Competing against a well financed, successful company is extremely difficult. For a new competitor, beating them with better ideas is one of the hardest things to do, since the successful company is years, decades, ahead in that specific thinking space. They are successful because they have already beaten previous competition by trying out and vetting existing ideas. They are not rookies. They are the last man standing. They know what ideas are financially feasible, but more importantly they know many ideas that are money sinks and dead ends. The new company does not and those money sinks are financial land mines they must navigate around or die an early death. The odds are against them as there are many bad ideas for each good one.
Winning in this environment is sometimes done through an overwhelming technological advantage. Tech is what makes industries leap forward, but usually it is the existing winners that get the tech first, as inventors or purchasing the inventing company, and use it to strengthen their dominance. That is not always the case. Microsoft and Apple are both examples for those of us who remember when they were nobodies. Tech is one of the strongest methods of bringing down the current winners in an industry, but that level of tech is rare. A tech advantage in this game could be everything from UI, optimization of computing, AI, upgrade methods, more assessible modding, better visuals, player aids, better MP, hiring away vital brain capital from the competitor, etc... Everything that makes things easier and better without raising costs is what a tech could be considered in a business sense.
*EDIT: As
@Vlad123 said below, Game Play is paramount to a game. The expertise to create it is a level of tech, in the sense I use it here, and cannot be ignored by those who would compete.
Winning against the most successful company in an industry can occur when the winning company has misinterpreted what made it successful and sticks to a plan that does not make customers happy. Not making customers happy eventually leads to making customers unhappy. It is not easy for a successful company to see this change as they are the winning company and their revenue grows, since there is no other competition. I am not saying this is happening to Paradox today, I am just saying this scenario exists and is a threat.
Such a scenario happened many years ago between two companies called Sony and Blizzard. Sony ran the most successful MMORPG in the world called Everquest. Nothing else compared with Everquest, but over time the players wanted fixes and changes to the game. Sony practically coined the term, "Working as intended" while denying these requests. Instead, Sony chose to produce new content while making very few changes to the base game play.
Blizzard, seeing the success of Everquest, decided to build its own MMORPG. Blizzard ran into the first and second problems above. Everquest already had the best idea and the technology did not exist to beat Sony through a leap above. Blizzard developers, realizing their current efforts would not work, started monitoring the forums of Everquest looking for insights. Instead of insights they found the forums were full of requests for features that were being shut down with the dreaded "Working as intended" response and players unhappy replies. Players even revolted in game, by staging protests in the game world, involving hundreds of players at a time. A few years later Blizzard launched World of Warcraft.
For those who played Everquest, it was obvious that World of Warcraft was a very close knock-off of Everquest. The commands in the game were identical, down to the shortcuts, the player communications were identical, the UI was almost identical, the game world was very much alike, the game play was so close that an Everquest player did not require a minute to learn how to play World of Warcraft. I know, I experienced all of it. Even today I wonder how Blizzard did not get sued to bankruptcy, but obviously they covered their legal flanks well.
World of Warcraft quickly dethroned Everquest and eventually eclipsed its player base by, I do not think I am exaggerating, by a factor of twenty or more.
So, there are ways HOI4 could lose to competition, but the advantage is with Paradox. They almost have to give away their leadership by getting behind in tech or disregarding customer wants to a negligent degree, like Sony did. That is a tall order, indeed, especially in the immediate future.
