Is Stellaris running out of steam? (pun intended)

[yangzilata]

Vic3 is less played because the core mechanics are really shallow.

As for Victoria 3, I think fewer people play it compared to HoI4 because the gameplay is more about building economies, which can feel a bit simple. It’s not as exciting as the war and strategy focus in HoI4. Instead of fighting battles, you spend more time placing buildings and managing economic changes.

Some players feel Vic 3 doesn’t really fit the usual grand strategy game style. What do you think? Should Victoria 3 still be considered a grand strategy game, or has it moved too far from what people expect?

Space is always popular

I really hope that's true!

I can't help it, but this really reads like an AI wrote it.

Fair point! I was trying to be clear and organized, but I guess it came off a little too structured. I just like being precise in how I explain things.

 

[Ikael]

I must admit that this topic has been quite interesting in clarifying what could be done for Stellaris 2, negative votes notwithstanding. I thank all the people who have explained their position of why they want a Stellaris 2, rather than turning this into a yes / no survey.

I think that adding features is not its main draw. I mean, you can always roll up parts of the LDC into the base game, as Paradox has done before (my bet would be to make Utopia into part of the core game, I hardly can envision Stellaris without things like ascension paths, hiveminds, or habitats anymore). And jumping into a sequel will always mean the loss of tons of content, that's the main, most obvious weakness of a possible sequel.

However, it is much more interesting the possibility of outright removing (or changing) parts of the core game. I mean, the more things you add, the more legacy content you need to support. I don't think that it is a coincidence that the most sweeping changes to the game were done early. I mean, yes, technically, you can still do radical changes like unifying FTL methods into star lanes, or going from a tile to a job economy, but the more content you have, the more taxing is going to be to revise everything.

I have perhaps relied too much on the past history of Stellaris. Perhaps the current game is not in a state where you can make those types of radical changes anymore. Which is a pity, but I suppose that's what "tech debt" means, and the reason why the Vela update has been kinda small.

 

[whateverman111]

Maybe I also misjudged the need for Stellaris 2.

If Stellaris is slowly dying, and there is too much tech debt, perhaps Stellaris 2 would address both those issues.

 

[HFY]

Maybe I also misjudged the need for Stellaris 2.

If Stellaris is slowly dying, and there is too much tech debt, perhaps Stellaris 2 would address both those issues.

There is too much tech debt, but I don't really see signs of Stellaris dying.

 

[Karlb]

I am sure that PDX is aware that I cannot play all the games I bought from them all at once, sales numbers are probably a vastly superior metric. I for one am catching up on some other games in my library (millennia was recently on sale) in between DLCs.. but I still bought the season pass.

 

[whateverman111]

There is too much tech debt, but I don't really see signs of Stellaris dying.

If the OP is correct, and player counts are dropping, perhaps 'becoming commercially less viable' is a more accurate term - the game is very well supported by PDX!

 

[HFY]

If the OP is correct, and player counts are dropping, perhaps 'becoming commercially less viable' is a more accurate term - the game is very well supported by PDX!

Pandemic inflated playtime for a lot of games.

Has Stellaris playtime dropped more than other games playtime dropped?

Honest question, I don't know enough to translate the OP's graph into actual playtime nor to figure out how other games compare.

 

[Imp0815]

Pandemic inflated playtime for a lot of games.

Has Stellaris playtime dropped more than other games playtime dropped?

Honest question, I don't know enough to translate the OP's graph into actual playtime nor to figure out how other games compare.

I do not want to impose any numbers: here is the chart for Paradox titles on Steam:https://steamdb.info/developer/Paradox+Development+Studio/ (Note the extreme gap between place one and two).

And here is the top 100 for 24-hour all:https://steamdb.info/charts/?sort=24h

I still fundamentally believe HoI IV's success is based upon its engaging core gameplay and combat design that could be reused for other GSG PDX titles.
___

And somewhat sad to see that ultimately my concerns about the DLC seemed valid based on the first review I saw.

 

[Eelectrica]

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.

All I really want before they wrap Stellaris up is a colonisation DLC. Make colonising planets exciting and even dangerous at times.

 

[HFY]

Could be worse.

We got Cosmic Storms.

We did not get Comic Sans.

Thank Zarqlan for small mercies.

 

[Troyen]

I do not want to impose any numbers: here is the chart for Paradox titles on Steam:https://steamdb.info/developer/Paradox+Development+Studio/ (Note the extreme gap between place one and two).

And here is the top 100 for 24-hour all:https://steamdb.info/charts/?sort=24h

I still fundamentally believe HoI IV's success is based upon its engaging core gameplay and combat design that could be reused for other GSG PDX titles.

If you want trends, IsaacCAT has a longer-term chart running on the I:R forums. But bear in mind, peak players are not actual players. To my knowledge, Paradox has not released total player counts for Stellaris, but they did for Victoria 3 a year ago and the steam peak players were a significant undercount of the steam actual players.

Sorting Steam's "Grand Strategy and 4X" category by Top Sellers, it looks like Cosmic Storms is 10th at time of writing, which is lower than Machine Age was during release (MA right now is 11th). But Stellaris itself is top of the list and hasn't seemed to suffer. Like in the investor vid I linked earlier, even smaller DLC bring awareness to the base game and older DLC.

I haven't personally played the patch yet so can't comment beyond what I saw in the DDs. The patch notes and storm descriptions honestly looked kinda meh, even though I'm the type of player who actually would like non-combat things like storms. Dunno about the Grand Archive either, but it's premature to doom a Paradox title based on one or two minor DLC. The accompanying patch was kinda light, but Eladrin has said the Custodians are working on something major for 3.15, so I guess we'll find out Q1 2025 where they're pushing the base game.

 

[Imp0815]

If you want trends, IsaacCAT has a longer-term chart running on the I:R forums. But bear in mind, peak players are not actual players. To my knowledge, Paradox has not released total player counts for Stellaris, but they did for Victoria 3 a year ago and the steam peak players were a significant undercount of the steam actual players.

Sorting Steam's "Grand Strategy and 4X" category by Top Sellers, it looks like Cosmic Storms is 10th at time of writing, which is lower than Machine Age was during release (MA right now is 11th). But Stellaris itself is top of the list and hasn't seemed to suffer. Like in the investor vid I linked earlier, even smaller DLC bring awareness to the base game and older DLC.

I haven't personally played the patch yet so can't comment beyond what I saw in the DDs. The patch notes and storm descriptions honestly looked kinda meh, even though I'm the type of player who actually would like non-combat things like storms. Dunno about the Grand Archive either, but it's premature to doom a Paradox title based on one or two minor DLC. The accompanying patch was kinda light, but Eladrin has said the Custodians are working on something major for 3.15, so I guess we'll find out Q1 2025 where they're pushing the base game.

I'm not sure what your point is exactly, but it seems you want to relativize my points.
The charts from IsaacCAT are not showing actual numbers, but the hierarchy is the same as SteamDB.

As always with statistics, it's easy to create a point of view that supports or counters arguments. So using a broad high-level view like concurrent players is a good basis for extrapolating overall player interest and engagement with the game without trying to push a point.

As the DLC is already at mixed reviews by the time of writing, I don't have to make any more points, as my original post was predicting this from my point of view.

I only might add, in hindsight, that PDX is in hot water, and I don't see a change of course. This DLC has also has issues as other PDX projects in recent history. At this point, it's a miracle the thing hasn't been canceled or outsourced at the last minute.

PS: Maybe it WAS outsourced!?

 

[Troyen]

I agree with some of your observations but not your conclusions.

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.

There's also been a sharp increase in people using steam peak concurrent player counts to draw all kinds of conclusions from this one metric that can't possibly support those conclusions. Yes, you can compare Hearts of Iron IV's numbers to Stellaris's numbers and say there appear to be more players consistently playing the game, though that's only because the margin between the two games is so wide. It would be much more dubious to make that claim about EU4 vs Stellaris because the numbers are a lot closer and the error bars for attempting to guess "total active playerbase" off of "peak concurrent players" are very large and can be affected by day of the week or time zone distribution of the playerbase. Way too many people take the peak player numbers and treat them as the size of the actual playerbase and then claim that e.g. Victoria 3 is about to be canceled because it "only has 10K players now." That does not matter outside of live-service games or multiplayer-heavy games, which 95% of Steam games are not.

From a business perspective, it's the sales that matter. Nobody publicly shares exact sales information for competition reasons, but monitoring the top seller ranking chart is probably going to give a more accurate idea on how well a game is doing than player counts. Why? Because if you have a dedicated playerbase but they aren't buying your DLC, you aren't making as much as a game whose playerbase only shows up for releases but buys all your stuff. Remember those Hearts of Iron numbers? Given they have 2-3x the peak players of any other Paradox game, why aren't the HoI IV DLC higher up the top sellers list? The non-country packs are sitting at CK3 DLC sales ranking numbers or lower (I picked CK3 because Stellaris is on sale and HoI hasn't released DLC in a while, and HoI still has double the peak players CK3 has). One possible explanation is HoI4 has a dedicated multiplayer scene...playing the base game, but only Paradox has the metrics to say for sure.

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.

As an aside, Paradox's publishing arm has issues because they're still paying for some bad decisions over the past few years, but that's a different team than PDS.

TLDR: yes Cosmic Storms is Mixed, no it's not going to doom the game or the company. No, it's not the season pass per se (though they may want to evaluate the distribution and relative pricing of content in future seasons - CK3's third DLC is usually just an event pack - and maybe three DLC a year is a bit too ambitious for Stellaris). And I really wish people would stop bringing up peak player numbers because they're misused pretty much every single time.

 

[Ikael]

I don't think that Stellaris is doomed at all (in fact it is kinda amazing how well it has held up), and not every single DLC can be a super hit, but I can see that it is slowly "petering out", due to the slower pace of updates. I don't think that it will go on longer than 1 or 2 years (that is, another season pass after this one) until Stellaris 2 is officially announced.

 

[Imp0815]

TLDR: yes Cosmic Storms is Mixed, no it's not going to doom the game or the company. No, it's not the season pass per se (though they may want to evaluate the distribution and relative pricing of content in future seasons - CK3's third DLC is usually just an event pack - and maybe three DLC a year is a bit too ambitious for Stellaris). And I really wish people would stop bringing up peak player numbers because they're misused pretty much every single time.

Yes, I know how project planning should work, and still, it locked them in. And yes, I disagree with that practice. On the other hand, people who bought the season pass now have the fun of getting mixed DLC for the rest of the year, but that would mostly be their own fault. There's also an element of "we got your money, why should we care then?"—but that's another topic and i would not go that far.

It's just another nail in the coffin, and the question is, how many nails does it take to close the one PDX is lying in? So I agree a single misstep will not doom the company as a one-off, but you must see the bigger picture. I just want to press home that I disagree with the content roadmap, the season pass decisions, and the direction the game is currently headed (constant gimmicks and no fundamental improvements). I've lost confidence in the product and mainly in the company's decision-making.

I don't think we should stop looking at peak player numbers, as it is one of the few transparent metrics of how popular a game is. Based on Steam's market share, it's quite obvious that these numbers say a lot more about long-term confidence and sales success than you might want to admit. The fact that people like to play HoI IV in MP is because it is fun and has fundamentally good game design in the aspects that matter. Otherwise, nobody would want to play it. And of course, when people play a game and like it, they share it, and it's a cascading marketing effect that leads to more sales. No marketing can reach the heights of sales that word of mouth can. So player numbers are crucial to that.

 

[Alastor]

I am very fond of Stellaris and would be happily playing it still. 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 love the pop change, I thought it was conceptually great, but Stellaris has simply never been able to handle it. It is just so exasperating that my favourite kind of experience in this game, late game on huge maps has been effectively unplayable for so long. I can recall months taking literal minutes to go by, I remember actually timing them out of frustration... and that's on vanilla, let's not even discuss what happens when mods are thrown in.

 

[ThePHD]

Stellaris 2 is only worth it if we get significant increases to performance. This has always been the biggest problem with this game and the no.1 reason why I personally don't play it more than I currently do. I like the game a lot but I just can't stand how slow it can get at times. Even on my relatively strong processor. It does seem to get better as hardware advances but I shouldn't need to shell out ridiculous amounts of money on hardware just to get acceptable late game performance. Keep in mind I am saying this from the perspective of someone who has a 5800X3D. Plenty of people are playing the game on much worse hardware than me. I understand acceptable performance is a subjective thing but I really think they need to do better in this regard if they make a sequel. It doesn't just need to be a vessel for them to sell more DLC.

 

[Ikael]

From what I understand, a lot of the issues regarding performance have to do with pop calculations. It is kinda amusing how many calculations are done "behind the curtains" for each pop, and how many of them have negligible or minimal impact on gameplay. Changing from tiles to jobs did come with a hefty tax.

That being said, I think that a lot of it has to do with the pop growth model and how you can theoretically cram as many pops as you want on a regular planet with no limits whatsoever (hence the global pop cap bandaid). Would the pop growth system be modified (I have personally always defended a hard per-planet pop cap), a big part of the problem would be curtailed, I think.

...or they can go through the Stellaris 2 route and design an economic system from the ground up that is not as taxing for performance. Who knows what will the future bring?

 

[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.

 

[Dr. B]

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.)



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.



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.



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



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



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.

This kind of open and friendly communication with the player community is invaluable. It is a major reason for why I like Paradox as a company and play your games for 20+ years.