Europa Universalis IV announced

[Phillip V]

All Pdox games from EU4 beyond will be Steam-only releases.



New dev diary released. No more colonist spamming!

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?660778-Europa-Universalis-IV-Developer-diary-18-%96-Sail-away-with-me!

[Tamas]

All Pdox games from EU4 beyond will be Steam-only releases.



New dev diary released. No more colonist spamming!

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?660778-Europa-Universalis-IV-Developer-diary-18-%96-Sail-away-with-me!

Is gamersgate going bankrupt over their christmas period fuckups or what?

[sbr]

Paradox has preferred Steam for a while now.  There was talk of making CKII Steam exclusive but they ended up caving to the small but loud outrage.

One of the devs made a post at that time that ~90% of their sales came from Steam and the amount of time they wasted dealing with patch installers and other related work for other systems was enormous considering the very small number of people using them.  I also now after that post they said that CKII's sale on Steam were an even bigger percentage than they expected.  I will go back and see if I can find any of the posts, I have at least the first one bookmarked somewhere.

[Josephus]

I don't know what they mean when they say the games will only be steam-only releases considering that they're launching their own download site.

[sbr]

That does seem odd.

[garbon]

Might be that all purchases on shop get you steam digital downloads.  That's what they currently have listed in the new shop.

[Arvoreen]

On their shop, you get a keycode you can redeem in Steam ... where the game is then downloaded, patched, etc.

[garbon]

So what is the benefit of buying in their shop? Discounts?

[sbr]

So what is the benefit of buying in their shop? Discounts?

I would assume they get a small fraction more money from the sale than if you get it through Steam but I can't verify that.

[garbon]

I meant for the consumer.

[Arvoreen]

My guess would be price.  They can ask for less @ their store, but still take the same (or more) profit...

[crazy canuck]

I think I will like the new colonizing mechanic.

[sbr]

I found one of the posts in regards to Steam

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?566740-quot-Requires-a-3rd-party-download-and-account-quot&p=13009805&viewfull=1#post13009805

Its because every portal has their own installers and system for downloading games/patches.

Its simple... Its more time spent on fixing bugs, improving ai and adding features. As well as more frequent patches.

This does not even consider the fact that Steam will auto-patch and make sure your version is not corrupted, which reduces support costs even further.

When we cater to multiple versions (and there were 23 different portals we sold games on, last time I checked), this cuts into development time quite a lot.

Now Kerberos is a developer that has about 2-3 times as many developers per project as our internal teams does, so you can imagine how beneficient it would be for our team.

Magicka had patches out everyday for weeks after release. We could NEVER do that on a non-steam title..

Sengoku, having 3 patches within 1.5 months of release, cost enormous amount of time and money for us for things that did not give anything back to us. About 90% of all who bought Sengoku digitally bought it through Steam, while we had to spend about 99% of the time for patch deployment and testing for non-steam customers.

Note the last paragraph.

I saw a post over there today where a mod said 95% of all CKII sales were through Steam.  2-3 devs (including Johan) posted after than and didn't correct the statement.

[crazy canuck]

Yeah, its kind of like when people tried to create their own version of paypal - lots of time and money invested for nothing. 

[Phillip V]

Rechecked the release date to remind myself that this game will not be released until Q3 2013.