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Corporations are not our friends???????????????
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Jan 25, 2020 06:16
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on the plus side a subscription model would probably let them allocate hours to things that aren't the current and hottest dlc and go back to tidy up mechanics, like total war does as was compared earlier maybe
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Jan 25, 2020 06:25
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I get why they'd want to try going deep rather than wide by getting more money from existing fans rather than acquire more fans, since their last attempt at broadening appeal by trying out a new time period went badly. Even if their profits stood technically the same, "re-arranging" them into regular subscriptions rather than bumpy and uncertain one-time purchases is much more appealing to finance people and potential investors. But it's also entirely logical for customers to not want to spend more money. I'd rather they chase whales who want cosmetic DLC than try collecting subscriptions that will be hard to cancel. Or even better, try making some better games that will be hits in their own right instead of trying to cannibalize the stuff they already have, but that's better said than done. I'd like to see maybe a fantasy or sci-fi game with a crafted setting, but even if there's hundreds of ways to do that right, there's probably thousands to do it wrong.
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Jan 25, 2020 06:34
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Gamerofthegame posted:on the plus side a subscription model would probably let them allocate hours to things that aren't the current and hottest dlc and go back to tidy up mechanics, like total war does as was compared earlier What’s sad is there was a time when Paradox kicked the poo poo out of Total War But now TW and CA (a subsidiary of SEGA) is doing almost everything right while Paradox keeps on... this
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Jan 25, 2020 06:48
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Speaking of Total War War Hammers, is #2 worth getting for $20.39? Do I need to gasp buy all the DLC?
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Jan 25, 2020 07:20
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Stux posted:this assumes it wont just replace buying the dlcs at any point, that the pricing is favorable, and ignores that the more logical solution to their dlc pricing is to actually cut the prices on old dlc instead of still selling in 2020 art of war for £15 and freaking conquest of paradise for £10. its a solution for a problem that exists on purpose and they want to use as the "solution" because it makes more money than just rolling the freaking dlc that just puts in a random new world no one uses into the base game 6 years after it came out. the actual solution is to just make the cost of entry lower overall instead of every now and again if you catch a bundle. As mentioned, the above also has the advantage of making it easier to keep the games bloat free, letting Paradox revisit features and expand on them rather than having to create parallel features modeling the same poo poo because they can't be sure any given player has a given DLC. That to me seems like an obvious way to keep player engagement high, leading to more sales to the existing playerbase and better word of mouth that can convince new players to join it - especially now that the barrier to entry would also be lower. Hell, the fact that a theme could be revisited later could also mean Paradox would be able to extract more features from the same amount of hours put in - half-finished concepts from earlier on, combined with player-feedback in the years following the original DLC release, providing the framework for new features that build on the ones that were just rolled into the base game.
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Jan 25, 2020 08:14
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AnoHito posted:That is almost always the main objective of tech companies moving to a subscription model. The objective is to generally have a single code base for all your users and not have to re-sell the app every time you upgrade, allowing you to move away from marquee app selling features on every release. It’s as much about lowering support costs and offering predictable revenue as making more money. DLC sales need to support ongoing maintenance but people buy for new content and this tension impacts decision making. For indie developers this is a lifeblood. For big tech cos, this is good for the bottom line. If Paradox is moving to an optional sub model then it could be the worst of both worlds for them. Players will move to whatever model is personally cheaper (or morally acceptable) while Paradox can’t reap the support benefits of presuming that all players have the same features, and still need to market the new expansions. On the other hand, the lower barrier to entry may mean that the long tail gets longer for the games and it’s a net win as far as income. People love all you can eat buffets even if it’s not the most cost effective way of getting food. Hence the tests. The financial world LOVES the subscription model, BTW. Mostly for the predictability of recurring revenue. For decades, Apple stock has traded below where you’d expect because analysts remained skeptical that the company could ever launch a new successful product, even as it kept launching successful products. As the company has moved towards services (which includes encouraging App developers to subscription models) and financing plans that let you essentially subscribe to iPhone, the company has become a Wall Street darling.
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Jan 25, 2020 09:19
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I’m the financial world, famous for never losing billions and taking the rest of us with it
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Jan 25, 2020 09:38
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appropriatemetaphor posted:Speaking of Total War War Hammers, is #2 worth getting for $20.39? Do I need to gasp buy all the DLC? Yes, absolutely. If you own the first game, all the DLC and content for that carries over to game 2. As for the rest of it, it's a matter of taste. Once you're tired of the other factions, pick up Tomb Kings and Vampire Coast to make them playable (they'll exist in the game as AIs regardless). The other DLCs add new starting positions and units to the existing factions. Again, you can just wait until you're bored of the stuff in the base game. The only one I'd say is really essential is The Prophet & the Warlock; it includes some of the best Skaven units, and they honestly feel anemic without it. All the other factions feel fine without their DLC units. Also you have to manually unlock each of the free DLCs, you don't just automatically get them.
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Jan 25, 2020 10:09
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Cease to Hope posted:stux is being all stux but this strikes me as incredibly naive, especially when you've got paradox execs hitting social media and replying to people who want it to apply to all of paradox's games with "oh, good idea, we'll have to think about that" There is a massive difference between having different pricing options (which is what Ebba is talking about) and applying a possible EU4 solution across all brands. Like it's literally the first experiment on pricing, drawing any conclusion from that other than "they are experimenting with pricing" is a bit bonkers. It's kind of like arguing that just because we did some experiments on Magicka 1, then we're going to change things in EU3. Or people not realizing that due to the way big event sales in gaming (like Steam Lunar Sale) it's almost never worth it to go lower that 50% off since you'd just make less money. Because the lower you go the more copies you need to sell to hit a sales target.
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Jan 25, 2020 10:11
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Speaking of games that fill Paradox's niche but aren't TW, has anyone played Nobunaga's Ambition: SOI? Sounds like it's Shogun 2: TW but with more focus on the overmap, so basically a Paradox game but you can influence the battles instead of getting hosed by dice rolls.
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Jan 25, 2020 10:33
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cKnoor posted:There is a massive difference between having different pricing options (which is what Ebba is talking about) and applying a possible EU4 solution across all brands. Like it's literally the first experiment on pricing, drawing any conclusion from that other than "they are experimenting with pricing" is a bit bonkers. Yeah just like that time Paradox experimented with DLCs instead of expansions and never implemented that system elsewhere.
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Jan 25, 2020 10:35
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cKnoor posted:Or people not realizing that due to the way big event sales in gaming (like Steam Lunar Sale) it's almost never worth it to go lower that 50% off since you'd just make less money. cKnoor posted:Because the lower you go the more copies you need to sell to hit a sales target.
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Jan 25, 2020 10:43
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Why don't you raise the price of the games then? I mean, you wouldn't have to sell as many then. It's not a linear relationship. As price goes up, the number if sales generally dips faster. Also product expectations go up sharply. If you charged $200 out of the gate, there would be almost zero tolerance for bugs or other problems.
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Jan 25, 2020 10:49
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cKnoor posted:There is a massive difference between having different pricing options (which is what Ebba is talking about) and applying a possible EU4 solution across all brands. Like it's literally the first experiment on pricing, drawing any conclusion from that other than "they are experimenting with pricing" is a bit bonkers. It's literally not the first experiment on pricing, loads of other companies have experimented with subscription models in their pricing, and people are quite reasonably extrapolating from the results of those previous experiments. PDS is no longer a special unique outfit, they're a division of a publicly traded video game company, it's not bonkers to expect they'll behave like other publicly traded video game companies.
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Jan 25, 2020 11:03
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Dramicus posted:It's not a linear relationship. As price goes up, the number if sales generally dips faster. Reveilled posted:It's literally not the first experiment on pricing, loads of other companies have experimented with subscription models in their pricing, and people are quite reasonably extrapolating from the results of those previous experiments. PDS is no longer a special unique outfit, they're a division of a publicly traded video game company, it's not bonkers to expect they'll behave like other publicly traded video game companies.
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Jan 25, 2020 11:30
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appropriatemetaphor posted:Speaking of Total War War Hammers, is #2 worth getting for $20.39? Do I need to gasp buy all the DLC? two is a v good game, if you pick up the first too you can play a map that merges it all together, too. The DLCs are all pretty good, the ten dollar ones (right now, anyway) are full on factions. All of still exists in game even if you don't get it, though, you just can't play it. A little annoying for the smaller ones that add a couple of units the AI will get, but eh. Tomb Kings and Vampire Coast in particular are popular.
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Jan 25, 2020 14:09
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“don’t worry everyone, this time will be the time that finance capitalism doesn’t gently caress up everything!”
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Jan 25, 2020 14:12
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cKnoor posted:There is a massive difference between having different pricing options (which is what Ebba is talking about) and applying a possible EU4 solution across all brands. Like it's literally the first experiment on pricing, drawing any conclusion from that other than "they are experimenting with pricing" is a bit bonkers. i want the lesson of this experiment to be "it is a real bad idea to pivot to software-as-a-service" you can't argue that it's a bad idea to cut prices because paradox makes less money then turn around and expect us to believe that this new pricing model is for our convenience and not maximizing paradox's profits. taking the first steps in what is clearly a plan that will eventually maximize paradox's profits at our expense is bad and i think it's perfectly reasonable to say so! Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Jan 25, 2020 |
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Jan 25, 2020 14:37
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cKnoor posted:There is a massive difference between having different pricing options (which is what Ebba is talking about) and applying a possible EU4 solution across all brands. Like it's literally the first experiment on pricing, drawing any conclusion from that other than "they are experimenting with pricing" is a bit bonkers. youre basically asking us to ignore that every other single case where a game has pivoted to a service model its been more expensive and worse and has absolutely replaced older systems due to it being more profitable. its paradox's first experiment but the results are already known and there is no reason to expect the outcome to change.
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Jan 25, 2020 14:54
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I was thinking about how fun it is that each time a DLC comes round paradox games becomes buggy and sometimes completely unplayable for a month until they patch it, sounds like a great idea to charge people for that month too
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Jan 25, 2020 15:18
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Raskolnikov38 posted:“don’t worry everyone, this time will be the time that finance capitalism doesn’t gently caress up everything!” ABOUT TIME
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Jan 25, 2020 16:22
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Raskolnikov38 posted:“don’t worry everyone, this time will be the time that finance capitalism doesn’t gently caress up everything!” To be fair, it only occasionally falls apart and destroys the economy every couple of decades, usually it just slowly sucks money and resources away from everywhere else. On the positive side of things, the financial industry does sometimes facilitate exponential growth by allocating money to people with growth potential, but some of them have figured out how to make money off of destroying the people they invest in, and it turns out that's sometimes more reliable.
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Jan 25, 2020 17:22
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Mr Snips posted:I was thinking about how fun it is that each time a DLC comes round paradox games becomes buggy and sometimes completely unplayable for a month until they patch it, sounds like a great idea to charge people for that month too You joke but I actually miss when MTG first game out and the base game's AI didn't understand how to run USA with the new demagogue advisers but not the MTG DLC with focus tree reasons to appoint either. End result? USA appoints fascist AND communist demagogues ASAP and by '43 could be anything. My fave was watching the CSA win the 2nd American Civil War, then turn Communist.
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Jan 25, 2020 19:46
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Mr Snips posted:I was thinking about how fun it is that each time a DLC comes round paradox games becomes buggy and sometimes completely unplayable for a month until they patch it, sounds like a great idea to charge people for that month too Remember when DLC launched for EU4 that made the game crash on start-up if you had any mods at all in the mods folder, and then one of the devs wrote a spirited post in the Paradox forums that they can't be expected to test all hardware configurations, like having any mods at all 
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Jan 25, 2020 20:39
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Remember when Johan posted here regularly and these dumb map games weren't world-famous
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Jan 25, 2020 20:42
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Remember when we had hope for Victoria 3 ever releasing?
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Jan 25, 2020 20:53
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:Remember when we had hope for Victoria 3 ever releasing? No.
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Jan 25, 2020 21:35
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:Remember when we had hope for Victoria 3 ever releasing? The best part of the "dawn of chaos" C-SPAM thread is talking about Vicky 3 alongside HoI XXXIV or whatever
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Jan 25, 2020 21:36
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Remember when Johan posted here regularly and these dumb map games weren't world-famous he didnt stop because of paradox games getting more popular, he stopped because of the embarrassment that was imperator
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Jan 25, 2020 22:04
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I don't want to stan CA too much, but, I am checking out the new 3K DLC and as someone colourblind, I really appreciate that in the graphics options there's a colourblind settting complete with little coloured boxes you can toggle to make sure you can see the game-relevant colours. There are really times in paradox games where I get baffled by the fifteenth mapmode's colouration and a simple colour toggle would help a lot Also as always let us change country colours but still get cheevos you hacks.
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Jan 26, 2020 02:34
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ca is actually good sega, assumedly, sets the price of the dlc kinda high but everything involved is usually good and high quality and well intregrated, which cannot necessarily be said the same for paradox stuff it ok tho
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Jan 26, 2020 02:58
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Is 3K fun if I don't want to play the battles?
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Jan 26, 2020 03:18
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3k’s strength over other total wars is in the campaign layer, so probably, but if you don’t want to play the rts battles I wouldn’t recommend total war at all.
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Jan 26, 2020 03:28
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yikes! posted:3k’s strength over other total wars is in the campaign layer, so probably, but if you don’t want to play the rts battles I wouldn’t recommend total war at all. Yeah I agree with this, the campaign layer is there mostly to contextualize the battles and make them meaningful. If you don't care about the battles, those are generally considered the strength of the game.
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Jan 26, 2020 03:32
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CA and I guess Sega is much better at least right now, of releasing easily compartmentalized dlc. Also when you're comparing your game to actual GW models anything looks cheap.  but like if I just love say the Empire I don't have to buy anything but dlc related to the Empire and I get the best Empire experience. I don't need some random thing from the High Elf dlc for my Empire game. I don't know if 3K is as discreet as W2, but it's a powerful advantage for a dlc based game.
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Jan 26, 2020 03:38
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Ham Sandwiches posted:Yeah I agree with this, the campaign layer is there mostly to contextualize the battles and make them meaningful. If you don't care about the battles, those are generally considered the strength of the game. I've tried Paradox games when I've realized that Total War games make me more interested in characters and march of history. Now that Paradox games are overloaded with meaningless numbers I sometimes feel that TW naive view on history is interesting again.
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Jan 26, 2020 14:23
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the last time I really enjoyed total war's real time battles was shogun 2 or really medieval 1. The AI and general battle tactics just isn't at an interesting level for me, whereas the abstracted battles for paradox titles is fine because so much more effort is spent on the campaign map. Which, for total war has generally been poo poo. I guess it's up to Paradox to prove the sub model will work for them in spite of evidence in the industry that it's generally bad. They're going to do this no matter what people say so I'd just sit back and see what happens.
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Jan 26, 2020 15:42
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Dreylad posted:the last time I really enjoyed total war's real time battles was shogun 2 or really medieval 1. The AI and general battle tactics just isn't at an interesting level for me, whereas the abstracted battles for paradox titles is fine because so much more effort is spent on the campaign map. Which, for total war has generally been poo poo. Unfortunately, that doesn't work, thanks to Whales that get utterly addicted, they'll make the subscription service seem profitable and the next thing is that it'll be subscription only, that's it, at this point, the worst is usually correct.
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Jan 26, 2020 16:36
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Are you confusing subscription with gacha?
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Jan 26, 2020 16:37
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