The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines

This was too late. Paradox's in house development studio did the same thing with Victoria 3. Do something way too greedy (lock historical characters behind a preorder for a dlc that was already bad). Waited to see the backlash, and when it was too much, they make the bonuses free.

At least they're doing something, but the dlc should have been pushed back at launch.

Remember when games used to be a finished product on a cartridge/CD? You just bought it at the store for a base price of a video game and that was it. Any bugs found in the game became widely accepted, and maybe even exploited by competitive gamers. But there was no patching, no updates, no DLC. You paid for a game up front and that was it.

I miss those days.

They've basically perfected keeping the community mostly happy by toeing the line between putting out solid base games and putting out greedy DLC.

What we're now seeing is what happens when you don't immediately change course after you skimp on making a good base game.

The Beach DLC was distasteful, you still can't even make convincing beaches with the terrain.

I'm very glad Paradox reversed course here. It sounds like they are starting to take seriously what it means to make a finished, solid game. Cities:Skylines fans are tired of half-baked shit.

We're riding this wave over in the Total War community too. Broken game, weak and overpriced DLC.

We kicked off (and then all their other games managed to flop at once, so they came crawling back) and now we've got a notable amount more effort into the DLC coming at the end of the month, as well as price cuts, refunds and redoing of the bad DLC.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but I'm seeing positive movements in general on legacy resting-on-laurels games.

Thanks for the tldr :)

City Skylines Team to their fans: We’re sorry. Making good.

George R.R Martin to his fans: Go get fucked.

NGL I wast pretty excited to play Cities Skylines a few years ago, but the EA style DLC market is disgusting.

It’s not the devs who are to blame for this fiasco. The management who pushed for releasing unfinished product is. There were some people sitting in a meeting room who decided that it was a good idea to publish a worthless DLC. Change is needed at management level.

The apology looks like honest but some part of me feels like they are sorry because their strategy for ripping our wallets did not work as expected.

I’m not planning to buy any Paradox game in the future.

Remember they're just doing damage control. They are still acting in their own interest

Stellaris optimization update, when?

I did not even know that a DLC came out. I am sure I would have if it was good news because streamers I follow would have tested it.

But it is so sad. I really liked cities skylines because it basically is what I wanted from sim city. But with a million mods it would always break at certain points and force me to stop playing. I had such high hopes with 2 but seeing this game at launch and now seemingly still broken is so... well I am not really sure how I (should) feel.

The good thing is, that I do not have to keep reading and researching but rather wait for some "news" to pop up in my feed again. So I can get back to forgetting about it.

Meanwhile, Indie games: Yeah, we fixed the wonky balancing with that super niche strategy and we're working on 3 new DLCs (all free, btw)

This team has been making the exact same game for multiple decades. Look at this developer's game history. It is literally the same exact game redeveloped over and over every few years and then they repackage and resell the same DLCs for the new versions. What a con of a game dev.