Price Increase

[fuser312]

The euro price for people in western europe have not changed afaik?

Hi

So what about us non western European fans? How can anyone justify a 100% increase in price out of blue for anything at all?

TO be frank we love paradox games we really do and yet people are bad mouthing it in recent days and writing negative reviews not because the games itself are bad (they are great tbh) but because of the recent company policies. The complaints are more targeted towards sales and marketing guys, if so many people are suddenly having issues, may be just may be its not the people but the company is at fault here and it should be a time for introspection.

I know I don't see any hope for price reversal as people generally are too arrogant (that includes me too btw to admit mistakes) and their memories are short too but still may be for future this can help.

 

[Chikanuk]

Feel free to keep baning people for disciss about you fails, PDX, you can permaban me if you want from this forum. I dont care. Anyway i will not buy anything from you anymore. You just spittle in our faces after all this "blahblahblah peoples first!" and then expect us to keep buying you luxury "much wow its new buttons on soldier pants only for 9.99%!" DLC? Haha.

You being to lazy because mod makers clean you shit. AI starving in stellaris? - Dont worry, mod will fix it! EU4 unplayable because event bug? - Nah mod will fix it. Missing buttons? - Heeeeey mooods!
And ofc because no real competition in this sort of games. Even in space 4x only amplitude studio stay in same category. So you can ignore bugs and holes in gameplay in months, because you know - people will eat it anyway. Admirals still colone yourself, ship debris still pop up on global map. This bugs here over then 1 year. 300k fallen fleet still chase 1 corvette over the galaxy. Still. Rockets suck. Still. AI still cant distinguish synths and living beings. etc. Every new patch bring more bugs. And i dont even talk about over games.
But peoples ignore it and keep buying you stuff becouse your "peoples first". I buy so much from you (shame for me). And then you do +100% price increase on every game in 1 night, w\o any discussion or warning RIGHT BEFORE steam sale.

This is the last straw, im done with you.

 

[pikachu01]

It saddens me that devs are resorting to half truths about what we could be getting from piecemeal vs full expansion DLCs.

 

[lequinow]

I never minded the DLC system, but that's mainly because I always thought they were still affordable, especially on summer/holiday sales. I know that aspect is open to critics, and it does vary from a DLC to an other (I don't own Mare Nostrum, no price ever striked me as a good deal for that one), I would've thought people generally lean towards finding them a little bit overpriced, especially on realease. As for new players, EU4 is probably the only game I have +1500h on that I simply can't recommend to anyone who doesn't already own it by some miracle.

That being said, I do feel the increase is rather steep. I understand a game being sold 20$ ten years ago isn't worth as much today, but at this magnitude the increase looks much more future proofed than just about catching up. Since I'm running on a tight budget, it basically means buying one or two less Paradox products per year. I'm a huge fan of yours, but that's not a concession I'm able to make unfortunately, which basically mean I'll put your games on hold for a few years untill my buying power catches up.

I know my imput isn't worth much considering all the data you collect through sales, but I feel like I'm probably not the only one that run on a budget to tight to support that kind of increase. Just sharing my opinion on the matter here.

EDIT: I just read Ketch's intervention and his or her analogy is on point:

I have always understood that switching to the DLC release model was an attempt to move to the (largely) annual sports action and sports sim franchise model (PCM, FIFA, FMxx, etc.). The property can be called on to generate a continual stream of revenue over time, which pays for the love given to the games. And I'm in no doubt about the love and the passion those working for PI and PDS have for their product.

Where the DLC model is problematic is that those other, mainly sports properties, give players the opportunity to come into the franchise with a 'mostly' working game every year, and incorporating the majority of previous development. Paradox games don't do that. The approach is not too far from asking players to purchase every historic version of Football Manager in order to play this years release. And you just decided to raise the prices of the historic versions.

 

[Johan]

It saddens me that devs are resorting to half truths about what we could be getting from piecemeal vs full expansion DLCs.

Huh?

I designed all eu3 & eu4 expansions. If any eu3 expansions were sold as eu4 expansions, 75% of them would be in a free patch and the paid content would have people up in arms if we charged more than 4.99

 

[trkemr]

witcher 3 game that you dont have to buy dlc every 3 months is cheaper compare to eu 4 in most of the regions.
i was okay with dlc policy before price increase my only problem was cost of content packs

 

[Sheeepie2]

I suppose I might understand if you release a very new game and it does much better than expected, then maybe the price would be a good move as the huge amount of sales would indicate that it might be too low, but increasing the price for games that are years old and still cost around £200 for the full game (including DLC) is ridiculous. Even publishers like EA reduce their prices by a lot when the game becomes a few years old (as seen with series like Battlefield, Mirror's Edge etc.)

 

[Darkath]

Let's not derail the thread, DLC policy is what it is and has no bearing on the issue at hand which is :

Increasing prices of the WHOLE catalogue, including 5 year old games and older, in countries with low purchasing power suffering from an economy crisis

 

[albso437]

Besides, you updated EU 2 up to 1.09 and the game provided fun for many years thereafter.

Those late patches for EU2 were something Johan did on his spare time.
We, as players, may miss those days (doubt Johan does), but they ain't coming back.

 

[agus92]

I was actually hoping that some of the gaming media would cover this. Word needs to get out.

that won't happen lightly, since PDX could retaliate not giving press releases for upcoming games.

 

[agus92]

Ok, I am getting this news just now as I am browsing through steam, I am in India and suddenly every product's price is doubled. I mean it basically has crippled my ability to buy at least any DLCs (endless and overpriced dlc being a different issue altogether).

I don't buy the purchasing power thing at all, I mean seriously who did the calculation? Things in India are supposed to be around 2.5 times cheaper (which includes wages/salary/income) than US (According to PPP), as it currently stands, without discount HOIIV is pricced at $40 in US while currently as around $25 in India but if we are going by the logic of ppp, shouldn't it be around $16? Which would had meant a price increase of about 20-25% and not this ridiculous 100%.

Not that there is a big market in India for Paradox games, so they are hardly going to pay attention to this region (which is understandable btw) but with this pricing and dlc policy I don't see any potential future either meanwhile whatever little fan base is here, we are indeed very very disappointed.

This reminds me... the Chinese part of the forum must be on fire. Lots of Chinese came with HoiIV.

 

[Svampen]

What an unfortunate coincidence that the recent price increase mostly affect regions that was their focus in the recent DLCs.

Skip the DLCs focusing on my region paradox pretty please.. Would hate to see the prices double here aswell.

 

[fabioke]

Huh?

I designed all eu3 & eu4 expansions. If any eu3 expansions were sold as eu4 expansions, 75% of them would be in a free patch and the paid content would have people up in arms if we charged more than 4.99

@Johan , you're seeing this too much from a content/technical perspective. This issue is more related to PR/Marketing/Sales/Timings. The delight fase has changed to the disgust phase for people that feel like they're abruptly thrown out (outpriced) from their community. Gaming is a lifestyle product and new customers are not willing to spend money to be associated with a negative image (A negative avalanche is unavoidable if nothing changes).

Simple mechanisms have failed, you don't need a marketing degree to know that you shouldn't :

- Increase prices for very old games
- Increase prices abruptly, before releasing an immersion pack in the same country, just when there is a steam sale coming up
- Sell a new DLC just two months after a negatively received DLC
- Be stubborn instead of just admitting that you guys made a mistake and fix the issue swiftly

I'm wondering if going public is the root cause for all these blunders. You should think that having benefited directly from the SimCity case, would be enough to understand the difficulties that can arise from these actions.

I work for a marketing agency that advises big companies in the Benelux. If this would happen with any of my companies I would be burned for the whole sector. This is the third similar case in a short time frame (FM17: Chinese fiasco, GTA: mod fiasco and now Paradox: price hike fiasco). The problem is that very blatant mistakes get enhanced with smouldering smaller problems. I'm not typing this because I'm angry (I'm not really impacted by these decisions), but just because I really love EU4 (mixed with compassion towards the affected players) and I want this game to stay relevant.

I feel sorry for the devs, QA's, Gamedesigners, Artist and all the very skilled technical people.

tl;dr: Fully agree that the content is more and better than EU3, but perception and adjusting to market sensitivities is the real reason why people are angry.

 

[decapod37]

So I've been trying to understand this recent price increase, so I compared prices of different games in different countries with EU4 prices before and after the price increase. For example here is the comparison between EU4, Civ5 and Civ6:

I think we can see a better trend if we compare only EU4 pre-hike with Civ5 and EU4 post-hike with Civ6, since Civ5 is an older game that got released closer to when EU4 came out and Civ6 got released closer to present day:

As you can see, there is not much to see here. The comparative prices are roughly the same for both franchises. I also looked at a few other completely different games that were recently released and the price distribution by country is always close to the EU4 one after the recent price increase.

So while I cannot say whether the price increase was fair or not, at the very least we can say that Paradox is not the only publisher who has adjusted their prices in this way.

Since there did not seem to be any large-scale outrage about the price of Civ6 or other franchises, I have to assume that the problem is less with the actual prices in a vacuum and more about the fact that prices increased for an already existing game. So is the outrage justified? Well for one the communication was really poor. No word of it beforehand and the first justification given is to "match purchasing power"? That just makes it sound like everyone in those countries just got rich and can afford to pay a little more now. I also find it weird to increase prices on games that are not getting developed anymore, like Victoria II.

On the other hand the new prices are totally standard for the industry. I can understand how the price increase along with already existing frustrations about the DLC policy (which I think are partly justified) can make things boil over, but for now I refuse to cast Paradox as a capitalist super-villain.

 

[sterrius]

would be nice to also have those graphs for DLC`s. Specially civ 5 DLC´s as the CIV6 have very few of them.

Well, if it is for EU 4 to get close to Civ5 price. We can clearly see some countrys are wayyyyy ahead of that game now. And not even counting DLC´s. And only for EU4.

If you do the same to CK2 you will see the treand is mostly equal to EU4 as both now cost the same price in most markets.

 

[allanschnorr]

As you can see, there is not much to see here. The comparative prices are roughly the same for both franchises. I also looked at a few other completely different games that were recently released and the price distribution by country is always close to the EU4 one after the recent price increase.

There is a significant difference in Brazil and Mexico, for example. It might not look like much to you, but add in all the DLC with new content and the difference will be enough to buy a AAA game.

 

[decapod37]

would be nice to also have those graphs for DLC`s. Specially civ 5 DLC´s as the CIV6 have very few of them.

From a quick glance, it looks like the DLC use the exact same numbers as the base games (give or take some rounding errors), with a few minor exceptions. EU4 DLC seems to be a little cheaper in the UK and Civ5 increased the comparative price for their DLC in Russia a little from what I noticed.

Btw all the data is from https://steamdb.info/ if you want to do your own research.

There is a significant difference in Brazil and Mexico, for example. It might not look like much to you, but add in all the DLC with new content and the difference will be enough to buy a AAA game.

Yeah but CIv6 is also more expensive in Turkey and New Zealand for example, so I'm having a hard time saying that Paradox is shafting players more.

 

[Bombur]

IMO, Paradox has the right to set the prices of their games, it´s, afterall, a profit driven enterprise.
However, I think it´s very bad business decision, as it´s likely that the gains in price increase will be likely offset by the decrease in sales, not to mention the damage to the company image for consumers. Let´s take my example. I live in Brazil and bought almost every grand strategy game released by Paradox. Usually I buy these item in sales, because their DLC policy makes the game too expensive. In the last sales there was a decrease in the discount rate, from 75% to 66%. I thought, well, ok, they are still cheap. Now the DLC´s are being offered with a discount of 50%, while base price increased by 50%, so real increase was 100%. I´m tallking about the price in reais, I don´t earn my money in dolars or Euros, and actually my income, inflation adjusted, decreased by 40% in the last three years, due to the crisis we have, in dollars, it decreased by about 60%. So, what will I do as consumer? It´s likely I will buy the remaining EUIV and CKII DLC´s while they are on sale, I can afford them. However, I won´t buy HOI IV and Stellaris. It´s actually an irony that I recently upgraded my video card to play these games (a fact that is forgoten is that the new Paradox games are much more hardware demanding). It´s also likely I will remain with Red Dragon and won´t buy Steel Division either, and I was just considering to buy Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity....no more. Also my daughter won´t get any new DLC´s for cities skylines. So I ask you, is Paradox gaining or losing with Brazilian consumers?

 

[Aat Jago]

(a fact that is forgoten is that the new Paradox games are much more hardware demanding).

Yet Clausewitz only uses a single CPU core. The engine really needed an update.

 

[binn05]

Since there did not seem to be any large-scale outrage about the price of Civ6 or other franchises, I have to assume that the problem is less with the actual prices in a vacuum and more about the fact that prices increased for an already existing game. So is the outrage justified? Well for one the communication was really poor. No word of it beforehand and the first justification given is to "match purchasing power"? That just makes it sound like everyone in those countries just got rich and can afford to pay a little more now. I also find it weird to increase prices on games that are not getting developed anymore, like Victoria II.

On the other hand the new prices are totally standard for the industry. I can understand how the price increase along with already existing frustrations about the DLC policy (which I think are partly justified) can make things boil over, but for now I refuse to cast Paradox as a capitalist super-villain.

I can't agree with your statement that the new prices are standard for the industry when you use CIV 6 - a game from oct, 16 - against EU4 (aug, 13) or CK2 (feb 12).
If we compare time, it would be fine to cost a little bit more than CIV 5, but not as much as CIV6.
Also, if we include DLCs , a complete CIV 5/6 (base game + dlcs) is far cheaper than any complete Paradox game, besides Stellaris or any other new one.

I'm comparing Brazilian prices (if the info matters).