In order to buy out Paradox, EA would have to make an offer for their entire existing share float, which would then have to be accepted by the shareholders. This means that they would almost certainly sell their stock at over market value (because why would they accept less?).
From their point of view, this would be a good thing. So why then would the shareholders allow this project to be cancelled if it was about to net them a huge payout, according to your theory?
There’s some ageless classics. HoMM3 came out 25 years ago and is still pretty much the top of its genre. Freespace2 more or less shut down the spacesim genre 25 years ago, as well…
Oof. Wasn’t this the one that was going to have in-depth object customization? I was looking forward to it from a dollhouse-building perspective. Even if it wasn’t great, having some competition might convince EA to allocate more dev resources to the Sims, which has ruthlessly embraced the “minimum viable product” philosophy for a long time.
Then Paradox was developing it. They own the studio. Who else is going to build the game? An executive?
I am sure that everyone would agree that Paradox owns/developed/published Europa Universalis 4… But that was made by “Paradox Tinto” or Stellaris was “Paradox Development Studio”… The publishing wing of Paradox doesn’t develop games. Obviously. But I don’t understand why thats in any way relevant to the discussion. Paradox (the company, not specifically the publishing wing) was 100% responsible for the development, the testing, and the publishing of Life by You. They built it, they took it down.
My biggest complaint about Sims-likes is that the visual style always looks too serious. It gives me the feeling that whatever I’m going to do with my not-Sims, it’s gonna be something that makes me regret my real life.
You wanna know what I did the last time I played the Sims 2 though? I repeatedly held parties at my Sim’s house and then lured the guests into a room they couldn’t get out of. I also used the moveobjects cheat to collect police cars whenever a cop showed up to shut the party down. By the time I was done I had amassed around 70 urns, many hysterical immortal Sims (Sims with households can’t die while visiting someone’s house in the Sims 2), 4 Police cars and a fire truck.
The Sims has a mischievous air to it that tickles the devil on your shoulder and begs you to listen to them. None of the Sims-likes I’m aware of seem to have the same air.
Yup… It looked like a really bad attempt at photo realism in 2024. At this point you either need to use cartoon-like graphics or some sort or actually pull off the photo realism.
It was pretty obvious that game was never going to reach either of those marks.
I was definitely excited for the prospect of a Sim’s competitor, but this wasn’t going to be it… I think they did the right thing pulling the plug.
Stylized graphics would have not helped with the performance, or the mismatching scale of objects & people, or the garbage UI structure, or the garbage game structure. The whole thing was just amateurish and cheap looking.
Do by chance mean Stardock not Paradox? I was unable to google anything about Paradox and the Star Control IP but lots about Stardock came up. But if it was them could you pass me some links I was unable to find anything.
It’s a shame. But based on what I saw about it, it looked like maybe they had some delusions about using LLMs for character dialogue, which seems like an insanely complex feature to build into an already complex game.
Why? It can’t be much more than using one of those chatbot girlfriends. I know there could be delays as it takes time to generate but it could have a local version that just is a stripped down version that just processes dialogue. Probably requires a beefy GPU though.
You’d need the conversations to be highly constrained in order to not break the game. Currently there are too many ways of “jailbreaking” LLMs. It was too much of a scope creep for a game which was already biting off a lot more than most studios could chew.
There already are a small number of games utilizing LLMs. Yes it‘s immersion breaking from time to time but the worst part is the credit system many of them use to pay for the API. If you go past your conversation limit, you‘ve got to pay extra.
Well HECK! I have been advertising this game to every gamer I know, finally a Sims game that’s not EA… :( I was very hopeful when they delayed without a new date, just take your time and get it right. Dang, I was really looking forward to this
They 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.
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.
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.
In a hilariously circular way, EA has this beat still.
The Simcity 2013 launch was so terrible it killed Simcity and the studio Maxis, basically paving the way for City Skylines to take over the genre 2 years later.
It was online only, to the point where if you disconnected from the Internet you were booted out of the game. It also did most game rendering server side to force multiplayer/anti piracy/EA Origin store, and they only had enough infastructure for 1/10th of their player base on launch. That 10% isn’t exaggeration, either. They underestimated server load by 90%.
It was also a severely buggy, local resource hog somehow, even with being mostly remotely rendered. Since only a tiny fraction of the servers needed for the game were online, the game just chocked itself to death.
It took months to get it to a “working” state, at which point people had discovered all the insane and dumb behavior by ingame actors like citizens just picking a random house to go to end of day/etc. The tiny city limit size caused by being always online was also a very sore point for players, as you could barely build anything in a city building game. You could finish buillding your “city” in just a few hours, at which point you had to buy another “zone” that was separate from your current one. They didmt seamlessly connect like old SimCity or city skylines, you actually entered another tiny city slice to build on. It was terrible, and the size limit was clearly one of the measures to reduce server costs, as each zone looked like it was a new small server instance.
By the time they actually resolved the server issues, the game was dead, ending a 20+ year legacy in gaming for the brand and the studio. EA hasent made a simcity game in 11 years because of its failure. It was a shitshow and a half.
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.
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 or else miss out on having the entire library? 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah. Pdx went the same shit route as EA by now, even have subscriptions too. Doesn't matter if I have to through hundreds of bucks at EA or Pdx for a single game. It's both the same shitty principle.
Yeah, but having the games in competition would force then to try to win players to their side over the alternative, for both of the games. It would have been nice to have an option when playing this genre.
That also looks like it isn't performance like complete garbage. When I saw the first videos for Life By You I was kinda shocked that they even put that out to the public. I'm really not surprised they canned it.
I wonder how that’s going. When the devs started they were clearly overpromising things that they thought would be cool to have without any idea of how long it would take to implement them. I always suspected it would remain in development for many many years, but apparently it’ll be playable next year.
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