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I honestly like the Paradox model, game mechanics breaking until patches aside. Give a chunk of new base functionality as a free update. Charge for a more exp
by ethbr1 2y ago
I honestly like the Paradox model, game mechanics breaking until patches aside.
Give a chunk of new base functionality as a free update.
Charge for a more expanded form of that functionality as a DLC.
We can quibble over whether this DLC or that DLC was worth the price, and there are certainly balance issues that are patch resolved, but it keeps expanding their games for years with pretty serious new stuff.
That's more than you can say for other publishers' post-release behavior.
EU4: 11 years
HOI4: 8 years
Stellaris: 8 years
How many games that old are still getting major feature patches/DLC?
- krige 2y agoHow about we don't drip feed content over the years, causing problems and then graciously fixing them?
- Apocryphon 2y agoI mean, do you expect them to have created these massive games with multiple expansions’ worth of content at the beginning? Hasn’t Stellaris been essentially rebuilt over the years with DLC?
- StrauXX 2y agoStellaris has had at least two Ship of Theseus level reworks over the years.
- tsimionescu 2y agoWhy not? The only thing I think you could reasonably say is that it would be nice if there was a built-in way to freeze the game at a certain state, so that you can still play, say, Stellaris 2.0 if that's what you liked, and not get any of the patches that essentially assume you'll also have certain paid DLCs to function fully. But Stellaris 1.0 and all the other were massive games people enjoyed playing, they weren't stripped down skeletons to build DLC on. Were they as good at release as they are 8 years later? Not at all. But having them change and generally evolve over those 8 years is a key part of what makes people still play Stellaris today, when many other games from that time have long been abandoned. Not to mention, plenty of people would have actually preferred it if instead of Civ VI and Civ VII, we were getting Civ V 4.0 today.
- Apocryphon 2y agoMore like Civ IV 5.0 but close enough.
- Talanes 2y agoYeah, it's hard to call their model particularly predatory, when a lot of the industry is going with battle-pass models that rely on FOMO to keep the revenue constant. At least with Paradox you can still buy-in on a sale years after release and not be forever locked out of anything because you weren't playing sooner.
- Elohahs 2y agoOSG!!But If You Do that than you would be stuck in an endless time loop,a never-ending cycle of losing the game and forgetting about it just to respawn again at the point of conundrum and frustration,to be laughed at and mocked by the winner for all time...and then some!You didn't do that though,right?