something in a dev diary, people have given feedback and it's been changed.

I made a post about this a number of months ago, talking less indepth about this exact issue, and there was some feedback from CO on it, but i've not seen much change. You have an extremely passionate fanbase and I look forward to updates on this game more than any PDX game except HOI4. I think its a shame that the community is left in the dark for so much of the time.

 

[co_emmi]

I am happy to hear ideas what you would like us to write about! We can't usually talk what we are working on before it has been announced so honestly I've been a bit out of ideas this autumn what to write

In the between of the dev diaries we follow the forums and reddit and comment on some threads.

 

[lrbaumard]

I am happy to hear ideas what you would like us to write about! We can't usually talk what we are working on before it has been announced so honestly I've been a bit out of ideas this autumn what to write

In the between of the dev diaries we follow the forums and reddit and comment on some threads.

Thanks for the quick reply emmi (the @ wasn't working for me there), maybe you guys could talk to some of the PDX community teams and see how they talk about their unannounced content/ how to talk around it?
Another idea is the Bannerlord 2 dev diaries, they have very little to no new content shown, but they talk about interesting things around the development.

I do see quite a few posts on the forum about, is the game development finished, and i think that comes from the month long silences. Commenting on posts is great, but going through every thread marked with a developer response is not an easy way to get information, and can't be linked to reddit easily.
Obviously i know nothing about sales but it seems to me a more sensible approach to announce an expansion a couple months out then slowly build up a content picture. I really didn't like the week long dev diary cycle before release. Obviously i loved that it was out so quickly, but it would have been out on the same time no matter if it was announced a couple weeks or a couple months ago
Again though, it would have allowed more community input during the design process.
Personally for me for example, this expansion is something i really wanted, and it ticks all my boxes. However something i'm not mad on is the UI showing the product flows from raw to processed. Whether thats a wider feeling I have no idea.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

@co_martsu did use to post regularly a while ago ( was it called word of the week? i can't remember). i do miss those. does the currency have a name yet, btw?

 

[Timmysoboy]

I strongly agree with the sentiment on this thread. Hearing more about industries early, especially, would have allowed significantly greater audience interaction. More importantly, it could have allowed the fan base to communicate its wishes (for me, the multi-station freight line was high on the list).

I remember a thread a while ago that hinted the bottleneck on dev diaries made by CO came from PDX. If this is the case, I would love to see PDX loosen the reigns, or worst case scenario a CS2 published in house by CO.

 

[RHKINC]

A weekly mods of the week rundown similar to what... the... Planet Coaster team do might be a way to tease us about what might be coming without ever revealing information. Paradox famously teases us in a million directions without ever actually telling us whats coming. But it may be a way to fill in the time because I definitely like hearing about what the developers are enjoying week to week.

It has been an interesting meta comparing CS dev diary transparency to that of PDX titles. My friends and I play several days each week and talk about it while we play; but I never feel quite as compelled to come to the forums daily/weekly like I do for the PDX titles without the dev diaries to lure me here.

I want to hear more from you... because we love you and your 'paint-a-city-simulator'.

 

[co_emmi]

Thank you for the feedback. We can try to improve with the CO words of the Week. co_martsu is so busy now days that I will be probably writing more often. Feel free to suggest topics or throw questions and I shall try to answer them

 

[lrbaumard]

co_emmi is there a picture of your face? I like knowing who is talking as I know most of the PDX staff by face
(which is quite an odd thing for a modern games company, i have 4k hours in Dota but couldn't tell you the name/ face of a single Dota developer)

 

[AndrewT]

co_emmi is there a picture of your face?

Yes, but it didn't develop

 

[prismaticmarcus]

Thank you for the feedback. We can try to improve with the CO words of the Week. co_martsu is so busy now days that I will be probably writing more often. Feel free to suggest topics or throw questions and I shall try to answer them

something about the music/radio would be nice e.g. who wrote the vanilla music or something about the development of the radio stations.

 

[co_martsu]

Colossal Order works with Paradox so that we get to focus on the game development, basically making Cities: Skylines a better game. Paradox does all the PR, marketing and distribution for the game. I have always felt that we should have a close relationship with the community to understand the hopes and dreams of our audience.

As much as we love to interact with you guys we have a few limiting factors:
- Time. Yeah, that's a bummer. We will always put the development first and we are not willing to work overtime on PR.
- Publisher. They will want to control the information and we only talk about stuff we are allowed to. We can't go announcing stuff on our own, they would kill us
- Lack of things to share. This is really something I have struggled with.

co_emmi is there a picture of your face? I like knowing who is talking as I know most of the PDX staff by face
(which is quite an odd thing for a modern games company, i have 4k hours in Dota but couldn't tell you the name/ face of a single Dota developer)

We don't share the faces of our employees on the forums like PDX who mostly work on PR does. You might get a glimpse of how we look in events/other PR related things Paradox has us doing

 

[co_emmi]

something about the music/radio would be nice e.g. who wrote the vanilla music or something about the development of the radio stations.

We don't actually develop the radio stations so we don't know much about them, but maybe @TheLetterZ from pdx could take a note of this wish!

 

[lrbaumard]

Yes, but it didn't develop

#PDXbanter

Colossal Order works with Paradox so that we get to focus on the game development, basically making Cities: Skylines a better game. Paradox does all the PR, marketing and distribution for the game. I have always felt that we should have a close relationship with the community to understand the hopes and dreams of our audience.

As much as we love to interact with you guys we have a few limiting factors:
- Time. Yeah, that's a bummer. We will always put the development first and we are not willing to work overtime on PR.
- Publisher. They will want to control the information and we only talk about stuff we are allowed to. We can't go announcing stuff on our own, they would kill us
- Lack of things to share. This is really something I have struggled with.



We don't share the faces of our employees on the forums like PDX who mostly work on PR does. You might get a glimpse of how we look in events/other PR related things Paradox has us doing

Fair enough on the faces! I met a lot of the C:S team at PDXcon so was trying to see who was who!

Do we need to bother someone in PDX PR department then? I know you say development time is a factor, but the 8 dev diaries were quite informative and full of content, would have been nice if they were spread out over a few weeks instead of days. Again i find it very odd the short time between announcement and release, can't remember last time I saw that in the games industry, though i'm thankful i can play it so quickly!

I find truth in the comments about the lack of forum activity relative to numbers of people playing can be due to the fact that without regular dev diaries, people don't really need to come to the forum. For me i don't really use the C:S forum anymore whereas until relatively recently i was very active on the HOI4 forum.
I know you are your own studio and people do forget that sometimes, but i'd like to see a request made to PDX studios to maybe change the way you can interact with the community
I can't remember off the top of my head who to @ for that, but if someone provides it i will happily @ them, and I'm sure many other people would love to see more from CO.

In terms of what to talk about I think there have been quite a lot of suggestions so far, maybe make a poll, or I can make a poll asking for suggestions?
Saying you think that dev diaries take away from the more important game development, i get that. But let me counter by saying that community interaction is very important for developing a game. I remember you (CO) saying that for Parklife, it was very much driven by the large amount of requests for features it now includes; and now its one of the most successful of all the expansions. I think the community has a lot of useful things to contribute, beyond "increase agent limits!" that you'll miss without sharing your development with us.

 

[co_martsu]

Fair enough on the faces! I met a lot of the C:S team at PDXcon so was trying to see who was who!

Do we need to bother someone in PDX PR department then? I know you say development time is a factor, but the 8 dev diaries were quite informative and full of content, would have been nice if they were spread out over a few weeks instead of days. Again i find it very odd the short time between announcement and release, can't remember last time I saw that in the games industry, though i'm thankful i can play it so quickly!

I find truth in the comments about the lack of forum activity relative to numbers of people playing can be due to the fact that without regular dev diaries, people don't really need to come to the forum. For me i don't really use the C:S forum anymore whereas until relatively recently i was very active on the HOI4 forum.
I know you are your own studio and people do forget that sometimes, but i'd like to see a request made to PDX studios to maybe change the way you can interact with the community
I can't remember off the top of my head who to @ for that, but if someone provides it i will happily @ them, and I'm sure many other people would love to see more from CO.

In terms of what to talk about I think there have been quite a lot of suggestions so far, maybe make a poll, or I can make a poll asking for suggestions?
Saying you think that dev diaries take away from the more important game development, i get that. But let me counter by saying that community interaction is very important for developing a game. I remember you (CO) saying that for Parklife, it was very much driven by the large amount of requests for features it now includes; and now its one of the most successful of all the expansions. I think the community has a lot of useful things to contribute, beyond "increase agent limits!" that you'll miss without sharing your development with us.

The announcements and release dates are always set by PDX (marketing + sales I believe). I'm sure they are analyzing different approaches/campaigns to develop them. We just write the stuff and post it when told to do so

And we do spend a lot of time on the forums reading the feedback and the suggestions, but I get how it's not something you notice. Maybe we'll take another look of the dev diaries and try to have some regular posts over here. Let's see!

 

[lrbaumard]

The announcements and release dates are always set by PDX (marketing + sales I believe). I'm sure they are analyzing different approaches/campaigns to develop them. We just write the stuff and post it when told to do so

And we do spend a lot of time on the forums reading the feedback and the suggestions, but I get how it's not something you notice. Maybe we'll take another look of the dev diaries and try to have some regular posts over here. Let's see!

Moarrrrrrrr Cities = yay

 

[Avanya]

Since it's limited what you can say about future unannounced stuff, perhaps talking about past DLCs makes sense. I'm thinking about stuff like design choice, what inspired the DLC, how you settled on the features, why some things were scrapped and things like that. A sort of look into how things come to be. I think that's super interesting to read and I could see that helping us making (even better) suggestions for features, when we also have some ideas of what you look for. Ofc course that takes some time away from your work, but I wouldn't expect something like that more than a month, maybe even just every other month. And despite not talking about future stuff it gives us the feeling that you're still around and doing stuff, since we can't see how much you lurk on the forums.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Honestly in terms of comunity engadment it wouldn't hurt for you guys to ask your Paradoxial Publisher for some advice. The regular Stellaris Dev diary is something I look forwards too all week and come back and read several times to bask in anticipation.

 

[Arko]

Definetly unfolding devdiaries over a longer time would be great. Getting one DD every day the last ten days before release and then monthes of silence is almost ridiculous, bad timing/marketing IMHO.

 

[metacritical]

Definetly unfolding devdiaries over a longer time would be great. Getting one DD every day the last ten days before release and then monthes of silence is almost ridiculous, bad timing/marketing IMHO.

the other dev diaries were more spread out. this has been the first where it was a daily thing, not sure why.

 

[Fox_NS_CAN]

For anyone interested, you can get an idea of spacing/frequency here:
https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Developer_diaries