The Paradox DLC Model: Planning for the Long Term

[Music] we'll try to keep you entertained so the name of this talk is the paradox DLC model planning for the long term and the astute among you might notice that there has been a change of speakers I was supposed to do this talk together with John Anderson but unfortunately he had to cancel pretty much at the last minute so instead - team colleague shams Jorge ani will be jumping in and doing this together with me all right so does everyone know who we are what is the paradox no one summer so I can take this off again thanks everyone for being here so we're gonna go through this presentation and we'll be talking a

little bit about our dlc model and hopefully towards the end we'll do a bit of a Q&A you can kind of ask us if we have our head screwed on straight or what that what's going on and tell us if this makes sense or not but one of the reasons why we are here is that we get a fair amount of for our business model to put it mildly if you if you go and check out any of our you know use the scores on Steam right now you'll see a lot of thumbs down and all they write is the DLC model so that's that's part of the reality but we also have an equal amount of people that defend it and support it quite a bit and we have an even greater amount of people who just buy the games and DLC to hell and back so we're not here to defend the DLC model but we are here to explain and elaborate about a bit about why the business model looks like this and to shed a bit of light behind it then hopefully there's a bit of takeaways and

that you guys can take with you as you go on and make a ton of money hopefully offer your DLC plans right so it's kind of a two-part talk we're doing talked a little bit about the business model and that's more your area yes and I'm going to talk about our design practices and how we decide how to do features and what kind of features we do in these expansions so my name is Henrique phrase I'm a game director at paradox these days I usually do or mostly do game design creative supervision and product management but I've had my hand in our games since 2001 as a programmer scriptor and all kinds of things and I'm probably best known for Crusader Kings - I'm still Aris most recently yeah so my name is gemsto Johnny I've been with paradox about eight years I work in the publishing side so I'm very much the corporate

douchebag in that sense so where Hendrik makes the games fun for you I'm on the other side doing other things and we'll get to that I've done mostly about just about everything at paradox and from marketing production side but most most notably I've run been in charge of our games portfolio for the past seven years so all the bad stuff we've released and signed that's my fault and all the good stuff I've been just partially responsible you could say I've also been part of the management team and I'm very much in charge of running the the part of the business models stuff so I could do like a five hour talk about the business model straight up today so I was happy to jump and jump in but I'll take it all from you Thanks so paradox ooh how many here have played a paradox game right please keep your hands up fantastic how many of you have played a parallel team for more than 10 hours how when you play the power to have more than 100 hours more than 500 hours more

than a thousand hours more than 2,000 hours more than 3000 hours again so awesome fantastic first of all thank you secondly this tells the rest of you who haven't played Paragon who play the paradise game Oh is a few okay poor poor people so paradox games have since their inception always been niche games one of our unofficial slogans has been a game for everyone as a game for no one essentially and we've created these very hardcore sandbox procedural kind of games that have been very much focused on historical settings this is where paradox started paradox made these historical games and work with you know regular publishers this was in 2004 before there was digital distribution before Steam so we work with Atari an Atari published our games the same way

they would have published any old action you own after a while we realized these guys have no idea how we weirdo strategy historical gamers behave talk about games and enjoy them we have to stop working with that publisher and become our own publisher so many of you may be standing in front of that challenge right now - I self-published or not we we asked herself that question in 2004 those a gentleman called Frederick Westar who's an our CEO who came in and presented a business plan to the people who own paradox then and he said you got to become your own publisher they looked at the plan and said get out of here we're closing everything down and they actually closed everything down and gave it to friend who bought the company for one Swedish crown from that point on paradox started becoming its self-published company and once you know these games did fairly well we had our niche audience they cost next to nothing to make and we kind of scramble to survive during those harsh years and after a while we kind of had a bit more

success and decided hey we're pretty good at publishing these weirdo niche games how about we find other weirdo niche games unpublished those and that's what we started doing but we had a shoestring budget so most of those games were actually not that amazing so over the years we've released about a hundred hundred twenty games most of them are not amazing we've had that doesn't mean that people didn't work really hard a lot of these games but you mean we had we had to do what we had to do to survive so that's that's the kind of a back the paradox has had nowadays we've grown quite a bit we're still we consider ourselves very much still a niche publisher in that sense but we've had and pretty a lot of success depending on the what Triple A game is failing currently on Steam we'd be considered top 5 or top 10 publishers depending how you do it and we've done that by sticking to our guns and kept doing those kind of really weird niche strategy games over the years we've

branched out and sometimes we've done stuff that's been more mainstream like magicka and that did fairly well and that allowed us to keep pouring more resources into our core business which was the strategy games so nowadays we have about 200 internal developers or making strategy games of different sorts and then we do a lot of publishing worldwide and we'll get back to the type of you know what would that essentially is meant for the design side of things most recently we released surviving Mars last week which went well we also quite recently bought triumph Studios at art studio who makes the age of wonder series and two and a half years ago we bought white all from CCP we're not doing that much with the eyepiece so we're big fans of vampires as well so over the years we've kind of developed a secret sauce and it's not so secret essentially because we talk about it all the time but we have a basic formula for

what we consider is a paradox game and as I've kind of try to maintain focus for the portfolio over the years we try to stick to these pillars we feel that these pillars are the the thing that makes a pyranose game the paradox game and not only that we think that these games the games that follow these pillars fundamentally result in a stronger business model and this is a really important aspect professor most of us I don't know about you hundred but I started in the games industry because I wanted to make games and then I ended up not making a second game of course but that's how things goes most of us our first passion is maybe making games but then we quit quickly encounter the realities of making games which is ultimately it's a business it's a business and an art but without paying for your work it you know very quickly become something else so friend our CEOs main focus has always been building a business and he's always built a business for the long term it's always

we always view games and our function in the games industry as a marathon not a sprint we're quite confident that if we make it to the 10th game it's probably gonna be good the challenge is to get to keep to make a game so you get to that 10th game I don't know if anyone here plans on retiring after the make that our next game I don't think so a lot of us want to keep making games so we retain focus on what makes the business model kind of works so we talk a lot about the business model and it's something that's deeply ingrained into our games it's an it's a fundamental part of it and we feel that games that do follow these pillars actually just result in a stronger business model that allows to make more money and more money allows us to make more games and better games we think that these type of games are largely underserved and we also understand them fairly well and just briefly I'm not going to run through

them in terrible detail since most of you already familiar with the type of games we do but a paradox game should be infinitely replayable ideally I just checked the numbers yesterday the median played the time for hearts of iron 4 is 202 hours medium play time if you look at again hearts of iron about 34% of everyone who's bought the game has played it more than more than 100 hours half of the people who ever bought hearts of iron since it was launched almost 2 years ago still played once a month so we have crazy retention numbers mostly because I don't think those players have anywhere else to go but so the games need to be infinitely replayable we want the games to be intellectually challenging in some form we want them to challenge the mind not the reflexes although they do also have that an action component from time to time we want the games to cater to some kind of creative aspect we want you to tell us a story in our games rather than us tell you a story the games are not

made beautiful necessarily by graphics but by the gameplay and sometimes so we feel that graphics are there to serve a purpose they're not the ends themselves and we like the games to be accessible in some way or form so you can get into them we felt quite at this often we also want the games to be something you can nerd out about if you have real-world knowledge about flack eighty-eight cannons that should help you in the game somehow a number of games that just I want to show you briefly that we think that really live up to these kind of pillars and we draw a lot of inspiration from and humbled before the fact that we can learn a lot from these type of games literally every single game here that is not currently published by us a lot of them aren't we'd consider paradox games it's just failures on my part that I didn't manage to sign Tara or hearthstone that would have been a pretty hard so I'm coming back to the business model so

and this is a really important part so by giving having a game that somebody can play a thousand hours and if you've spent a thousand hours playing the game it's probably not going to be that hard for me to convince you to spend one more dollar in it if you look at the average spend you've had over those the lifespan of the game it's you're getting quite your money's worth compared to most other forms of entertainers I argue quite heavily and nobody listens to me again hope luckily that we should put a big fat juicy number in the main menu of every single paradox game which tells you how much money you spend per hour of entertainment and I'll dare you to find any other premium games that can beat our numbers maybe free-to-play games but I don't think you can find that on the premium space so we just see people spend more in games where they are spending more time it sounds very simple and it is true it's it's harder to make games that do not focus on art or games that focus

on systems and procedural stuff just get better get better mileage out of development resources SimCity 5 had about 80 artists that were working on it city skylines was made by a team of eight people by not focusing on art we but focused on stuff that gives us more mileage by having modding in our games we are actually are pushing the costs to other people which are fans they create variants of our games ultimately we think that every single game has a dota or a dayz locked in inside of it somewhere but we as developers can't find it it can only be found once once it's put in the hands of new players because you guys are much smarter than we are I mentioned that already I actually duplicate sorry we also by having games a follow this model actually seals or recurring revenues people come back and spend money over time people that actually spent a

thousand hours in our games are less likely to go to a competitor as well because they're locked in because of the sunk cost fallacy or whatever reason if you invested that much time in the game you don't want to let go of all that this is why I still play a Magic the Gathering after 20 years and finally these games are quite hard to make and which you know for the at least in the grand strategy space we consider ourselves not having any real competitors so this has led us to a position where we still keep making niche games but we know that niche games don't mean small by any means our basic philosophy is that if we create something that is very pure and uncompromising we will create such a satisfactory game experience in the the core audience that they can't find anywhere else and they will after a while start talking about the game in in terms that you know you might not recognize and then other people will actually not maybe relate to the game

but they will relate to the player fantasies and while the core gameplay is pretty niche the core fantasies we have in our games the play of fantasies ultimately the reasons why people play the games are quite strong I'll give you a good example Crusader Kings 2 is about running you know a medieval royal house in an obscure part of Europe if the game does not necessarily look that amazing it's quite hard to play the game has still sold almost 2 million copies and the reason for that is that it has a pretty basic and relatable player fantasy which is to rule as a king or queen and that's something everyone here has experienced or fantasized about at some point during their childhood that fantasy is strong and by through game shows like Game of Thrones that that fantasy is enhanced and it's there and people can relate to it other examples is EVE Online for instance you hear these amazing stories about the EVE Online that people have

gameplay experiences are like that sounds super cool I want to experience that and people try it out and then it's like making your doing your taxes for three hours and then you maybe discovers that hey I like my doing my taxes with the others so one thing we know that you know niche does not mean small by any measure of the word as long as we were uncompromising and really try to stick to the basic tenant that a game for everyone is a game for no one and I'm gonna hand it over to Henrique in a bit but this model has developed over a few years Henry will describe what our DLC model looks like today but in the past it didn't work this way we used to release a game and then six months later we have an expansion and that more or less replaced the old game and he did another expansion 6 or 6 months later and that made the last expansion obsolete so it was a very serial way of approaching things and we know that our games had a little life cycle of about two or three years and then they became obsolete

more or less so I've harped on about the business model because it's it's something that drives a lot of the design decisions that we make and it's one of the fundamental things that ties the company together and we'll be able to come back and talk about you know as we wrap up on why we think this the this DLC model is literally the best thing for us as a money-making company but most importantly it's the best thing for our fans and the players people who want more content and DLC from our products are benefited by the fact that we work with our current DLC model compared to the old one it's quite easy to look at the product page for Crusader Kings and just see that oh my god these guys have 270 dollars worth of DLC they're evil well on the other hand you could look you could have bought the base 2 game of scruciating Kings in 2012 and never bought a single piece of DLC and you'd

still see multiple updates every year and tons of content for free so our usual kind of what we say to people is that you don't want the DLC don't buy it and that works you know it's just in some respects so I'll hand it over to you now a little bit more about the business model unfortunately but stay with me as it from the perspective of the development studio so we've already mentioned that our fans are pretty hardcore they play our games for a long time and they used to do that even in the old days with Europe reversal is - and Victoria 1 and so on but we didn't really capitalize on that so the long tail existed but we didn't you know make any money off it really which is sad so we came up with this new DLC model instead of every other every new release of an expansion obsoleting the previous one they would all be modular so it's like going into the candy shop and

picking up the stuff you like into your little bag and they would be able to play nice with each other regardless of the combination of expansions or DLC that you bought and we thought that game should have an indefinite lifecycle if people keep playing it we want to keep supporting it and keeping it fresh and releasing new stuff for it we thought that actually at the time we didn't think that we learned that but we can go as high as 50 50 free and paid features when you think of our development time for an expansion and the patch that goes along with it and that's fine people will perceive it as one whole experience anyway so these things release both expansions and something to call immersion packs or story packs which are less heavy on the code content and here is actually the current downloadable content page on Steam for visual kings - it's not that bad actually because we've come to the

realization that we should bundle up our stuff it used to be like 80 different DLCs there which was extremely of putting in hard to navigate so we've taken some flak for the model but what I say to everyone is basically that all these DLCs even if you just buy one or two of them will allow us to keep developing and improving the game for an indefinite period basically which is great for everyone so instead of tailing on we're tailing or tailing off we're actually tailing on this is monthly active users for Europe Rosales for sons what is it July 2014 unless you can see it just keeps growing it's pretty amazing I don't know if I know any similar game that has a similar curve to be honest our games models end up having a very similar curve to free-to-play games that are run as games of service so our premium games come pretty close actually just replicating that we're

spending more I think we're spending like tripled the amount we're spending now today on Crusader Kings compared to the year before the game was finished for release yeah it's really amazing I mean these games are getting quite old now especially Crusader Kings - and you know it still looks like this so Sean's talking out about the business case and from from my perspective or studio perspective it's more like you know expansions drive up the monthly active users no question about that old expansions keep selling so that the base game sales are actually quite eclipsed by all the expansions and DLC that we release and we want to cater to different types of players find new demographics and target groups or our existing games and of course it gives us some sales and marketing flexibility to do pre-order bonuses and other gimmicks that we can throw out there and as for that first point that

expansions actually drive up maou here's that same graph again with the various expansions and content packs for your personas for that you can see that they coincide quite nicely with all these bumps now there are some other bumps as well and they are actually sales campaigns and holidays and stuff like that so there is a reason for them to and they probably contribute as well in keeping interest and driving up monthly active users what expansions are extremely effective to get this tail or a curve but we like so much and as for old expansions that they keep selling hair is two examples the old gods for Crusader Kings - it was released in 2013 and you can see there how many units in thousands is that it's sold tons done and we see the same pattern even better actually for your parasol is four with common Suns you know when you have 15

expansions that's starting to get to be a lot of money and we want to cater different playstyles different types of players and it's particularly suitable for a game like Crusader Kings 2 which is almost a hybrid between a strategy game and an RPG in that different expansions can take a different tack you know some of them can be pretty RPG others can be more internal politics some are even into the supernatural and fantasy stuff which it's slightly controversial not appreciated by all our fans all about sales and marketing flexibility well we can whip up things like this some with more effort than than others and it's quite neat you can give it away at fan gatherings and stuff like that since it's all neatly modular and place nice with the base game but of course there's a player case as

well and I already mentioned you know that I think it's good for players to to see their beloved game live pretty much forever or for a very very long time at least and also the fact that they can buy and pick and choose whatever expansions they like it's just a sad fact that there are so many completionists out there who feel that they have to own everything and that we are thus you know doing a con job or something is it's too bad so the idea with longevity anyway is that games should never feel abandoned we will keep improving the base experience as long as people keep playing the game and buying our expansions so even if you don't buy any expansions we're gonna keep it fresh and people are going to notice that the game is actually improved getting better if you come back to it two years after stopping playing it will be a better experience right and the

other point was modularity you buy what you like and with our model you can actually try things out in multiplayer because you know what the host is running everyone can use so that's really neat as well it comes back to learnings from watching our fellow Swedish developers at dice famously released map packs that divided the player community so we kind of decided that we want to have inclusive DLCs that allow more people to to experience the DLC without the dividing the player community yeah it was also kind of a technical challenge and to get that to work I think it's a great great idea right let's take a look at the design approach here because it is quite a challenge to churn out this many expansions and come up with new features that are perceived well by players and I think that it's all about player perceptions really it's not about what the developers want to do so first off if

you want to do this you got to have a very solid base game and the trick there is to make the game feel absolutely complete you if you don't own any expansions it's gonna feel it's got to have to feel like a complete experience basically or it'll come back to bite you and you're gonna have some fun core loops that's what you should focus your efforts on making sure that the base game you release has excellent KOA loops that are addictive and fun and you can save all those darlings you know all the extras for later because you can rest easy in the knowledge that you will probably release a lot of expansions of course you also need to prepare for that fact you should think about all the expansions you want to release or at least the first couple of years so you should have design outlines for that and the code base to support it and if you boil it down to

two principles when you design features for expansions that people pay for principle number one is that they have to be visible it has to have a visible impact or people will not understand but you put a lot of effort into it so no matter how much work you do under the hood it's not going to be well-received unless it's immediately visible so here's an example of that we added something called ages to hero parasol is four and once you install that expansion you can immediately see in the main interface that you know there's little thing there you're in this age of Reformation for example the other main principle is that good expansion features should be atomic in a way that should be standalone unentangled and independent from as many systems as you can possibly make them this can be very hard of course but if you can't make the

features atomic and standalone you should put them in the free passes and updates instead one big no-no another camping thing as a designer especially is to add a paid feature but you don't want to build on in a subsequent expansion after that that's going to be very tricky you be limiting the number of people who actually can buy and enjoy that second upgrade to those features so don't paint yourself into a corner and without in mind we have found that there are certain types of features that are excellent material to make paid first off feature starts add new ways of playing of achieving old goals in a new way say that you take territory through military means in the base game but then

you other way of doing it diplomatically in an expansion as well progression is super good as well if you can add a system where you can level up or gain new ranks or rank up in in some old system what's also perfect it's pretty standalone atomic anothers customization stuff like we we made a DLC for Crusader Kings 2 it's a barbershop basically where you can change hair and beard of your character and it's a little thing but it's kind of cool and it's extremely standalone and not entangled in anything else purely cosmetic and then there's faction unlocks which is it it's not just us doing this I think other companies have also found that it's perfect for this and the reason is that there is a risk when you add more features to the game but you get feature creep the interface gets cluttered with new things but if you do faction unlocks

that doesn't happen because it adds a different way of playing the game with mutually exclusive interfaces basically and then you can do quality of life UI things and I have an example of that coming up so here's an example of a faction unlock increase early Kings to on release you could only play Christians and that had a distinct play style but then word expansions we added things like Muslims in sort of Islam and with this expansion the old gods we made it possible to play pagans and it's a completely different experience the Christians mostly play nice and abide by diplomatic rules they have to use you have to have a reason to go to war and all that boring jazz but the pagans you know they're all about raiding and pillaging and just declaring war taking concubines having a good time we also added 200 more years to the gameplay which was quite appreciated but the cool thing about this is if you

don't play as the pagans it's the same old thing so the the pagans are a different way of experiencing the same game there's another example it's the diplomatic micro planner from Europe aerosol is for it basically gathers up all diplomacy in one place and it was very appreciated so it's a new interface but you get with this expansion that little heaven but it's very separate from everything else it's just a convenience thing you don't have to have it the game works just as well without it which means that it stand alone and very modular so a perfect feature for a paid expansion and there's one more example of progression in stellaris which has a really cool Texas 'tom the technology system is the Laureus is basically a collectible card game almost so it's very easy to to slot in new technologies and what we did here

is basically we added a new layer of late game technologies for for progression and ranking up and in this case it's very visible in some cases like the planet destroyers on the titan class spaceships all right so those are some good types of features that you can actually charge money for but there are also bad features and trust me we've we made plenty of these as well plenty of mistakes so you should you can do these things but the point is you cannot charge money for them so you shouldn't try to make core gameplay changes that alter the experience for players who have the expansion that's a big no-no you shouldn't try to make or charge money for minor improvement balance and bug fixes of course you'd be free and you should not try to make features that mess with a thousand other features in the game that's a pretty bad

idea so here's an example from C key - in Crusader Kings two armies are not standing around on the map and they are mobilized or called off when you need them so they're peasant Levites essentially what I thought it would be a really cool idea if the professional troops that actually existed at the time could also be represented in the game somehow and that as the eras progressed the peasant levies would be phased out and people would start using retinue troops more however while this was well received it also messed with the core gameplay in significant ways it's completely upset the balance of warfare if you had the expansion or not and it was also a feature that we really wanted to build on in subsequent expansions but we couldn't because we painted ourselves into a corner and here's a more recent example a blitz combat tactic from

hearts of iron 4 which caused pretty much an uproar on the forums in itself it's pretty it should be pretty suitable as a paid feature but it was kind of a minor thing it was one combat tactical many and it was perceived that this should have been part of the base game was also fortunate that it was called blitz you know it's pretty iconic for a World War 2 game to have a blitz command or combat tactic so it kind of backfired on us we've also done some entangled features this is a system we other than EU 4 called estates it's basically internal political factions that create gameplay for you as a ruler you need to keep these political factions happy or that you'll start causing you all kinds of troubles but they can also give you bonuses the problem with this feature or one of the

problems with it is that it it kind of messes around with every other thing in the game and whenever released something new we have to consider well what will happen to the estate's mechanic if we do this so pretty bad idea should have been free which brings us to free features there is nothing wrong with this and I think we spend at least 50% of the of our development time actually doing free features as long as you have a strong theme for your expansion they are perceived as a whole thing you know the free and the paid part make for one experience and that's also how I see it as a designer I really ideally want people to to kind of mix them up and not know what is free and what is paid doesn't really work that way but we can dream so free features using them you can replace old mechanics that you don't like much you can mess

around with the core gameplay and people will still perceive you know that the game is kept fresh and cool and you're doing interesting so everything I said was bad in a paid feature you can probably do as a free feature there are some other pitfalls that don't have to do specifically with the types of features you should remember to stick to what the game is this is also something we've forgotten sometimes and what is the game well it's partly what we think it should be what we thought when we created the game originally but it's also what the players think that the game is and you know the the biggest mistake you can make is probably add new restrictions on players now there is a case to be made that our games at least ck2 is hard to learn and easy to master

and that's kind of the pyramid upside down right so I had the brilliant idea but let's crank up the challenge and make the game a bit harder so we added defensive alliances and other things to the game but we're supposed to crank up the challenge but people just felt that I'd been put in a straightjacket instead and that's not a good place to be so don't mess with agency the player the players freedom to act another support feature overload and UI clutter and it's a challenge because it completely contradicts the high visibility requirement and paid features rights but if you have a lot of visible features what are you gonna end up with well it's gonna be pretty overloaded interface another huge mistake is to ask developer think that yeah I like the

black sheep Turks you know we should expand on that experience it's an awesome faction but unfortunately most players will not see it that way they have their preferences and we know that there are certain certain countries are a lot more popular than others Germany Germany Prussia the Confederate States of America rights the Eastern Roman Empire all of these are super popular for some reason don't ask me why but when we do an expansion about India or something ya know so just don't go there it's a sad fact so what actually you know what do players value well initially we thought that hey let's look at steam review scores that's a great metric and it was a pretty good magic metric originally but on less and less so over time as there was more and

more rage about our DLC model particularly so there is a correlation between steam review score and actual revenue but it's weaker than you might expect so as designers we look more at actual revenue now let me do the steam reviews course we also came up with a neat little formula or spreadsheet that we employ to estimate the value from money for our expansions so these are some ck2 expansions and we've divided up the features into different sizes and each size gives you a different sort of score so we don't sum up that score and we divide it by the price point and then we get a pretty arbitrary value for money right it works pretty well we want that value for money value to be at 2 or above ideally but as you can see some of

our more popular expansions are actually way below that or a bit below that so all gods had 1.8 it still did extremely well so there the floor with this formula is it doesn't really consider the three features that we release along with the paid ones I mean I know for a fact that the Reapers do which didn't really contain that much paid content it was extremely well received mostly due to the free stuff right so people keep mixing this up and it's to our advantage of course so we're still working on improving this formula or spreadsheets and now we come to Joe hands part of this presentation so sadly I'm not going to do it justice but it has to do with other types of challenges that are not related to design specifically about the architecture well the code base will

keep evolving all the time and that's interesting in many ways but it's gonna help in at least in our position it helps because we have so many live projects if you know you can do a lot of improvements in the engine we have the close of its engine and we have a middle layer called Domino and if you can do improvements there it's gonna benefit all the all the games and y'all one really wanted to stress that you should keep the code simple and readable and not over engineer it and that's very important for us because in our organization we have to move the programmers around a lot and you know they need to understand the code pretty much at a glance so don't get too clever you also got to keep the code maintainable and I know one thing he wanted to bring up was a simple little trick if you have a get function for example you can pass along a text string as an argument or pointer to get the tooltip so you only have one function

you're following some now you only have one function to to work with and you don't have to have a separate tooltip function and you should try to have a clear programming guideline or or a standard that everyone follows as for the technology itself well it's a virtual file system we treat our DLCs exactly like mods they're pretty much the same thing as far as the game is concerned the packages that are treated as module changes you can toggle them on or off at load time which is convenient so if you buy you know house Lords or full plates music or whatever we can turn it off if you don't like it or if you get tired and then there's the process the project management of it all and it's very important of course to plan ahead you should have the design ready in time designers should be you know one step

ahead all the time and if you'll have a scalable UI that is easy to to work with and make room for more stuff because you will add more stuff to the UI it's guaranteed and it's important to remember that you have to repay take that we have a pretty aggressive schedule when it comes to releasing these expansions and we don't have an infinite amount of people so sometimes we have to cut some corners and accept the fact that we will have to do some hacks and hard-coded solutions and these accumulate and get worse over time so it's worthwhile to take some time to catch up and we usually schedule a couple of weeks in between certain expansions to catch up and I'll take that most importantly though you need to understand your players and if you can use reasonable metrics do so you know if

you have telemetry use it if you don't have to lemon tree add it and you should listen to your hardcore fans well to some degree I suppose don't listen to them too hard because there are pretty vocal minority but as long as they keep it constructive and positive you should listen to their stories and what they tell you and you will understand them probably if you play a game yourself and sadly not all people actually play the game and enjoy it so how can you expect your players to to do so right so if I were to summarize this somewhat unfocused subject it would be keep your design modular and standalone and this this is for the paid features of course

and you should think about player perceptions more than the time you spend developing something or how hard or complex it is the only thing that matters is how players perceive it so remember to make your features visible and to be perceived as giving high value under need to have a maintainable architecture there's probably something here to add on the business side of things as well I think that you touch upon something that's really interesting in the sense that we've built the company by having a very transparent and open and very close dialogue and relationship with a lot of our fans try to listen to them we have our forums that have over a million active users and and what what's happened over the years is that not only has a lot more people have come in to the to the paradox ecosystem that are not familiar with the games or don't

everyone has their different types of stories so the the vocal minority is they get a critical mass in their voice that's heard in a completely different way today and it's it's heard differently because they're they also have tools which allow them to get hurt so on one hand I mean we're getting a lot of complaints on the DL C model on the other hand we have more people than ever that not only buy the stuff but they keep buying it and you know we end up with a silent majority that are in the game enjoying the features and not posting on the forums so there's always this balance of trying to find look how do we keep in touch with the players and listen to what they have to say and balance that out against what we're doing on with the silent paying majority is doing because they up at the end of the day they are the people we need to please because they keep paying

us if somebody doesn't agree with some of our practices it's it's somewhat hard I think there's another interesting point that I think it could make as well I took that kind of point here is that I can't stress enough and I've said I'd love a million times but it's it's really what I love it's the business model that games are followed the these give us a robust protection from from changes in the market and I'll give you a good example when steam rolled out their refund policy and for those of you not familiar with it they deceivin refund policy said that if you played the game for less than two hours you can refund it no questions asked and this was rolled out without informing a single publisher or developer as far as I know and nobody of I have asked had heard of it before and they even had a big grace period of six months back you could just refund anything if you had a game let's say out an indie game that was very narrative and story driven you could start and finish it in less than two hours you were utterly and

completely screwed over by that policy change from Steam site it's ultimately a good policy change it protects the consumer and makes our positions as gamers a lot better but that developers business model is completely screwed and when it comes to paradox game well good luck getting past the main menu in two hours so so it's a silly example of how the business model or the the way we do things actually allow us a fair bit of protection from from stuff on the outside I think a lot of us have seen the image of Mona Lisa being cut into small pieces and they were selling the pieces in separate pieces as an analogy of how games are destroyed today and discrete parts of being sold pieces that people should be in the game and belong in the game I know and I don't want to get into this big discussion about entitlement but it's something that we

end up thinking a lot about I'm talking a lot about it's also a feasibility you know if if that was true it would take us ten years to develop a game and it would look bad at the time released it yeah and ultimately like it it's it's a I think that whenever we walk the have a good balance between quality of life improvements that will give away for free and do screw ups where we charge for features that feel like they should be in the game that's where we get more hate but ultimately I mean the game is called Crusader Kings not Muslim rulers so I don't feel that necessarily if we charge if we put that into the kind of Mona Lisa do you'll see like we and described that's not necessarily a comparison I feel it kind of fair but it's this perception is ultimately reality and I think that the issue we have today perhaps with a lot of people that are upset with the DLC model is a lack of us explaining the rationale for why they

why the model exists and what ultimately what kind of additional value they get thanks to this model a lot of people might just know simply just not want it other people in the community complained that we just do too much stuff that's nice and they want everything but they can't afford it and we should stop doing stuff therefore but I have a hard time getting behind that argument I can you know coming back to my original statement about the key metric of having a number in the main menu that tells you how much you spent per hour of entertainment I think is we should really do it every time the complaints become too loud I even argue that we should increase the price of the game and this is of course everyone just wants to shoot me when I say this but arguably a few ball Crusader Kings six years ago it's a much much much better game today and we're still only charging 40 bucks for it people go nuts when we don't lower the price of the game I think we should raise it it has arguably more value and

the concept of we should lower the price of things over time because it's old it doesn't hold up to me people I think look at how our you know and this is the reality we have to deal with people's and players behaviors and conditioning through other games and then they apply that to the lens of our game and it doesn't really drive to me but again I can't change perception and reality I can just try to explain the model and show them how they get additional value and I can black-and-white show why we would have never been able to create all this cool content if it wasn't for the fact that we've created all the DLC cool I don't think we don't have anything else to add to that we'll be happy to take questions [Applause]

hi my name is Cole Hamrick and two years ago you won't blame me for your coding style sorry about that perkele them a long time ago my question is how do you manage queueing so many different combinations of the game alright so the question is how do we manage the keyway there are many different combinations of the game well I don't have a perfect answer for you except that our QA QA department is doing a really good job but they have it like a smoke test protocol that they go through where they don't exactly try every combination of DLCs that would be redundant because we're confident enough in the architecture that most time will work together but they have a protocol for that ok I've really enjoyed paradox games over the years my question is how do you plan for what you want your modders to be capable of knowing that some of your

community won't have all the expansions and the modders will probably be assuming you have all the expansions I know my own mod work that I just click all the boxes yes you must have this this and that alright so if I understood you right your question is how do we plan for modders wanting to use features from all expansions or different expansions well that's a really good question we you actually talk about it a lot right now if we should for example have the cosmetic stuff be in the base game so basically for free but it's not shown in the game unless you have the expansion right so that's that's one approach and I think we're moving towards that so for example event pictures from expansions might be in the patch you know in the base game but you don't see them but motors can use them done for whatever

mod they want to do so it's a complicated situation if you will we don't think further than that at the moment but it is a good question hello my question is when working with other developers that like for titles like tyranny or surviving Mars how do you work with those that Studios to have the DLC model so the question was how do we work with third-party Studios when it comes to the business model on DLC models so a bit of inside saw works we get about a thousand I get about a thousand pitches every year and we say no to almost not all of them we end up maybe signing five games per year the process that we have obviously being a niche publisher ends up saying we only do games that are RPG management or strategy games ultimately and another factor is that we only work with people who buy into this and think this is a

great way of working we never try to force down IP or business models or culture or way of working with developers but what we do is that we explain how we work and why we work that way and if that's something that's attractive to people they pitch and approach us on the same basis and we learn from their experience and try to change it so what we do is that we we do more or less this talk but we do it with the each and every developer and we do it many times over to try to help educate and under help people understand why it's a more robust way of doing things and for the especially for the development partner studios this means that they'll be funded for six years working on a project instead of like making a game and that hope it sells so they can keep working this fundamentally gives more job security to the third-party developers that we work with so it's hopefully I they think it's an attractive model for that reason alone but it's you know but ultimately we

never sign a game unless it has this potential there are exceptions we published pillars of eternity with obsidian and it's a linear narrative story driven game and I said not every game lives up the pillars perfectly as you know the ground strategy games the pika these guys make but we do exceptions for the for the benefit of thinking long term we'll be able to make a game that fits the game more so pillars of eternity while it doesn't match the pillars quite perfectly the second game we've made with obsidian tyranny and we felt left lived up to the pillars more and should be able to adapt this business model better but that didn't quite so play out either it turns out it's really expensive making RPGs so happy to hear that thank you thank you hi my name is Rutger I work at a B Games we also make strategy games so this sounds really interesting to us to support the game

for longer and we can do now so I have experienced this new DLC molitor's I bought hearts of fire and for at launch and I bought a few DLCs the ones I like thank you and at work I felt that works really well but I was run there wondering how you can deal with for example players that come in late basically that entered a cycle halfway through yeah I have experiences myself with Universalis I was like I want to play this game but there are so many things to sort when I don't know what to do basically that's a great question the question was so what happens with the players that don't get on the train from the from the get-go when it's just $40 buy get into it now somebody who comes to the Crusader Kings page and this is a really good point a lot of the hate I think comes from those people because they're just overwhelmed with what they're seeing because they've been conditioned again by other games that I'm getting an incomplete experience unless I buy the other stuff but it's still a car you're getting leather seats is not a part of the core experience that's the kind of comparison and I think that there's an issue there and

this is something we talk to steam to all the time about how can we create product pages that more clearly explain to people what is necessary to be able to play the game the most common thread I see on our subreddit is which expansions are essential and I wish that people said you don't need to get any of them they're optional and that's the half answer some of the times but clearly you get a better Crusader Kings experience if you buy more expansions we design it that way but it's a good enough experience at that but at at that level so in part we need to do a better job of explaining this in our product pages but another part of it is also you know and this comes back to the business model a lot of the times people come to the pages or one of when they want to buy a game and this applies to anything we do most of the time we just we've consciously made the decision that we want to buy the product that's the main

pain of actually making the purchase who want to talk about psychology once somebody's made the choice and conscious effort to that they want to buy the game what they're then presented with which of these different options will give me the greatest value and if you're looking at one that is priced at about $280 which is in total of the ck2 DLCs you kind of feel like I don't I can't afford that that's too much and you kind of feel like you're losing out so there's an other layer of psychological pain but we do counter this by having frequent and quite deep discounts and sales through promotions so that person that comes back and says holy everything is 75 percent off they're buying that deal see the total package that would have been 300 bucks is much cheaper but we're still making a healthy chunk of change so one more question they tell us but we'll be available for questions outside afterwards thank you hi I'm Scott I have a kind of similar question um you mentioned the phrase hard to

learn easy to master do you worry that with the infinite life cycle that you mentioned that problem will just be exacerbated you ask so the question was do we think that the games become harder and harder to learn over time yeah as you add more and more features even free ones for example yeah well that's uh that's an excellent question as well and it's definitely true right but that's another reason to keep to do like faction unlocks and to add new new ways of playing that are preferably mutually exclusive with other ways of playing rather than overloading players with also watch faint and stuff right so if you start as a pagan it's still a manageable experience and as you start as a Christian and so also a manageable experience but when you put all these things together yeah it's a rich game with a lot of different ways to play so I prefer that way of doing things in general and I think that we've gone a

little bit too far with the stuff we've added to both cq2 and perhaps even more so you for but you're correct in the fact that it's a greater challenge of which we need and do put more emphasis on learning to teaching up the game the problem is you know we created a tutorial one time under camp perhaps the best example of where we failed horribly has been Crusader Kings 2 or even Victoria - I think where everyone knew that the tutorial was broken and you couldn't finish it for like a good nine months but we didn't do anything but captain about it because that's not how people learn the game they're going YouTube on watch let's play series it's been really lazy on our part yeah I mean we we've learned to do things properly when I think the stellaris tutorial which is a huge yes forward yes you know that's the way we're gonna do stuff from now on as well as in the future games that we do thank you thank you so much guys thanks [Applause]

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