It seems unconventional to celebrate what is essentially World War 2 kicking off but hey, Hearts of Iron IV [official site] launched a year ago today and Paradox are marking it with the gift of free DLC. The small ‘Anniversary Pack’ freebie brings Polish voices for Polish troops, twenty new portraits for leaders and generals, and twenty new icons for divisions. Not huge, but nice to have.

Paradox have also crunched some numbers from the past year of play, noting that the active playerbase is still growing, and sharing stats such as: 60% players use mods.

HoI 4 game director Dan ‘podcat’ Lind shared the numbers in today’s dev blog post:

“60% of players use some kind of mod (although the most common stuff is things like colored buttons, or extra names for equipment), but what really makes me happy is how popular the big mods are: Millennium Dawn, The Great War, Kaiserreich and Road to ’56 are all very popular and have daily playing numbers between 8-20%.”

That’s impressive, that.

He also broke out some graphs (wait, they’re not as bad as graphs usually are) showing that yup, the number of active players per month is still going up. As Lind notes, “A ‘normal’ game would just have that first spike and then head straight down, but our aim is to keep people playing with patches, dlc releases and mod support and grow amount of active players more and more over time (looking at graph we broke active player record several times since release numbers).”

As Paradox recently chatted about with our Adam, the Paradox way is to keep expanding and updating games until they essentially become their own sequels, keeping players for years.

As for the Anniversary Pack, players should automatically have it now. Apparently those Polish voices are provided by a player. Lind says:

“We also got a cool surprise when a member of the community contacted us about helping out with Polish troop voice overs (our resident team pole is on parental leave which was our original plan!). They sound super nice and its always cool to have members of community to come buy the office for stuff like this :) On release we also gave out the free DLC ‘United and Ready’ that was focused on Poland to everyone, so we felt this was a fitting followup.”

Paradox are expanding HoI 4 again on June 14th with the Death or Dishonor expansion.

Hearts of Iron IV seemed to get off to a rocky start, though Paradox have added a fair bit in free updates, not to mention several small-ish expansions. How has the first year been for you, warheads?