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I would much prefer spending the $79.99 CAD that AAA games cost in Canada and getting a more fleshed out product. When you consider the amount of hours we all put into PDX games it is very well worth it. Why torture ourselves now with early barebones games when we could have a more richer product.
 
My final perspective on this: Stellaris is a game I've been interested in buying. It is currently on sale for a very reasonable price and so I almost picked it up. But, knowing the PDX model, I knew it would be a shell of a game unless I also bought most of the DLC, which pushes the entry point, even during the Steam sale, to over $100.

Knowing Paradox, I know that the real entry point to the good game experience isn't $24...its a much bigger investment. And that decided it. It's also kept me away from HOI4, kept me from I:R, etc. Until EUIV, I bought every game and expansion PDS made, so the model may work in a lot of ways, but here, its taken someone who would have bought a solid game and then a major DLC a year and driven me away.

I own every major DLC expansion for CKII and I still see "complete your collection for $293!" Good lawd!
 
My feelings when i played I:R at release :
- the game was released as if it was the 1st pdx game
- the game was released as if pdx had no experiences from their other games
We have a good pool of veterans/fans of pdx games (ck, eu, vicky, stellaris, etc ...), i don't think this quality of release can be accepted any more.

Some friends asked a refund of I:R, they said they had the feeling of a botched game at release. True or wrong is not the question, their feeling is a fact ! I can't blame them that they want a more completed game. They will eventually come back later.

I'll keep playing I:R for several reasons, but i have been disappointed of the release and all the events around it, and for moment i still have a bad taste.
 
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I still think releasing in beta would be a good way to do it. You'll still have to pay full price but emphasize the game isnt done yet and that they would love your help in finishing it if you decide to buy the game before full release.

Feel like that would go over alot better. I'm sure there would be a few people who who would complain about full price for bet. However put in the right light it could go over well I think. Just say if you wmdont want to play or pay full price for beta then wait for full release.
 
I:R was based on the feature set of EU:Rome, with some additions. EU:Rome, however, was not a successful PDS title. This means the basis of I:R was something that most people would already consider a failure. I don't quite understood how such a decision was made.

Vicky 2, however, is a masterpiece. If a theoretical V3 took V2 as its starting point, it would be set up for success from the beginning. I'd pay $100 for an upgraded V2 with some new features that would continued to be fleshed out with new DLC for years to come.

After the I:R roadmap was announced, I bought the complete Stellaris on sale, and I'm having a blast. I'll give I:R another look in the future.
 
My final perspective on this: Stellaris is a game I've been interested in buying. It is currently on sale for a very reasonable price and so I almost picked it up. But, knowing the PDX model, I knew it would be a shell of a game unless I also bought most of the DLC, which pushes the entry point, even during the Steam sale, to over $100.
Stellaris is actually unlike CKII or EUIV - it has all core gameplay in the base game. So buying no DLCs is a very reasonable choice.
 
My final perspective on this: Stellaris is a game I've been interested in buying. It is currently on sale for a very reasonable price and so I almost picked it up. But, knowing the PDX model, I knew it would be a shell of a game unless I also bought most of the DLC, which pushes the entry point, even during the Steam sale, to over $100.

Huh? I just bought Stellaris + all gameplay DLC a couple days ago, and I think it was around $50 for everything. I didn't buy soundtracks and ebooks. Also well worth it, as Stellaris is a blast.
 
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I:R was based on the feature set of EU:Rome, with some additions. EU:Rome, however, was not a successful PDS title. This means the basis of I:R was something that most people would already consider a failure. I don't quite understood how such a decision was made.

Vicky 2, however, is a masterpiece. If a theoretical V3 took V2 as its starting point, it would be set up for success from the beginning. I'd pay $100 for an upgraded V2 with some new features that would continued to be fleshed out with new DLC for years to come.

After the I:R roadmap was announced, I bought the complete Stellaris on sale, and I'm having a blast. I'll give I:R another look in the future.
Have you ever played base-game Vicky 2?
 
A good* paradox game can easily be enjoyed 1000-2000 hours. Other good games will tend to stop being fun after 100-200 hours. There are ofcourse games which can only be enjoyed for less than 10 hours (mostly story driven games).

When I buy a game, I compare the price with the expected hours of joy. If you have to pay 40 euro's for 10 hours of joy, you'd be paying 4 euro per hour (still cheap compared to a movie or bowling). So for a good paradox game 70 dollar or more is not that weird. In terms of price/hour of joy, it will actually be cheap.

I should note that if you'd buy an unfinished or broken game you will likely not enjoy it and may even get frustrated with it. Being forced to buy game fixing expansions results in the actual price of the game being over 200 euro's or dollars (looking at you CKII).

I find the price of dlcs and expansion way to much compared to what they add. But without them the games tend to feel empty, unfinished or even broken. I tend to buy dlcs in packs because of this (and you pay less for packs). This gives you a bunch of stuff that together might be worth the price.

Also, with the dlc spam you never know when the game is really ready to be enjoyed. I know some naive people still think any game is enjoyable on release, but that's just not the case. You now have to estimate after how many expansions and patches a game is enjoyable. If you'd release a fully fleshed out game on day 1, players would know they can buy it now and enjoy it now. This worked great for many games in the past.

So increasing the base price and reducing dlc spam is a good idea in my opinion.

*good as in good for you ;)
 
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If the base price were increased I wouldn't be able to afford it unless during a massive sale. I have a feeling that a lot of college kids wouldn't be able to either.
 
Pre-order sales are the most important sales for any game. A higher price would mean lower pre-orders, because more people would wait for a sale, and reduce investor confidence in the product, leading to it being ditched. A game that doesn't sell well initially doesn't get DLCs. Not only that, but the longer development time you are asking for requires a greater risk for the investors.

Besides, the game's reviews haven't been that bad, and it has sold more than expected. Also, investor confidence in the company remains steady, despite a peak in the share price just before release of IR and a dip straight after. Why change a strategy that is working?
 
Longer development time does not necessarily require a higher price tag. I am sure some market analyst would disagree because any content put in the base game is content that cant be monetized additionally later, and there is truth in that, but a game that is better at release would sell better, opening up more people to additional monetization. If in an alternate universe imperator had recieved acclaim from its fans and not sat at a mostly negative rating, it could have attracted more players - perhaps good enough to reel in that vaunted total war crowd. Then the additional development time would have paid of itself.

Unless of course pdox gauges their market saturated with no opportunity to grow besides living off the whales that we are. In that case a better game at release is a detriment, because it would not sell more anyway and just rack up cost. If they do (and i dont know what they think) id disagree.
 
Paradox is practicing a very unique business model by supporting games long after release and without knowledge of the proper business details, any comment I can make is speculative, BUT:

From a players perspective, it is the best case scenario if I get a decent game and the certainty that it will receive proper DLCs for five years or more to come. That is basically the best incarnation of the idea of DLCs, which were promised as a way to constantly grow and improve the games we already love. Paradox is only one of few studious who really even attempt to keep that promise. From PDXs perspective however there is the challenge that every DLC faces a shrinking potential audience, because you are not going to buy the Ancient Relics DLC if you do not own Stellaris already and not every owner of Stellaris is going to buy all the DLC. There are those who skip out on certain DLCs or wait for a while before they go on a sale. On the other hand, DLCs are probably cheaper to make than a entire new game when looking at straight return on investment per Euro, because most features exist and the code base is already there. But these are speculations dependent on many factors and DLCs only work out if the base game is selling well enough.

Now, I want to make it perfectly clear that I believe that the way PDX practices their model is the best case scenario for us players and I would hate to see them fail. When something like Imperator Rome fails to make an impression with the community, PDX can try to pour mmore resources into it to save it, but it may be too late, the reputation be ruined and the project may become a dangerous drain on the studio. If they, however, decided that Emperor was a lost cause and cut it off entirely they would break the pact that they have with the community, which is vital, because it makes us tolerate incomplete, buggy, laggy games, because we love you guys at PDX and respect what you stand for. And half of the fun of your games is hoping and wishing for you guys fixing/implementing stuff. ;)

With all this being said, my conclusion is that the most important thing is the relation between PDX and their community and if they need to raise their initial prices to keep up with player's AAA-expectations... Then just do it. We understand. I have sunken more than 500 hours into Stellaris and people still look at me like the new kid in class. If you raise the price by 5 or 10 Euros, we understand. Or maybe come out with extre premium versions that include extra features that are cheap to make, like twice the amount of character portraits, and let them cost 10€ more. The portraits alone would make it worth for me, and you would have a higher return on investment and the guys that picked the standard version get the same game without missinf out on real features.
 
Pre-order sales are the most important sales for any game. A higher price would mean lower pre-orders, because more people would wait for a sale, and reduce investor confidence in the product, leading to it being ditched. A game that doesn't sell well initially doesn't get DLCs. Not only that, but the longer development time you are asking for requires a greater risk for the investors.

Besides, the game's reviews haven't been that bad, and it has sold more than expected. Also, investor confidence in the company remains steady, despite a peak in the share price just before release of IR and a dip straight after. Why change a strategy that is working?

I am hugely interested in the business side of things, so if you do not mind, could you provide the sources that support your claims or at least provide the base for them? What you say makes sense on the surface level, but without sources this information remains baseless speculation from my vantage point. (Sorry, not trying to sound rude, but let's work diligently.)
 
Imperator could have had double the development time, but would have made little difference except clearing up bugs. This is because Johan/Paradox believed the game was finished & the issues such as MANA were not problems in their minds. I am certainly not going to pay a premium price for a shell of a game. This is not to say I wouldn't pay a lot for a game, but I would have to be convinced that it was something I wanted & would keep me entertained for a long while. Paradox games are getting to the stage where you have to wait awhile to get the game you wanted, which is not good news either to the consumer or company. When EU5 & CK3 are released Paradox will have to think very carefully what the games entail & include, otherwise Imperator might seem a minor setback in comparison.
 
Imperator could have had double the development time, but would have made little difference except clearing up bugs. This is because Johan/Paradox believed the game was finished & the issues such as MANA were not problems in their minds. I am certainly not going to pay a premium price for a shell of a game. This is not to say I wouldn't pay a lot for a game, but I would have to be convinced that it was something I wanted & would keep me entertained for a long while. Paradox games are getting to the stage where you have to wait awhile to get the game you wanted, which is not good news either to the consumer or company. When EU5 & CK3 are released Paradox will have to think very carefully what the games entail & include, otherwise Imperator might seem a minor setback in comparison.
Mana in I:R was a symptom of underlying issues, not the source problem that everyone makes it out to be. I'm getting sick and tired of hearing people state that the solution to all our problems is "remove mana" which is a blatant simplification.
 
This DLC-policy is a double edged sword anyhow. Because yes, you get to monetize your existing player base, but once you get around to releasing Stellaris II you better have something that can compete with +5 years worth of DLCs.
 
With all this being said, my conclusion is that the most important thing is the relation between PDX and their community and if they need to raise their initial prices to keep up with player's AAA-expectations... Then just do it. We understand.

This I emphatically disagee with. We ABSOLUTELY do not want to be ANYWHERE NEAR the AAA gaming space, given what a toxic pile of mess that is that gets worse with every passing piece of news. If people come in with those sort of expectations? Then, quite frankly, I would rather them be disabused of them, no matter how miffed that makes them.

Those sort of expectations have been trained into people by companies that are, at the moment, using flagrantly using psychological manipiulation techniques (and are requiring govermental-level intervention), cheerfully driving their devs into stress-based work overload breakdowns, are bad for the entire gaming industry. Flaws-and-all, Paradox is one of the few big-ish developers that is head and shoulders above the pack and we need to keep them there.

The AAA gaming space is not something PDX needs to, nor should consider, ever approach in the current clime.
 
This I emphatically disagee with. We ABSOLUTELY do not want to be ANYWHERE NEAR the AAA gaming space, given what a toxic pile of mess that is that gets worse with every passing piece of news. If people come in with those sort of expectations? Then, quite frankly, I would rather them be disabused of them, no matter how miffed that makes them.

Those sort of expectations have been trained into people by companies that are, at the moment, using flagrantly using psychological manipiulation techniques (and are requiring govermental-level intervention), cheerfully driving their devs into stress-based work overload breakdowns, are bad for the entire gaming industry. Flaws-and-all, Paradox is one of the few big-ish developers that is head and shoulders above the pack and we need to keep them there.

The AAA gaming space is not something PDX needs to, nor should consider, ever approach in the current clime.

Absolutely agree. I see so many complaints, then look at other games where you literally get an advantage over other players by paying while playing competitively against them, or have what is effectively gambling with real money.