Editing note: I started this draft several weeks ago. I’m not happy with it, but given the choice between publishing it and delaying again during finals, I went with the former.
In the past few years, I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of Paradox grand strategy games. Specifically, I started with Cities: Skylines before making the jump to Hearts of Iron IV. Following that, I was successfully converted to Stellaris. I haven’t touched the Victoria, Europa Universalis, or Crusader Kings franchises, but sometimes I think it might be awesome to try out the fabled mega-campaign, an undertaking to lead a single country from the earliest dates in Paradox Danes through to the conquest of the galaxy in Stellaris.
But I don’t want to talk about the actual games that Paradox makes. I want to talk about how they make them. Specifically, I want to talk about their funding model. Because Paradox makes really big games. More than the campaigns or the stories are the enormous systems with countless moving part, which, when they gel together properly, serve to create an intricate and finely tuned whole, which seems like a self-consistent world. At their best, the systems paradox builds feel like stepping into a real campaign, constrained not by mechanics themselves, but by the limits of what you can dream, build, and execute within them. They don’t always hit their mark, and when they miss they can fall into incomprehensible layers of useless depth. But when they work, they’re a true experience, beyond mere game.
The problem, besides the toll this takes on any device short of a supercomputer, is that building something with that many moving parts is a technical feat. Getting them to keep working is a marvel. And keeping them updated, adding new bits and pieces to deal with exploits as players find them, making sure that every possible decision by the player is acknowledged and reflected in the story of the world they create, adding story to stop the complexity from breeding apathy, is impossible, at least in the frame of a conventional video game. A game so big will only ever have so many people playing it, so the constant patches required to keep it working can’t be sustained merely by sales.
You could charge people for patches. But that’s kind of questionable if you’re charging people to repair something you sold them. Even if you could fend off legal challenges for forcing players to pay for potential security related fixes, that kind of breaks the implicit pact between player and publisher. You could charge a monthly flat fee, but besides making it a lot harder to justify any upfront costs that puts more pressure to keep pushing out new things to give players a reason to stick around, rather than taking time to work on bigger improvements. Additionally, I’m not convinced the same number of people would shell out a monthly fee for a grand strategy game. You could charge a heck of a lot more upfront. But good luck convincing anyone to fork over four hundred dollars for a game, let alone enough people often enough to keep a full time development team employed.
What Paradox does instead of either of these is sell their games at a steep, but not unseen by industry standards, price, and then release a new DLC, or Downloadable Content package, every so often that expends the game for an additional price. The new DLC adds new approaches and mechanics to play around with, while Paradox releases a free update to everyone with bug fixes and some modest improvements. The effect is a steady stream of income for the developers, at a cost that most players can afford. Those that can’t can wait for a sale, or continue to play their existing version of the game without the fleshed out features.
I can’t decide myself whether I’m a fan of this setup. On the one hand, I don’t like the feeling of having to continue to pay to get the full experience of a game I’ve already purchased, especially since in many cases, the particulars of the free updates mostly serve to make changes to enable the paid features. I don’t like having the full experience one day, and then updating my game to find it now incomplete. And the messaging from Paradox on this point is mixed. It seems like paradox wants to have a membership system but doesn’t want to admit it, and this rubs me the wrong way.
On the other hand, with the amount of work they put into these systems, they do need to make their money back. And while the current system may not be good, it is perhaps the best it can be given the inevitable of market forces. Giving players the option to keep playing the game they have without paying for new features they may not want through a paid membership is a good thing. I can accept and even approve of game expansions, even those which alter core mechanics. It helps that I can afford to keep pace with the constant rollout of new items to purchase.
So is Paradox’s model really a series of expansions, or a membership system in disguise? If it’s a membership system, then they really need to do something about all the old DLCs creating a cost barrier for new players. If my friend gets the base game in a bundle, for instance, it’s ridiculous that, for us to play multiplayer, he either has to shell out close to the original price again for DLCs, or I have to disable all the mechanics I’ve grown used to. If Paradox wants to continue charging for fixing bugs and balancing mechanics, they need to integrate old DLCs into base games, or at the very least, give a substantial discount to let new players catch up for multiplayer without having to fork over hundreds of dollars upfront.
On the other hand if Paradox’s model is in fact an endless march of expansions, then, well, they need to make their expansions better. If Paradox’s official line is that every DLC is completely optional to enjoying the game (ha!), then the DLC themselves need to do more to justify their price tag. To pick on the latest Hearts of Iron IV DLC, Man the Guns: being able to customize my destroyers to turn the whole Atlantic into an impassible minefield, or turning capital ships into floating fortresses capable of smashing enemy ships while also providing air and artillery support for my amphibious tanks, or having Edward VIII show the peasants what happens when you try to tell the King whom he can marry, is all very well and good, I don’t know that it justifies paying $20.
