Well, looks like it was just a trailer and the release date: February 22.
Feb 22nd is much sooner than I had anticipated, holy cow. Are they going to beat HOI4’s Waking the Tiger out the gate?!
I’m thinking maybe both at the same time?
My body is ready!
I’ll be ready once I figure out how to go without sleep.
The trailer is pretty good.
Only a few weeks!
for a new player to buy this game now is silly…this is a dead game till 2.0 launches…the sales must be in the toilet …ergo, the sooner 2.0 releases, the better and paradox knows this
It has a “Very Positive” rating on Steam and 1.56 million owners, compared to 941,000 for HOI4. I don’t see any indication that their sales would be in the toilet.
Certainly for me, I have no desire to start a new game until 2.0. I don’t know if a prospective new player would have the same point of view, or even know enough to realize the scale of the changes.
Game to me tend to fall into two categories: ones that I am obsessing about and buy on release and ones that I pick up a brief recommend or gut feeling during a sale.
I’m the same, holding off until 2.0 to try a new game but don’t agree that sales are in the toilet. They are working on fixing the games problems whilst also getting new revenue by following the Paradox DLC method of adding new shineys every now and then. I won’t be buying the new DLC until it’s price drops, but I will dabble with the new patch and see if it re-ignites what interest I had in the game.
1.5 million units sold, figure that and DLC, they should have revenue close to or over 50M.
That is not what I call sales in the toilet.
Until the next release i am playing the Star Trek mod (New Horizons i think). Pretty fun! i think some of the ideas in it are being used in the the next release, starbases, more but cheaper tech. Not saying they took the ideas from the mod, just applying similar ideas.
New Horizons is a great mod with a ton of love put behind it that suffers terribly from the fact that the Stellaris engine simply is not designed to handle its scope. 40+ species with hundreds and hundreds of habitable worlds even at the lowest 25% habitable worlds setting is going to slowdown even the best PC available to a crawl. I’ve got an extremely powerful rig and my hat goes off to anyone who has the patience to ever finish a New Horizons campaign, because the three people who have ever done that must have the patience of actual saints.
It’s frustrating because modern PCs do have the power to handle this, but it’s a damned difficult programming job. It’s too bad we are past the days when you could wait a few years and everything is 4x faster.
The question does remain how much of that is ongoing now. These Paradox games’ continuing development is generally funded by their own profits. With some, like CK2, the tail is long enough to keep it up for years and years. I think it was very mature/altruistic of the devs to recognize that launch Stellaris, while very cool in some ways, was also a title that had lots of gaping holes and significant issues over and above intentional gaps for planned DLC. They’ve been working feverishly for a year or more to get it “right,” but if at some point, that significant investment doesn’t pay off, their generosity could run out.
On the other hand, if all this extra work pays off, wins back fans, and provides a stable, ongoing sales base, then yeah, it could wind up with a CK2-esque lifespan.
Knowing the Paradox of today, the minute Stellaris doesn’t look profitable (or potentially profitable), they will drop it. They won’t even blink.
After providing almost 2+ years of new content and free updates post-release, what company wouldn’t stop updating it if it was no longer profitable (or didn’t look like it was going to turn a corner)? At that point you’d move resources to Stellaris 2 or something else, no?
Fair point, but Paradox has abandoned games with a “beta” patch in the middle of the beta, even filled with reproducible bugs, more than once. The problem is not stopping support - is doing so at the drop of a dime even when they know there are pressing issues that might ruin the experience of people who bought their product.
And there are companies that support their games for years, long after they are “profitable”. Like Blizzard. Or some indie studios I know. But that’s beyond the point; we’re talking about Paradox. And Paradox will surely abandon their games at the first sight of “no profit” faster than EA or Activision or any of the “big bad companies” do.
And that’s PDS games! It’s even worse with the third-party games Paradox publishes. Oh boy.