Paradox respond to the accusation that they fix games with paid DLC

[Pete Dero]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/paradox-respond-to-the-accusation-that-they-fix-games-with-paid-dlc-we-try-to-find-a-middle-ground

Fire up the Steam page for Stellaris, one of my favourite space sims, and you will see 28 pieces of DLC, ranging from free character portraits to £35 expansion passes that span a bunch of species and story packs. Stablemate Europa Universalis 4 has 37 DLC packs under its banner, while Cities Skylines is streets ahead with a whopping 62. Paradox Interactive have long built their core game business around putative forever-projects that trail an enormous mantle of paid expansions. It's seemingly this, as much as their institutional expertise with 4X, that justifies their commitment to grand strategy games, whose worlds and systems can be fleshed out for literal decades.

One drawback of this approach is that Paradox may at least appear to be deliberately withholding features in order to sell expansions down the road. It's certainly a fair conclusion to make when said DLC expansions are later folded back into the base game, which implies that they should have been there to start with. Pretty much every Paradox game I know of has a vociferous group of players who accuse the company of releasing games that must be "fixed with paid DLC". This is especially true of sequels, which inevitably look skinny and malnourished next to their much-expanded and updated predecessors. At the company's Media Day last week, I asked deputy CEO Mathias Lilja how exactly the company assign resources between main game and DLC development, and how they address the perception of "fixing with DLC" - especially given their more recent experiments with subscription models, which arguably bake in the practice of holding material back.

More intelligibly, Lilja suggested that Paradox's developers have long had a kind of unspoken agreement with dedicated players that they will build a business around DLC without taking the piss. "That's the deal we have with our fans - we will continue to develop these games as long as you play it, and we can sell DLC. That's our sustainable business, and that's how we get these games that live for - [in the case of] Europa Universalis 4, it's about 10 years now. It's now called Early Access, but we did that earlier and we didn't call it that. We developed as far as we thought would [make for] a good game. And if we have fans that want it, they will play it, and then we can continue to build on it."

I spoke to Paradox's chief creative officer Henrik Fåhraeus after my chat with Lilja. He had less patience for the charge of "fixing games with DLC", arguing that Paradox have a decent track record for overhauling and adding to their games at no further cost. "That's the negative way of looking at it," he told me. "This game will live for a long time and even if I don't buy anything, it's going to keep getting better, right? That's what we're after."

Fåhraeus did caveat that Paradox have gotten a little "lost" recently with regard to their paid DLC strategy. But he also told me that you can't please everyone. "Since this is subjective, there will always be people who think that every game is incomplete, when we release it, and that it needs more of something," he said. "So there's no getting around that, but what we can do is do our utmost to ensure that it feels like a really good game, that the quality is high and that it meets player expectations. What do players expect? Quality."

[Tripoli]

In fairness, I can understand Paradox's strategy, and it does have some benefit for players.  The players get a game plus support for 10+ years using this model.  Matrix is able to do the same with some games they sell to the military, such as CMO.  In the Matrix business model, it is the government that effectively pays for the continued support and development of the commercial CMO game, giving the game a longer lifespan.  In Paradox's case, the game's lifespan is extended by the consumer buying DLCs.  In both cases, the consumer benefits from a game with replayability spanning 10+ years.

[Sigwolf]

The amount of DLC for Paradox games, and the price they charge, has always been pretty crappy.  I haven't really kept up with current releases, due largely to my unmanageable backlog of un-played games. 

In the past, each major dlc release has included free updates to the base game so that everyone benefited from the continuing development.

Is that no longer the case?

I think they got the most out of hand with the cosmetic dlc, which was never truly "necessary", but led too many people to feel they were 'missing out' without it.