Comment on Paradox Interactive has completely cancelled "Life By You"
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 months agoThey sell you a product at a fair price without putting it behind a loot box, unless I missed something. I don’t think that makes Paradox “just as bad” because they make a lot of DLC that you could choose to not purchase.
They sell you 15 minor features for $10 each and then every tutorial/gameplay video you watch has 5-10 features you’ve never seen before. It fills you with fomo and when you do cave you end up spending $80 to make a $40 game slightly more interesting. It’s predatory as fuck, paradox can go fuck themselves.
Sorry, I really hate paradox.
What am I fearing that I’m missing out on when there are 62 DLCs for Cities: Skylines but I only wanted 3 of them? I wanted Green Cities, After Dark, and Mass Transit, but I really couldn’t care less about Airports. Why does this FOMO apply only to DLC and not the entire library of video games out there that you can opt to buy or not? I really don’t understand it. If you buy one Paradox game, do you have to buy every Paradox game? I hope that this doesn’t come off as me being hostile. I just genuinely don’t understand it. Latching on to gambling addiction in EA’s Ultimate Team DLC is a concept that I can easily understand how it’s predatory. Making a bunch of other products that you may not want to buy does not strike me as predatory but as casting a wide net to make the right content for the right customer.
Just because you’re able to spend $60 on 3 DLCs instead of whatever the 62 DLCs cost, doesn’t mean those DLC are worth what you’re spending. I can buy a single banana instead of the full bunch if I want but if they cost $10 each I’m not getting a good deal.
The fomo is because I’ve already invested in the base game. I can ignore content about games I haven’t bought yet but if I want to watch tutorial videos that have every DLC I have to filter out all the content I haven’t paid for. I can’t engage with the community on equal footing unless I spent 4-5x the price of the base game on overpriced content. That is not an enjoyable experience and has left me with a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to Paradox games. I don’t want to navigate the cesspool that is their monetization strategy so I simply don’t buy their games (I pirate them :^) ).
Well, first I’d say that those three DLCs cost a maximum of $45 and not $60, if they were MSRP, with current MSRP being a little less than that, but I don’t know if they ever got a price cut. Second, Steam sales happen like clockwork, for DLC as well, and there’s no way I spent $45. Third, the right feature to the right person might be worth that price, and that’s the benefit of their model. Over the course of so many years, they can keep working on the game and add niche features, some of which might be up your alley, rather than putting out a base game that lacks features important to you and never expanding the game.
I’m not sure why the tutorials for features you don’t have are a problem, because then you wouldn’t be doing the things they’re doing anyway, but I’m sorry that ruined the experience for you. It’s really hard for me to call that a cesspool though. They just put out a lot of product where you can decide what’s important to you, and I’d say that’s exactly what it ought to be.
They added an option to subscribe instead. Pay a monthly fee, get access to any and all dlc.
I dont love their monetization model either but I understand the need for financial return on the investment of continued development.
Plenty of developers continue to develop content for years after release without selling overpriced DLC. Y’all are coping.
Cities Skylines 2 launch is worse than any EA launch I can remember. Even that sense of accomplishment horseshite. They released a paid DLC 5 months after launch while not dealing with core functionality bugs.
I’m going to rate “exploits addiction to make billions off of legalized gambling for children” as worse than putting out a sub par, broken sequel with DLC 5 months after release.
Using the floor as a bar.
Hilariously, EA has this beat. The Simcity 2013 launch was so terrible, it basically crated city skylines.
TBF, when it comes to The Sims specifically, that’s the same as EA’s model: a bunch of DLC/expansions you don’t have to buy.
Until the next one is an always online live service that means it has an expiration date built into it by design, and that’s not even conjecture; we already know this.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Realistically, at least for Stellaris, Paradox updates the game for free for everyone that breaks everyone’s in-progress games and breaks key features of the game by fundamentally changing how the mechanics work. Then they sell the DLC that is absolutely necessary to fix whatever they broke for people who don’t own the DLC.
Paradox creates the problem and then sells the solution.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I haven’t played that one, so that’s news to me, as I didn’t experience that in Cities: Skylines or Surviving Mars.
lath@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Ck3 with the plague mechanics does this. The base game has some default settings that absolutely wrecks everything once plagues get going and only having the DLC can change those settings.
KombatWombat@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I only played Stellaris off and on, but I went years without buying an expansion and always thought the new systems were complete and better than what they replaced when I returned. Breaking current saves is frustrating, so I guess you would need to delay an update if you had one you planned on returning to.
If you didn’t know, you can roll back to older versions of steam games with some work. A few games have a built-in system, but most of the tile you have to manually replace files after redownloading the old versions.