From Imperator: Rome release it seems people no longer want a 39.9$ release game and rather have a game that have been twice or so long in development and priced around 69.9$.
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Yeah it might be time for Paradox to start aiming towards those AAA titles. Expectations have obviously reached a level they were unaware of. I don't know if the market for grand strategy games can really support that though. Then again creativity and innovation can go a long way. There are tons of great ideas from players on these forums (and tons of bad ideas, too).
It depends on the demographic.
I reckon pdx games are played more by academics and people with higher average income than other genres I guess (no data to support my claim though, but pdx should have an answer).
For myself I would easily pay 70-100 euro for a game that is fleshed out.
That doesnt mean I would squander my money.
E.g. I thought about buying I:R right away, but after learning it is a bit barebones, I hold back a year or so and might buy it at a sale when DLCs and patches are out.
I learned from paradox that games are way better few years after release and cheaper.
On the other hand, there is no guarantee people are happier with a game even if more resources are dedicated to it (with a higher selling price).
So there is a higher risk for a company involved with this strategy.
Plus you lose a lot of casual players who just buy a game and ditch it after 20 hours (vast majority of players).
Judging by the number of DLCs you have that's not true. More features in the base game means less features in the DLC, which means less money spent on DLC and more on the base game.
First of all, I bought most of my items during sales(for example I bought CK2 expansions on a 75% discount IIRC). The only time I buy something full price is because I really want it (for example Man the Guns). Secondly, if I buy the base game for a standard Paradox price of 40 euros, I have saved 30 euros which I can spend on entirely optional DLC. There, I just saved myself 30 euros.
So if the base game had all those same features at the cost of extra development time and a higher price tag, you wouldn't buy it?
Just going to make a point that if you are not on huge amounts of income, it is a hell of a lot easier to find £35 and £15-20 six months later than £60-70 at once (because for some people, you might not be in a position to save it.) One of my mates is in this sort of position.
I'll of course buy it but I don't mind the DLCs at all.I do want base game to get more rich however.
DLCs let us choose what we want in it and how much we are willing to pay for it and when we want to purchase the features in it.It let us customize our purchase as well as provide us with long term support for the game through base updates.
I wouldn't buy it, it's too expensive. Would you realize that a feature in the base game was supposed to be in a DLC? How would you know that "Send volunteers" was supposed to be in the base game? I would just consider base game to be a base game and 70 euros is too much too pay, way too much.
Oddly, I was about to start a similar thread.
Mine was going to be about how people seem to be focused on the "OMG SO BARE BONES" concept which has caught Johan et al completely off guard. I've been looking over Rome and I don't see it. I'm with Johan. Rome seems, to me, to be a pretty solid game.
Paradox seems to be (to quote another thread) a victim of its own success. People are comparing base games, which are fully fleshed out games, to CK2 that have literally a decade of growth and expansion. So, in a way, every new GSG historical game Paradox releases will have this problem.
How could Victoria 3 be released without ALL of the features of HOI4 and EU4? If it doesn't feature them, people will howl at the moon. Which means that Paradox is at a strange (heh) paradoxical point of game development where their previous titles dictate a level of features for all future titles, which means that each game designer almost has to start with a feature list from the previous title AND ALL CURRENT ACTIVE TITLES, put the whole thing on a white board, and start chopping until you reach "perfection", then decide how to build that game.
Then you decide on how much time you'll need, a budget process, and then you go to Dnote and he tells you that you, and your team, are out of your gourd and to go back and come back with a timeframe with 1000 less hours. So you need to figure out how to chop 1000 hours off.
And you need to keep doing that until you have a budget and a product.
Which means that yes, base games are going to have to move from $40 or $50 to $70 and add a few months of development time. And it's going to be risky.
And that means that Victoria 3 is most definitely NOT the game to try that model out, because Victoria 3 is NOT a commercially masterful monster. It's going to have to be EU5, CK3, or HOI5.
That's the marketing message from your Uncle Duukie.
Mine was going to be about how people seem to be focused on the "OMG SO BARE BONES" concept which has caught Johan et al completely off guard. I've been looking over Rome and I don't see it. I'm with Johan. Rome seems, to me, to be a pretty solid game.
Paradox seems to be (to quote another thread) a victim of its own success. People are comparing base games, which are fully fleshed out games, to CK2 that have literally a decade of growth and expansion. So, in a way, every new GSG historical game Paradox releases will have this problem.
How could Victoria 3 be released without ALL of the features of HOI4 and EU4? If it doesn't feature them, people will howl at the moon. Which means that Paradox is at a strange (heh) paradoxical point of game development where their previous titles dictate a level of features for all future titles, which means that each game designer almost has to start with a feature list from the previous title AND ALL CURRENT ACTIVE TITLES, put the whole thing on a white board, and start chopping until you reach "perfection", then decide how to build that game.
Then you decide on how much time you'll need, a budget process, and then you go to Dnote and he tells you that you, and your team, are out of your gourd and to go back and come back with a timeframe with 1000 less hours. So you need to figure out how to chop 1000 hours off.
And you need to keep doing that until you have a budget and a product.
Which means that yes, base games are going to have to move from $40 or $50 to $70 and add a few months of development time. And it's going to be risky.
And that means that Victoria 3 is most definitely NOT the game to try that model out, because Victoria 3 is NOT a commercially masterful monster. It's going to have to be EU5, CK3, or HOI5.
That's the marketing message from your Uncle Duukie.
Few people worth listening to are doing this. From another thread:
Paradox has a real problem reinventing the wheel and starting from square one every time they develop a new title. The same thing happened with HOI4, which took very few lessons from HOI3, HOI2, AoD, and DH, ditched perfectly good mechanics and features, and tried to make everything anew, with some success and some failure. Imperator is the same way, it doesn't seem like the devs took lessons from CK2, EU4, or any other title. It's like they rewound the clock to right after EU:Rome development stopped and said "ok, what next?"
EDIT: Turns out that's exactly what they did
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I saw that, too. I don't think you and I are as far apart as you might think. Let me relate to you something from my work field. I own an insurance agency and one of my carriers is Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan. Each "team" at BCBSM has its own, specific, client system, and these systems don't talk to each other. So when you, as an agent or client, call in, the customer service people aren't able to help you with different issues and can't see outside of their own tiny box (for example if the client has both a Medicare supplement and a Prescription Drug plan). As an agent, from my web portal with BCBSM, I can see both plans because I have a top-down agent view. But from inside BCBSM they can't see the issue. It's maddening.
Paradox seems to have the same issue. As players, we can see the issue clearly, but inside Paradox they seem blind to the fact that they DON'T have simple feature-sharing between different games that are all, theoretically, based on the same engine. Example: Not every game STILL has a "continue last save" option, and even among the ones that do it's not always in the same place. Some it's in the launcher, some inside the game post-launcher.
Paradox needs a "Best Game Practices" baseline where certain QoL features that have become staples of their games are introduced and become "Must-Haves" in every iteration of every game, and there should really be better communication between the teams so that, for example, if the Stellaris team gets slaughtered for something that happens during their release of an expansion, the other teams can learn from the mistake so the entire company can grow. If something goes exceptionally WELL AND GOOD then THAT should be shared ("Hey guys! We added a cool feature to Majesty 3 and the players built statues to us in Stockholm! Look out the window! You should add this in your next patch!").
That way, when a feature becomes such an ingrained part of the game culture, it doesn't turn up as "missing" out of a release.
Does that clarify what I (hope) I meant?
Definitely, though isn't it part of Johan's job to oversee the various groups to provide some continuity at least? I'm not familiar enough with Paradox's corporate structure but that's what his title would imply.
I agree they should increase price to 60$ at least for release and increase development time.
I mean if people paid 60$ for anno 1800, that shouldn't be a problem for PDX games.
I mean if people paid 60$ for anno 1800, that shouldn't be a problem for PDX games.
You just assume that more time and money mean better products. No. Many expensive games with years of development turn out to be bad or unfinished anyway. Also increasing prices ALWAYS limits your customers, no matter how academic or not, so it has certain risks. Paradox has increased its size and value significantly by using the current method, so I don't think they'll change their policy just because one of their games got bad reviews.
As one of the fools who paid $60 for Anno 1800 and played it for only like a week, switching to Imperator because it was Paradox, and then continuing to choose Imperator over Anno 1800 despite Imperator's somewhat stale peacetime gameplay, I concur with this wholeheartedly.
Here's the thing:
Paradox games are already a niche market. And by definition, looking at the market, Paradox basically assumes that over the course of a game's life the average Paradox player is going to drop HUNDREDS of dollars on a single game.
Asking for $70 up front so the game gets an extra month or two of development time isn't the worst idea and probably wouldn't cost them any sales. The people that won't pay $70 up front probably wouldn't pay $50 up front and would be waiting for the sale anyway.