As I said, I have always defended the DLC policy of Paradox. But if my vanilla games aren't interesting enough to keep customers playing, I am gambling on the DLC to safe the cause and collect a few $/€/Cronas along the way. If things work out, we get a continous stream of DLC that add good content and make the game attractive to play even weeks after release and if they don't work out, the publisher is more than ready to jump shit and abandon those games (Imperator, EoS). I don't like that and it's tiresome.
HoI suffered from a range of issues (AI, balancing, bugs) but it's main problem was that it was boring because only the skeleton of the game was released. DLCs have been good.
The same thing is probably true for Vicky3. The base game is incredibly shallow, it suffers from bad UI choices and while I like the approach the game took when it comes to armed conflict, I have to say it's implementattion is increbibly boring. If we take it for granted that those games will only be good after X amount of DLCs then what is the point of buying the games in the first place? I don't think it's good practice to milk the fan base of a game for the time being to have a game that continiously attracts people playing it further down the road. If you need financing, crowd fund this thing or whatever. But HoI was painful for the first 2 years (at least), Vicky has been a painful experience for 150 days now and I fear that the next game will be same as well. Also, I am not buying smaller Paradox titles anymore for the fear of them being abandonded before they actually get good. It's a practice that will eventually drive the loyal customer base away.
I think it depends on what you expect out of a game? I think it's fairly normal for people to check out the new stuff and then go on to other things.
I've only played three games over the past two decades where I invested more than 1000 hours into them. Two of those were subscription MMOs and the third was Factorio, which was heavily driven by a strong modding scene. But just because I put a game aside after playing it for a while, I don't consider it a failure if I enjoyed my time.
I've put about 150 hours into Victoria 3 across five different runs, two of which were with 1.2.4, and now I've moved onto other games. But I do intend to check back and try out the 1.3 and 1.4 updates when they come around. Maybe one of the updates will introduce something that makes me want to spend a lot more time with the game, the way CK3 1.7 did (for Vic 3 that would be stuff to do in the lategame because I get bored in the second half once I pass all the laws I wanted), maybe not, but I don't feel offended or ripped off by my purchase.
I'm also fine with Paradox's DLC model and prefer it to subscription services, and I think it's OK to not buy something if you're uncertain whether it'll be worthwhile
right now. I think Paradox is fairly open with what you can expect in their games, at least for the in-house developed ones (not so much console or most third-party studios they publish for), and in most cases I had a reasonable idea of whether I'd enjoy something or not before buying it (though this gets trickier the later into a game's lifetime you get as a lot of info about the game becomes out of date).
I think people are overreacting a little bit to the I:R situation (which came amongst a major reorg into the four studios they have today), and a large part of that was because of how it was communicated (the communication director who made the announcement left the company and nobody else picked the ball up). EoS is published by Paradox, not developed by them, so I think it's held to a different standard, and Paradox themselves mentioned
they were disappointed with the game's quality after launch (I don't see any similar disclosures about Vic 3 in
the 2022 year end report).
