Is Stellaris running out of steam? (pun intended)

[Eladrin]

Apologies if some of this is disjointed, I'm currently a little loopy since I'm sick. (Cue Alfray telling me to stop working, but I'm in bed dude, chill.)

Cosmic storms always seemed like the most optional of optional DLC. No must haves at all. A couple of nice to haves with the pre-cursors and planet scapers.

I really don't mind Cosmic Storms being considered an optional DLC. It was always intended to be the small release of the year, intended primarily for people interested in the premise of it.

It's sort of like First Contact that way. I want our teams to feel that they have the freedom to make small packs that aren't for every Stellaris player, without having to find a way to try to force them to be "essential". Major Expansions (like The Machine Age) should have something for everyone though.

Your original post was claiming the season pass locked them into the DLC set we're getting this fall. That's not the case. They don't decide to make the next DLC once the previous one is released, DLC are being worked on a year in advance. We were getting Cosmic Storms whether there was a season 8 pass or not. That decision was made well before the expansion pass announcement. I suppose if they hadn't announced it with the season pass they could have canned it at the last minute if they weren't happy with it, but...there doesn't seem to be a good reason to? Astral Rifts was Mixed and still sold a bunch and brought new players to Stellaris. It appears Cosmic Storms had a dev team on the smaller side, which means they don't need to reach Machine Age sales targets for it to be profitable. Cosmic Storms and even Grand Archive bombing wouldn't doom the game either, especially if the 2.x era is any indication. Established games seem more resilient - just look at EU4 Leviathan. I keep pointing to the investor video because it's Paradox explaining their business model to the people that actually influence the financials of their company. and their own conclusion after years of this model is even a meh DLC drives sales of the base game and older DLC via all the marketing and attention a release generates.

We run many parallel tracks of development alongside each other, with varying degrees of co-development with other studios. (On paper, Cosmic Storms started 16 months ago.) Some lines may get killed partway through development.

Right now, all of next year's projects are in progress, and all major features of the planned Q2 2025 release are at their functional state.

We have several years of plans currently.

And no, I don't think the DLC was outsourced. Galactic Paragons was done by a different team at Paradox (usually that doesn't count as outsourcing). Astral Planes' writing was outsourced. The console versions are outsourced. But there's not really any indication that Cosmic Storms was outsourced - gruntsatwork has been working on Stellaris since at least the early 3.x days, if not longer. It's more likely a combination of smaller budget, company policy on price setting, and maybe the designs not working out or being limited by the engine.

Cosmic Storms was co-developed with Behaviour Rotterdam, who also worked with us on Stellaris: Console Edition.

There is exactly one issue and it's a deal breaker, ever since the tiles went away all those years ago performance has been various degrees of horrible.

I agree that this is one of the biggest problems facing Stellaris right now.

Eladrin has said the Custodians are working on something major for 3.15

Not for 3.15.

But I do have them working on something big. We'll start talking about that after Grand Archive releases, and after I have some more data from the Custodians.