Should DLC Policy change be considered?

[C.D. Howe]

I hope that Paradox considers reexamining its DLC policy. Rather than having paid and free features, I think it could be healthier long term for the game if all the features were available to all players. The paid content would be for flavour and cosmetics. This could generate far more goodwill between the players and paradox as well as make it easier to create updates long term. One of the big weaknesses of EU4 recently, is that because it has so many expansions that have paid features, it makes it more difficult to have smooth DLC launches. Leviathan at launch for example was (even more) broken for people who did not have access to certain DLCs. This can't make it easy for developing new content either when the devs have to try to balance so many different versions of the game based on who paid for which features.

One of my favourite other games; Don't Starve Together, operates under this principle. Players are generally a lot more forgiving of game breaking bugs at update launches because the features are free. They are viewed as the devs giving a lot of content for free, and this generates a lot of goodwill. The game is instead funded through the purchases of skins. While paradox does give free features at expansion launches along with the paid features, I don't think they are viewed with quite the same goodwill.

I'm not sure if this would make sense for Paradox financially and the games are completely different, but I think if it does it would make development of DLCs easier and improve the relationship between the players and Paradox. Personally, I would still buy the DLCs. The inclusion of paid features is not why I've bought expansions, but rather because I want the flavour and am willing to support a company making a niche game (or maybe this last part is simply how I make myself feel better about spending so much money on Paradox games!). Already you can play with paid features for free if you have a friend who has them host the game, so it's already partly there. If it still makes financial sense to have all features be free while the paid expansions are for flavour and cosmetics, I think it should be considered.

 

[Filosofum]

I believe they have changed the DLC policy because when we look at CK3 and IR there are not the many unit and music packs there used to be. I think the DLC policy of CK3 is a very fair one with sometimes a more expensive and bigger expansion and a tad more often a flavour pack. This is fair for the developer and the customer.

 

[Cysiek]

PDX model is good, if mechanics and QoL are in free patches, while "cool stuff" and content is behind paywall. Stellaris is a great example - crucial mechanics like economy rework trade etc were added in a free patch, while cool stuff like world destroyers new ways of playing the game like robots and corporations were paid. Wiz once said that this is his vision of commercialising the game and I think it is fine.

EUIV has problems because DLC are lightweight, especially those released early on, and many of them has crucial mechanics to the game.

 

[safferli]

Please keep the discussions on topic. Two posts deleted.

 

[C.D. Howe]

I think you two are right, I was thinking more about eu4 because I've played that game more than CK3 and Stellaris but your explanations make a lot of sense.

 

[marmot01]

Continuous addition of features which have not been part of the original vision, a.k.a. "Agile development" is a bad approach for games development.

It may be good for the revenues of the developer or for pumping the playtime hours of the player, but the best strategy games were not the result of Agile development but of clear and holistic vision for what the game should be. Patches were aimed at balancing factions, and the number of expansions was 1-2, with some QoL features.

Ceaser 3, StarCraft, Age of Empires, Red Alert/Command & Conquer.

I'd say this development model is stopping Paradox from producing a true masterpiece of strategy gaming. Only for CK2 I could say that it's got one foot inside the pantheon.

 

[Renegade3231]

Nope, I wanna see the ck3 model.

 

[Vernichtere]

Paradox has to play by the rules of the market. One cannot ban capitalism from the hobby. You have to generate a profit and from a certain size of the company all negative effects automatically take hold.

With regard to DLCs, there is an automatic tendency to withhold content or to go in the direction of colorful advertising arguments. On the other hand, a longer project cannot be handled differently according to the current rules of the game. Alternatively, you would just bring out a new game.

At the same time, one cannot deny that DLCs develop as a result of reactions from the community.


I can only say that as a customer I try to punish certain actions. But I tolerate a lot because I have to more or less. With some tokens there are hardly any alternatives.

But what is of little use here is to appeal to morality.

 

[Durtiiboii]

Absolutely not.
the harsh reality is, paid expansions (and flavour packs) keep the game developement funded and operation, no one would pay almost full game price for a flavour pack (and rightfully so) when its just cosmetics, cosmetics which can easily be modded in, expansions on the other hand take months to develop and many members working together....and to just release it for free?

the only way around that barrier is micro-transactions.. and i sincerely hope PDX consideres bankrupcy before they ever consider micro-transactions in single player.

remember Deus Ex? ..yeah, that didnt go down well with anyone.

 

[Bismark776]

I think the DLC model is generally necessary for the game to receive regular and continuous updates over a long lifespan. They need to keep the developers paid to do all the bugfixing and other activities, selling various content helps that. Selling only the cosmetic stuff and giving everything else away for free won't work as many players will just coast for free. I've never bought a cosmetic pack in my life. I couldn't really care less about having special cultural soldier models in IR, the right flags in EU4, focus trees for countries I'll never play in HoI4, etc. I'll pay for new major mechanics almost every time though.

All that said, I would strongly prefer a return to the expansion system instead, if it was viable from a business standpoint. I'm guessing it probably isn't, as its much riskier, the releases are more infrequent and bigger, and the potential for missteps is higher. However, the DLC system slowly gates off the game mechanics from development. If you add a new feature in one DLC and then you want to complete redo it in a future one, you can't. You'd have to either give it all the existing purchases of the old DLC for free, or you'd force them to buy a new DLC to get a feature back that they already paid for. Eventually you run out of things to update, your mechanics become less and less connected/integrated, your UI gets overstuffed and opaque, and so on. Expansions allow for wholesale change and improvement but it has its own set of problems, particularly on the business side.

 

[Vernichtere]

Continuous addition of features which have not been part of the original vision, a.k.a. "Agile development" is a bad approach for games development.

It may be good for the revenues of the developer or for pumping the playtime hours of the player, but the best strategy games were not the result of Agile development but of clear and holistic vision for what the game should be. Patches were aimed at balancing factions, and the number of expansions was 1-2, with some QoL features.

Ceaser 3, StarCraft, Age of Empires, Red Alert/Command & Conquer.

I'd say this development model is stopping Paradox from producing a true masterpiece of strategy gaming. Only for CK2 I could say that it's got one foot inside the pantheon.

Memories from old people. Please take out the old games to remind yourself of the good old days. The game design may have been closed, but the games were correspondingly small. We also mostly remember the successful things. It's like the film industry. I can quote armored cruisers poemknin, of course, but there was also a lot of junk going on at the time.

Games are a relatively young industry and are going through exactly the same development as other branches. From a certain point in time, there are large sums of money behind the large projects and also automatically investors who want to have profits distributed. The DLCs are a logical development in this regard. You have a basic framework on the market relatively quickly and take fewer risks. Developing a closed game simply means that as an investor you don't know for a very long time whether the concept will work or not. You still have to pay the developers. Certainly, it can also fail with regard to the DLC model. But that's a lot more controlled. The main aim of games is to make money. To expect pure idealistic care here is a little naive.

It depends, of course, on the genre. I can't produce as many DLCs in an RPG as I can in a strategy game.

 

[Kriegsspieler]

What I find interesting about their DLC policy is that it really isn't one single approach. In different games you see different things being done to the game. In HOI4, for example, the dlc's have alternated between adding specific content for certain smaller, less essential (and easily ignored) countries and major improvements to the game's core machanics. The game-mechanic dlcs have brought significant improvements to how the game works, and although comparatively expensive and slow to come, they have proved their worth over time. For Victoria, one might expect a similar approach, with minor dlcs being issued to add flavor to countries outside the major powers, and big ones reserved for fleshing out a complicated game system that is black-boxed for release.
I could live with something like that.

 

[Kriegsspieler]

The other thing that isn't widely appreciated about Paradox's policy toward dlc's is that in the early days a lot of basic scripting work was taken up by betas. During pre-release for both CK2 and EU3, for example, I researched and then scripted dynastic (for CK2) and provincial history files. This work was reviewed by PDX developers, of course, but a significant portion of the basic grunt work wasn't done by them. Since then the in-house teams devoted to game development have grown considerably, for both better and for worse. But from this point there's no going back.

 

[marmot01]

Memories from old people. Please take out the old games to remind yourself of the good old days.

Games are a relatively young industry and are going through exactly the same development as other branches.

Have respect for the elderly, for that is your future

the games were correspondingly small.

Not true, if you are comparing content. Player bases are incomparable, though Paradox games still can't compete with the best RTSs of the old generation.

The main aim of games is to make money.

No, that's the main aim of the businesses who produce them. The product will only make money if it fulfills its purpose, which in the case of a game is to be a fun game.

My whole argument is that Agile development is dragging games down. If a masterpiece like one of the games I've quote above appeared today, providing all the innovation and addictive gameplay loop that they did, it would sell much more than a product which starts as barebones and in 6 years it's a Wolpetinger of various expansions and DLCs. The devs cannot even know if dlc X will be present so they can balance DLC Y around it. Can't convince anyone that this model ends up giving the consumers a better product.

 

[Vernichtere]

Have respect for the elderly, for that is your future

Not true, if you are comparing content. Player bases are incomparable, though Paradox games still can't compete with the best RTSs of the old generation.


No, that's the main aim of the businesses who produce them. The product will only make money if it fulfills its purpose, which in the case of a game is to be a fun game.

My whole argument is that Agile development is dragging games down. If a masterpiece like one of the games I've quote above appeared today, providing all the innovation and addictive gameplay loop that they did, it would sell much more than a product which starts as barebones and in 6 years it's a Wolpetinger of various expansions and DLCs. The devs cannot even know if dlc X will be present so they can balance DLC Y around it. Can't convince anyone that this model ends up giving the consumers a better product.

I'm just as old and lived through the good old days. Paradox does not produce RTS. As I said, there have been enough bad games in the past.

But it can no longer be compared, also in terms of the strength of the team behind a game today.

And no, the goal is not to produce the best games. The goal is to give people the permanent feeling that they are buying good games and at the same time to keep their own risks low as soon as their own company employs more than a few students and also has to satisfy investors. And in that regard, the model works pretty well with the DLCs. This arises from the rules of the market, which has little in common with the dream worlds of libertarians with their island comparisons (the baker makes rolls with his three employees and sells them to the farmer with his five assistants).

 

[BeauNiddle]

Not true, if you are comparing content. Player bases are incomparable, though Paradox games still can't compete with the best RTSs of the old generation.

I would disagree with this view. The games themselves were small you just got lots of maps to play in a campaign. Most of the old RTSs had 3 tech levels and it was very rare to play the same map for more than 2 hours. The only game I remember doing that in was Total Annihilation which was just bonkers for the time.

The old games have very good campaigns (some with FMV - wonder of wonders) but each map was small and the tech levels were limited. Civilisation would maybe be the only game with a similar scale to Paradox games and it was extremely simple compared to current games.

Now I agree the old games were a hell of a lot more fun per minute for being focused but don't confuse that with large scale.

Old games (that we bother remembering) were good. But the Expansion idea wasn't good for the companies. How many games died on the vine? How many games only got a few expansions? How many games have to produce version 2 - Bigger & BOLDER to try and stay relevant (and then kill the golden goose).

The Paradox system of refining and improving what they have is much better (for me) than hit or miss new versions of the game.

All that said - I much prefer the current DLC plans (for HOI4 mainly but also others) of releasing most features as free and DLC as cosmetics or focused deep dives (species packs in stellaris or NF trees in HOI4).

 

[Vernichtere]

What is always amused is the discussion of the question only in relation to morality and quality. On the basis of this argumentation, a higher economic sense is automatically derived from the quality.

Based on logic, the development of the game market seems absurd. Which cannot be true, since the proponents of the old school would otherwise have prevailed.

It is just the case that from a certain size of the company other considerations take effect and pressure is exerted from the side, for which it is just as an investment as an investment in a share in any other sector.

The system guarantees continuous control in terms of success (sales figures) I and permanent earnings. At the same time, people pay a lot more. Nobody would want to spend 150 euros on a game at once. But it works pretty well psychologically when pieced together.


At some point, of course, the UI and the game itself are overloaded with contradictions. It is important to recognize this magical point.

 

[Alfred Dreyfus]

I do not want the EU4 DLC model that has completely destroyed the game (lots of small DLCs every year).

I prefer 1 big DLC per year.

This gives a more consistent and cohesive game development, instead of the EU4 chaos.

 

[alexti]

My worry is that if Vic3 takes approach to DLC that was used in other Paradox games it will seriously limit the game potential. For example, assuming that the base game won't include such things as corporations, financial markets or labour movements each of those could be a good subject for DLC. But any of those would have a large impact on the game, meaning that they would take a large effort to create, but at the same time the mechanics itself would have to be in a free patch to avoid having to maintain several significantly different system (with DLC/without DLC) going forward. Then if the main features are in a free patch, how do they sell the DLC?

I wonder if Paradox might consider combining recent DLC model with the old expansion model they've used in the past. Big important features that have large impact on the game would form the core of expansions which would be paid and mandatory (in a sense that one would have to buy them to continue getting updates and future DLCs). Optional DLC would be a smaller, optional content, more focused on adding cosmetics and flavor.

From the experience with the other games Paradox probably knows how many people skip "important" DLCs. For example, is it common for people to skip "Art of War" in EU4, but buy later DLCs? If it's rare, that DLC could have as well been a mandatory expansion.

 

[Vernichtere]

EU IV had several problems in this regard. First of all, the lack of depth in terms of domestic politics meant that you almost automatically had to add more mechanics that seemed funny. Then you have the feeling that you didn't really know where you were going. At some point it has to be over.


I hope Vicky has some sort of idea of long-term development. I basically have no problem with spending money on Flavor. I just don't want to have my own mechanics implemented for Russia.