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.
Lilja began by making what struck me as a slightly unhelpful comparison with painting, designed, I think, to illustrate that game development is a messy, open-ended process. “I think that’s one of the things that we’re trying to do – to address that [perception],” he said. “The reason that our business is sustainable is that we launch a game, that is good enough. But, like a painting – when is a painting done? When you stop painting it, I guess. Game development is quite a lot the same.”
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.”
Lilja thinks that “expectations are higher” today with regard to how much goes into the base game – a continuation of sentiments from earlier in the interview about how “accepting” players are that technical problems will be fixed after launch. But he still thinks Paradox are walking the line well enough. “If you look at Crusader Kings 3, it was a really solid game at launch and it now has DLC,” he said. “But we also offer another subscription model, so people can come in and at least try content without having to invest as heavily. And some stay in the subscription model, some convert to DLC, when they’ve had a chance to feel around. So we try to find ways for people to not have to say ‘yes, all in’ or ‘no, never’ but to find a middle ground.”
Lilja also shared a little about how exactly Paradox first-party divide their resources between developing for the base game and for post-release expansions, including some thoughts on when and where the developers may have gotten the ratio wrong. “We build games of systems – it’s a system of systems, that’s mostly what our games are,” he said. “Not all systems are created equal. So the question is, what systems are core to this game. The experience of Hearts of Iron 4 – what is the most important system to have fully fleshed-out to make it a good game, that has to be there? But maybe we don’t do everything because again, we would never be done.”
“When we fail, it looks something like Victoria 3,” he went on. “People wanted more warfare. It existed in the game, but it was barebones – you could go to war, but maybe that was not the [focus]. So you had other things, diplomacy, economics, building your country, whatever. But people wanted the warfare. So there we maybe missed it a bit. Maybe we should have focused on that, because that was part of the fantasy that people wanted in this game.” Paradox are still “catching up” with Victoria 3, he added.
What does this division of labour and resources translate to in hard numbers, I asked? How do Paradox allocate time between the launch game and post-release development? It’s obviously quite a broad question – different projects have different ins and outs, and Lilja didn’t give me a very granular answer. But he did estimate that, right now, a Paradox grand strategy game might take around five years to make, versus around a year for a larger paid expansion.
“Five years to make, depending on the length of the concept phase, which can be quite long as well, and then a DLC takes maybe a year,” he said. “So it could be five to one, for the base game versus the first big DLC expansion. We can do smaller content, but it’s very clear that people prefer the bigger DLCs. That’s what people like – the smaller content pieces are maybe nice to have, but it’s the bigger pieces.”
The picture is always shifting, however. Echoing other industry executives, Lilja observed that development costs have gone up dramatically over the past decade. “Generally speaking, the requirements on games, have grown over time,” he noted. “People get accustomed to a certain standard, I guess. And they expect that or better. So team sizes over time have grown quite a lot. I think generally that is also part of the problem, right now in the games industry, that teams are huge. Our teams aren’t huge, but they’re way bigger now than they were a couple of years ago, or 10 years ago. It’s a big difference.”
Paradox’s team sizes have expanded partly because they want their grand strategy games to reach players who might find grand strategy absolutely impenetrable. “We want our games to be more accessible, so we need to focus more on that than just the core features – we need to build out around these things,” Lilja said. “But it also means that every piece of content we make becomes more expensive.”
The unspoken context here, of course, is that Paradox have been doing a lot of cost-cutting over the past two years, closing studios, cancelling games and laying people off. This seemingly has less to do with the publisher’s tentpole grand strategy business than with their outside bets on new genres, such as XCOM-style turn-based tactics games and life sims. But Paradox’s grand strategy forever-games haven’t all escaped the guillotine: the publishers stopped supporting updates for Nimble Giant’s unfortunately titled Star Trek: Infinite the year after launch.
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.”
This news piece is the fourth in what I would have branded the Paradox Files, if the conversations were slightly juicier, or if I had slightly less shame. Elsewhen at the same event, Lilja aired his current expectations for the much-delayed and shuffled-around Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, which increasingly feels like it should be called something else. He and Fåhraeus also talked about what went wrong with Life By You, and why they’re still keen to publish a Paradox life sim.