Tldr: They’ve been going through this cycle of consecutive huge successes and consecutive flops for decades but this is the worst series of flops in the company’s history
My guess is because of shareholder pressure
Hearing that imperator Rome surpassed their expectations is surprising because they must have had extremely low expectations. That is my biggest gaming purchase regret of all time.
It improved significantly since release, though.
Strongly disagree
Paradox’s dlc policy is why I might buy the games, but rarely buy the dlc. I do enjoy the gameplay in them, I probably have something like 3k hours between CK2, CK3, EU4 and Stellaris.
Eh, I honestly like their DLC policy. Basically, every year or two, I come back and buy some DLC on sale and basically treat it like a new game. I’ll play EU4 for a couple hundred hours, take a break for a few months, then buy some DLC for a couple hundred more hours. I’d much rather have this than new releases every few years, since I can just add new systems instead of dealing with a bunch of UI and core system changes.
The main problem I see is that they launch things half-baked, which means their games and DLC aren’t worth the price at launch, and by the time they’re properly patched, they’re on a pretty significant discount. I think they’d do much better if they delayed their releases until they’re actually done and cut prices by 25% or so. If they consistently delivered high quality products, I’d probably buy near launch.
The next biggest problem is a shift toward flavor DLC instead of actual mechanics. While I like the flavor, I mostly come for the new mechanics to play with, and at least in EU4, they’ve been reducing the actual amount of new gameplay with each DLC.
