The Players Said No. 

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You're telling me Paradox actually got player feedback and didn't blame the players?

" we thought you'd eat shit. You wouldn't. We're really sorry you wouldn't eat shit. "

I still can't believe they made the beach dlc and didn't add a way to make you know.. a beach.

"I'm only 29, why am I having to say 'back in my day'?!" Ahhhhhh welcome to the party. You are officially a grown-up

Considering that botched releases killed Imperator Rome (which is a great game btw) and almost killed Victoria 3 and its DLC's, I think paradox realised that this was unsustainable and incompatible with their DLC funded develpment model. If the release version is bad, why would anyone buy DLC's for a bad game? It just doesn't work with their financing model.

I think Colossal Order and Paradox needs to take a page from Hello Games and No Man's Sky. Free updates and DLC's for at least the first 2 to 3 years. Fix the game, add basic features like Traffic Manager, move it, and others that should have been in the base game from the get go. Build the good will back from the players before charging money for new content

Pam tree!

I love how the best way to kill a game is to listen to upper management and the board of directors 👍👌👏

There is a lot of suspicion of content creators with large followings who kept the game's problems under wraps after they had early access. They didn't acknowledge problems until it was no longer possible to downplay them. Everyone knows which ones were the most guilty of this. They shouldn't be allowed on this "council."

they didn't refund the Beach Fronts DLC to be kind to their customers, they did it so they can scrub the bad reviews from Steam. it's been removed from the STEAM store as a DLC along with the title of worst reviewed item on Steam.

Enshitification will continue until the "service" fails...

The way you kept saying 'Palm tree' had me rewatch that bit. I kept hearing 'pantry'.

I cannot believe they are even thinking DLC. Fix what you have first.. smh

I have been 30 now for almost a year, and I too agree it is painful to think on how many things have degraded since I was little. I used to say “back in my day” with a laugh, but the emotion around that phrase has largely turned sad.

What pisses me off as a gamer is how many times has a company had to say 'yeah sorry, we put out shit and thought you'd eat it, but you didnt... so we promise we'll put some seasoning on it next time so that you like it'? Fuck being forgiving of these companies. I'm sick of being told 'sorry we fucked up' - no, do better. We gave you money, you knew the product was shit and you thought to try to make money off it... You don't get a second chance.

It's a statement on the industry as a whole. That we have reached a point where publishers expect to release trash product for financial gain until consumers have to say "enough". I would love to see this start being a reality throughout the entire industry.

It'd be wild if EA came back with a sudden Sim City reboot and it took over the market due to Skyline's negligence. Kind of like history repeating itself. But it is good that they seem to be getting their act together as a whole as a lot of these changes seem promising.

Oh man! The accent on "Palm trees" gets me everytime. Pam trees... idk why, but it makes me smile.

"Why do you care?" Maybe, just maybe, because we like the game industry to focus on making good games, not ongoin shopping opportunities.

I think their player council should not be based on “follower” numbers on social media, seems like a way to gain “good will” vs fix the game. I find RU-vidrs, Twitch Streamers, and “pro” players tend to have slightly different needs than Bob and Sally who just wanna play fun games for a few hours after work and on the weekends. Those players want a good balance of fun and challenge where neither over consumes the other.

Anyone else remember when games used to come out finished and there was no such thing as DLC.

"Well, well, well. If it isn't the consequences of our actions" - the Paradox board.

Most of the people who bought that expansion were the pre orders so they aren't really being compensated. Free "future DLC" that will come out eventually, is not just compensation for DLC that was already lacking in the first place. (The offering of 2 free radio stations WTF? and Content creator packs are literally mods made by third parties, that end up monetized). This is the most lowest effort imaginable solution. They could literally just come out with more slop and you get nothing. The few who are being made "whole" with actual refunds are mainly because the DLC was the worst rated thing on Steam, and they are refunding it so they can pull the DLC off Steam, so they can sweep the low ratings under the rug when they merge it into the base game. This is in NO WAY a win for the player base, and 100% Paradox covering their asses. Sure on the surface it seems like a win but the Devil is in the details and these details are crap.

Damn that “back in day” segment is so true. We’re not that old but we see a rapid decline in video game business practices that even saying 5 years ago is symbolizing a different generation of practices.

So far, I've sworn off all Paradox games entirely based on how they've burned their playerbase with this game. I truly do hope they improve.

This actually makes me nervous about the upcoming factorio expansion. I mean companies who become successful rest on their laurels and treat their customers as money piñatas. CO seemed like a company that could do no wrong with what they did with Cities 1, and then the fantastic failure that was/is Cities 2 means that as players, we cannot simply trust any company to do right by the players even if they have a good reputation. Judge them on what they do, not what they did.

I think this is extremely good reporting! I love that you aren't just reporting the good stuff, but reporting it in a way that encourages the industry to see how that this kind open admission of fault and drastic action to make amends is likely to bring long term benefit to the shareholders as well, even if it does mean a short term loss.

They only removed the DLC to hide that it was the most negatively voted on Steam. At the moment words are just words, Paradox and CO have a long ways to go to regain player trust.

My problem is they already "apologized" and then they released a paid DLC sitting at Overwhelmingly Negative for a game that's still broken . They should either go full corpospeak, or say nothing and fix the game like No Man's Sky. If they actually want to be honest they should admit they took our preorders because they mismanaged Lamplighters and the Paradox CEO wasn't going to accept getting paid a bonus a couple million smaller than if he had done his market research right.

'player councils' are a good idea. Normally they tend ti be a net positive. However it can also backfire as Smite relies on their ranked and pro plauer content creators for some addtioanl feedback... And those lads tend to have a "pure meta" mindset. I.e. recently the pro and ranked players are up in arms demanding a nerf to health potions... nothing anyone in the long history of the game have ever considered an issue. but suddenly they belive the potions are overpowered...

So I guess I'll have to wait another year or two befor eI can actually play the game.

What is a pham tree :) Just giving you a hard time. Love you man! Great work!

There is a massive gap left for another dev team to swoop in and make a better Cities style game. Hopefully they’re on it. I think even if the game becomes what CO wants it to be, there is still tons of room for something better. CO vision seems to be far too limited

So Colossal Order wants to tap influences for more free advertising, I mean, troubleshooting.

2am My Brain: "pam tree"

As always, thank you for your great insights on CS2. I’m 100% fine with the DLCs taking a back seat to game optimization. “Just let the Devs cook.” Agreed. 🙂

It's a first step in the right direction. I won't be playing it until I see they've fixed the basic stuff. I'm still shocked they rely on mods to fix their game balance (i.e. land value, amongst others). I believe this game has huge potential and they're actually taking steps towards fixing it. It's a small win for the player, let's now see if we'll get the real big win over time.

How do i get the beach properties for free since they unlisted it from the steam store? pls answers

It's weird because, what part of the first game's massive library of piecemeal shenanigans didn't tip off people to the next iteration's swindle?

It's easier to screw up and apologise, than to ask, and risk a no. They rushed to hit a financial year deadline, knowing that they could try to make up for it after the deadline. This is how ALL publishers operate now. They ALL see how far they can push things before they lose all players. They went too far and screwed up. Now they're sowwy.

Picturing Pam from Archer everytime you say "palm" 😂

Is Bell saying Pelm instead of palm on purpose ?

"Pam Tree" They charged for a shrubbery...Ni!

I really wish we could live in a world where publishers were the front line of community management instead of developers so when a company like Paradox forces Colossal Order to ship an unfinished product, Paradox has to deal with the backlash.

Hmm, what city/country builder is that at 0:29 ?

It's amazing to see a CEO be so humble. Now it's time for them to put their words into action. It's hopeful to see.

They should fix Star Trek: Infinite as well. I am furious at them for leaving it a buggy, broken mess. This is the 2nd Paradox game I've bought in recent years, the other being Imperator: Rome, that they pulled the plug on and left customers in the lurch.

I have no problem if they take more time and what they publish then, is good. Nobody wins if Devs rush things, because “we can fix it once it’s out”. No - the damage is already done. That’s like taking your favourite mug, dropping it in a hurry. You can try to glue the pieces back together. It may look and work like a mug should but the damage is done and will affect the structure.

Things are fun and spicy indeed happy Friday 👌

that is indeed good news. The CEO talked the talk. Let's hope they walk the walk

Do they have staff that formerly worked at ccp / eve ? this smells like straight out of that playbook. edit: immediatly mentions eve :D

Shout out to Triumph Studios (Age of Wonders 4) for carrying Paradox. Even tho it was also rushed out. Everyone at Triumph deserves a big raise! You have a fan in my here in Brazil.

"back in my days" *old man raises fist in the air* 😬Maybe not getting old is the cure for this - at least I tell that constantly to myself the last 10 years! 😟

Bellular saying "Palm and Bush" LOL.

I feel like Paradox now realise that this is messing with there core business. They have also delayed Prison Architect 2 which is paradox. This could be a sign

15:41 If someone was getting scammed right next to you, it’d be pretty annoying. Imagine if it was a kid and he was paying for things you used to get for free. That’s why you complain. Simply because it isn’t right

I do disagree, this is not just on the publisher, the studio does a contract with the publisher, as you well know, and that covers deliverables by dates. If you don't deliver the expected thing at date/milestone x, you're going to get shafted, but you also originally signed that you can do X, Y, Z by Date. The publisher does have its money invested in the studio, as well as the marketing most likely with contracts already signed and material printed, ads scheduled and so on. The publisher has put down millions for the product and the marketing etc. and when you tell them 2 weeks before launch, yeah we could use another 2 months, it's a little late for it and the studio can actually be happy that penalties and overdrafts in the gaming industry do not seem as prevalent and/or cutthroat as they are in the rest of the sector.

No, no absolutely not. Paradox dug them selves into this shit hole and now they get to lay down in it! It is not the first time Paradox does this, remember the launch of the broken shitheap Imperator Rome? How it was riddled with bugs and issues, lackluster content?

I played city skylines for the first time in 2023. I was looking forward to this and decided not to buy which ended up being a good move. Ive been having fun on other games

the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. the second step is taking steps to correct yer mistakes. hopefully they can hold on for the long haul.

Man, I gotta see one of these PAM trees.

Oh my god, he's so good at doing an American accent I can almost forget he's Irish, then he comes out with palm tree.

Considering Vic3's SoL-DLC and 1.7: Moving both almost 2 months in the future, even though we havent seen anything besides texts in DevDiaries, screenshots and the announcement trailer keeps me kind of worrying how far the dev of the actual update currently is. At least for 1.5 we had a whole "work in progress" beta, supervising the state of the update. Now we get basically nothing. Well lets say im cautious towards the promise "we have changed".

The only time I would buy DLC for Cities: Skylines II is if that DLC provided a unique experience or a far more in-depth approach to something that was already there. Beaches are NOT a unique experience. Palm tress are very common and should have never been locked behind a paywall.

Since companies decided to treat the customers as a second class to the shareholders, I do not treat them at all. Since the products are only finished when they hit 50% on a Steam summer-sale 3 years after release, I treat that as the release date, if the game brings something new to the table that is. Else, some friends in their garage are also making games, for 10 bucks, with love and care. With Cities Skylines, Paradox managed to what took EA several game releases: KILL IT Maxis did not deserve to make the trash-tier dumpster fire that was the last SimCity, the one replaced by Cities: Skylines. Neither did Colossal Order deserve to be forced into making their own SimCity. As long as "whoops" is acceptable on the side of publishers paddling to share holders, after an expensive piece of "entertainment" got shoveled onto the market, is acceptable by the shovel-ware-publisher, I can spend my money elsewhere.

I think it's great that a dev actually goes out, owns their mistake and apologize for it. One thing I've learned is that if you do a mistake, you fix that ASAP, because a small problem can easily become a large problem if left unattended or god forbid hidden.

ya know what that reminds me? the runtime fee Unity introduced few months back caused a great divide among developers to make a switch

"...it pains us that we have lost the trust of many of you." Because now you won't continue to buy our broken, half-finished content in perpetuity. These people aren't sorry for their actions. They're sorry they got caught.

They better have Biffa on that panel

Would love for CS2 to be optimized to allow less new hardware to run it.

Holy smoke, Bellular is only 29? I thought he was closer to 40. XD

Im 40 so imagine back in my day. When i installed patches for max payne when its released from my 56k internet

Michael now, "I'm 29 years old!" Michael soon, "Get off my lawn!" 😂

I've been gaming for over 4 decades at this point. Trust me, "back in my day.." becomes something you say more and more as time goes on.

Community Councils are hit or miss, WOW's was dreadful.

Props to them for this apology. It's amazing how some genuine words can buy so much more good faith. Than the usual corporate bulkshit we have been getting.

Its too easy to blame the publishers though. The devs really didnt do a good job with what they put out.

Like, everything Paradox has done since HOI4 has been a regression, and they’ve only increased the monetization.

10 years older than you and yeah "back in my day" I definitely feel ya on that.

If they get a couple of mod creators, I don't know the bigger ones by name as well as a couple of the bigger members of the community such as biffa, MTM, CPP etc I think they'll have a good slice of what the community wants.

Paradox keep taking huge L's they can't manage anything correctly

I think it's funny that the people who like strategy and thinking deeply about things in video games, also have a dev team that actually thinks about "strategy, and deeper thinking". Something about it is poetic and even enjoyable to see. That the devs and the gamers think almost nearly alike.

Never pay for a broken game.

To think .. that I built a whole new PC just for Cities Skylines 2. Old system : Z97, 4770K, 32 GB (max), GTX 1070 - It was able to run the first game, at higher populations, not great, but it was running. Knowing how well the game was filling up 32GB RAM, I wanted to prepare for the second game. New system : Z790, 13600K, 64 GB, RTX 4070 - I don't know how 'well' it would run, I won't buy it until my favorite RU-vidrs say that it is 'now' acceptable. Maybe I should ask Colossal Order to refund my new hardware .. LOL. The old system, although from 2014, was running just fine, except for my expectations for Cities Skylines 2, it was running just about everything just fine, I shouldn't have replaced the old beast.

Because CO did such a great job on Cities Skylines 1 and that game gave us so many years of pleasure I think many of us CS players (including myself) are giving CO the time they need to fix up CS2 and make the game what it supposed to be. Even if this takes up another half a year, I would not care. Tinker en Test the game until it's really a worthy successor of CS1. And we, the most die hard fans, after more than 8 years, we can wait another half. 🙂

idk i think a lot of these companies like Paradox would be better if they werent publicly traded so they could have standards unrelated to "lets make money"

Not so sure if things can get better with having EA doing the same thing with TS4 (releasing an unfinished game and selling bare-boned DLCs) and being extremely successful at it. Ubisoft and Activision also aren't far behind. Paradox problem is that their game franchises were never that big to begin with, they were kind of niche.

The difference between this apology and the previous ones is that this one didn't try to spin the situation (mostly), and included concrete steps they're taking and can be held accountable for if they don't meet them, rather than vague promises to do better. It isn't certain whether they'll succeed, but it's a damn sight more honest to provide a yardstick they can be measured against without wriggle room, and that's the path they needed to move towards. I kind of suspect from the tone, and from the way that Vicky 3 has gone, that there was already internal pushback against releasing the DLC, saying that it was a bad idea, but someone made the call "we HAVE to release the DLC", and now that it did indeed turn out to be a terrible idea, the people who thought it was a bad idea are finally being listened to. Paradox seems genuinely spooked (and they should be) - far more than most publishers their games have huge audience overlap, so Vicky 3 having a bad DLC release wouldn't be an independent accident, it would be a significantly large number of the same people having their patience tried again. They appear to have really realised they simply CANNOT afford to do that. Every DLC across ALL their games needs to go smoothly and be seen as value for money for at least a while.

My biggest thing about buying any paradox games is the DLC. Weather it's old or new game. I know, going into it, I will have to fork over $100 + to fully enjoy the game. And it's not just the new stuff added to the game. Paradox has been know to release fixes to the base game in their DLC.

Not even just since "Back in the day" has the quality of products taken a sharp dive, but like the last 10 years has been every year getting exponentially worse. We're spiraling badly

It has been a bad situation long enough now that most people laugh at you if you say that this gives you more faith in them. Most people see it as lost money and have mostly moved on to something else. Personally I have less invested ($30 for base game through a third party) so it's easier for me to just wait. After playing I stated this game should have had a year to 18 months longer before release. I expect that by June 2025 it will be what it should have been at release. Temporarily I've moved to Indie games where you buy the game and play. No or very little DLC, most of the game is in what you bought for 10-30 dollars... imagine that...lol.

Maybe this means there's a dim flicker of hope for the upcoming White Wolf games to not be trash! Odds are insanely low because Hunter 5th or whatever they want to call it was such dogshit, but hey.

there's successful community councils and there's the WoW council

the messaging is commendable, rather than that infuriating passive aggressive "we're sorry *you* misunderstood" approach others like to take. sounds like theyre gonna do a No Mans Sky route.

How much has stuff degraded? Well, back in *my* day, ya whippersnapper, we went to the store and bought a box with a game that had *better* be finished - oh, and it couldn't be removed from our computers without our knowledge and consent. Patches might come out, but they were generally small and to fix bugs - because nobody could realistically spend hours downloading them over a phone set on an acoustic coupler. DLC? Disk Loaded Content. (And before *that,* we were typing them in by hand from books and magazines....)

How long did Paradox think $500+ games were going to last before even the most ardent fans noticed the pattern? Palm trees being DLC is just the natural evolution of Paradox' entire strategy. If they could get away with it their games would be sold one single asset at a time. Paradox is another one that can just go away.

For me to trust it enough to actually buy the game, Their creators will have to be able to discuss that there "is" an NDA, the terms need to be public, and the NDA cannot have a non-disparragement clause in it. Most people won't take the time to read it, but some people will, and it will be a level of openness that you don't see from publishers and corporations these days when it comes to an NDA.

That sort of 'long term investing' went out the window when funds switched over to AI to pick their stocks.

This is a lot like Creative Assembly's reaction to backlash over Shadows of Change. They apologized, added more content to it, did partial refunds for Pharaoh.