This is my experience as well. My first digital purchase of a game was a Paradox game (EU3) on their own platform at the time (Gamersgate). But somewhere along the way (probably when they decided to stop with DRM-free releases and move everything to Steam, and a bit later when they started what would become their current update/DLC strategy) our paths diverged. I would buy anything Paradox before that. Nowadays, I almost skipped Planetfall because Triumph got acquired by Paradox (though I did buy it because of Triumph and I don’t regret that).
Anyway, even if they lost me, they still have a lot of fans who love them. Well, I guess? The reviews on Steam paint a different picture, but what do I know?
About four years ago or so, I praised someone on twitter – maybe Quill18, maybe someone else – for having done a really good new (at the time) Crusader Kings 2 tutorial. I think I said that the person who did that tutorial series on Youtube deserved to be on Paradox’s payroll, since Paradox themselves couldn’t be bothered to help new players learn their games.
And Fredrik Wester – out of the blue, I didn’t @ him, so he’s obviously looking for shit to stir – replies by telling me that their games have multiple ways to learn to play. And his tweet was terse and pissy and defensive.
And so I replied back to remind Fred (who’d jumped into my mentions mind you) that the built-in, in-game tutorial for CK2 was broken by the game’s 2nd or 3rd expansion (and not by the expansion, but by the accompanying free patch) and had never been fixed and remained inoperable for new players for years. He then changed his tone, but I was still “You seem very nice, Fred, but it’d be great if you guys would fix the broken tutorial in your game, too.”
I remember many years ago listening to a podcast (possibly 3MA, maybe something else) with Fredrik Wester on it and he acted with a lot of braggadocio mentioning how the diehards on the Paradox forums would fuck anyone up who was criticizing Paradox games. Almost like he was daring anyone to come at them since he could send his flying monkeys out to silence them on a whim. It was a brief moment on the podcast but very enlightening to hear how the Paradox leadership thought.
Paradox deserves the current state of their forums/discourse since they cultivated that exact tone for many years.
With a little effort I am sure I could find that podcast again.
Edit: Without listening to it this evening I believe it was episode 219 (June 5, 2013) of Three Moves Ahead with this caption:
Rob talks to the Paradox brain trust of CEO Fred Wester and VP Shams Jorjani to discuss publishing, Paradox’s approach to the business, and whether reviewers are the enemy.
Speaking only for myself, I haven’t visited it in years. I look around this place, mostly, for PC stuff, and also Steam reviews and Reddit, and I like Push Square for PS4 stuff and Nintendo Life for Switch stuff and RPGfan for RPG stuff, but I’m not married to any of it.
Come on it’s not like the pdox forums are full of white nationalists who got away with using racist language like calling Turkey ‘kebab’ for years and years… oh wait it’s exactly like that.
I believe every customer in a business can give you some nasty feedback when he is angry.
Will communicate not only DATA but Feelings. Generally the customer will just communicate feelings, and data is something you have to filter for, or ask for.
You can’t really train people to give constructive feedback. But maybe you can have a employee that do this filtering. Or you yourself can learn to filter it considering it is like this.
Is not the customer job to learn how to do good feedback for computer programs. I found the devs post a bit naive, but maybe it worked somewhat to put down the flames, I don’t know.
Yes. On Discord, you can’t wind up in someone’s innocent Google search to find out about your game who then sees the negative stuff. Every Discord for a game is typically a holding pen for the sycophants that love the thing the Discord was created for.
You can control who gets in a lot easier in Discord, someone circumnavigating bans can get banned by discord entirely, not just the individual site forum.
Though I’ve never interacted with him Wester strikes me by reputation as a typical “tech-bro” in that he’s absolutely ruthless about promoting his own company no matter a history of smiles and thumbs up on community lines of dialogue. After Paradox went public I guess you can convince yourself that doing anything and everything at all times to increase shareholder value is >>>> than whatever cheevos you get in fan communities.
Which is actually about 90% right… but you do this by just not communicating with the community except though official PR and vetted channels.
Oh, I get that. But when you come in to someone’s twitter mentions with guns blazing…and you can be dismissed with “That’s great, but why don’t you guys fix this broken piece of your game”…well, maybe consider options first. :)
In fact, that Paradox never fixed the broken Crusader Kings 2 in-game tutorial and continued to develop new, paid dlc for the game for another 5 years after this exchange speaks to a mindset there that isn’t maybe super-healthy.
In fact, if we consider that the game’s selling shelf-life was the October 2019 CK3 announcement, CK2 had a selling shelf-life of more than 7 1/2 years. For about 5 of those years, the in-game tutorial was broken, and it was never addressed. To learn the game you had to turn to third parties, essentially. And that was adopted and accepted as a business model.
(And to be clear here: right now one of the main focuses of my entire job is documenting and creating an online help system for the software platform for the company I work for. And it is slow-going, it’s not nearly as fun as other aspects of my job, and I feel like I’m constantly retracing my own steps as I go, because our software evolves through various generations of development that is ongoing. But it has to be done, because holy hell, it’s just good business, not to mention an implied obligation when we license the use of our platform to companies, organizations and individuals.)
In the case of CK2 and EU4 (those are the two games I have the most experience playing), the thing that really gets me is that they’ve already done the hard part! The tool-tipping in Paradox games is pretty amazing! And once you’ve done that bit, putting together a tutorial that explains the interface, the core gameplay conventions, and provides a little guidance to shove players merrily down the slope on their skis feels like something that can be handled pretty expeditiously by comparison.
Yeah, I don’t really get it either. That said, a startling number of strategy games these days either have no tutorial or a useless one - it’s clearly not something that’s considered important anymore thanks to the prevalence of streamers and such. Speaking as someone that has no real patience for video as a tutorial format, it’s pretty maddening.
A lot of boardgame publishers big and small do this – they do write a full manual, but that’s meant as a reference. They contract with Rodney Smith or Paul Grogan or someone similar to do a how-to-play video as well.
The big difference there is the media. A tabletop game cannot grow and iterate on itself quite as easily as a videogame can, and once you’ve done rules errata, it kind of is what it is. And I think that’s the reason I’m pretty much OK with a boardgame youtube tutorial.
I suspect the man hours and overhead of Paradox strategy game expansions is orders of magnitude smaller than other games, and the profitability of them is some of the highest in the industry.
There were probably dozens of people involved in the Age of Empires 2 DE expansions at a minimum. There might well be a team of 5-10 people at most as the core group of developing a Paradox expansion. And that’s because the expansion are mainly developing new spreadsheet functions and adding some spreadsheet columns with a veneer of graphics and UI on top.
IE, the business model of Paradox really is fire-and-forget in practice, because the ‘main team effort’ is entirely on dev-ing engines for new games, and I suspect (though to be clear, don’t actually know) the long-tail support and expansion phase of a game is probably a 1/10 or 1/50 of that of the main team. They’re are also probably looking at new players vs old players thanks to all the Steam stats they can gather and decided at some point the games weren’t really drawing new players in past a certain threshold.
