Very surprising. The game looked like it had a lot of potential and could’ve been the most popular sims alternative, but it’s suddenly been cancelled.
Very surprising. The game looked like it had a lot of potential and could’ve been the most popular sims alternative, but it’s suddenly been cancelled.
Endless DLC is literally the paradox business model. I happen to find it an acceptable compromise for continuous development of the games I like, at least the way paradox does it, but lets not pretend like this was going to be different from a business model perspective.
My problem with endless DLC isn’t the cost, but the fragmented result of each ‘feature’ needing to stand separately and not interact with any other DLC feature. You end up with some really janky gameplay where nothing works intuitively and the stuff you can implement is all hurt by those limitations.
Not to mention the sheer code hell that all this results in with an exponential increase in possible install states to account for. Which the devs just give up on and the game becomes a little buggier with every new expansion.
Honestly think they should move to a sort of MMO model. Charge for the most recent expansions and older DLC eventually gets merged into the base game. Cuts down on complexity and most of your sales will happen in the first year anyway.
While PDX-published games may suffer from the decouplement of features between DLCs, at the very least PDS-developed games have a built-up expertise when it comes to managing this.
As for MMO model, it’s a hard sell because purchased things get made “free” for new comers. It’s one of the crux that EU4 faced when they rolled many DLC features into the base game.