Role of the Product Manager

So what about 2018?

Greetings everyone! I hope all of you have enjoyed the holidays and had a wonderful New Year. Here’s for a new year with plenty of opportunities and fun from the EUIV team and me, Firebolt, Product Manager for EUIV! Just like Fogbound mentioned in the last Dev Diary, if you are eagerly waiting for details on what new content will will introduce to the game, this is one is not for you. I will leave that task to @DDRJake who will be back next week. But for those of you curious to know a bit more about how we organize ourselves to bring EUIV to you and our general plans for the year to come, please stay awhile and listen!So what does a Product Manager do? My role is to make sure that we can deliver the best possible game to you whilst ensuring that the teams involved get the resources they need to do so.In the case of EU IV, I work closely together with the core Product Team, consisting of the Game Director (DDRJake),the Project Lead (millenss) and the Product Marketing Manager who coordinates all the activities dealing with the marketing & sales department. It is in this constellation we discuss what we need to do for upcoming months/year (other people and departments are also involved depending on the particular subject at hand).The Game Director is the one who is responsible for coming up with ideas for the expansion(s), the Project Lead works out when we can deliver these and the PMM is in charge of how we market the expansion in question. And I am responsible for the budget.Normally we plan for what we want to do in the next 12 months (we also have a more long term vision of where we want to take the game).This is an iterative process where we look at:- the content we want to add to the game (i.e. what each expansion should be),- what staff is required to do this (no of programmers, content designers, QA, marketing etc),- the optimal timing of release and the cost of marketing to make you, the players, aware of the expansion (competing releases, campaigns such as the Paradox Weekend on Steam and various trade shows etc.),- and finally the business case for all of the above.When all of this is done I look at the budget requirements and compare that to my initial estimates and goals. Hopefully those match, or else I have to revisit and change the plans or I need to request additional funds from management, be it that the developers need additional funds to add amazing new features to the expansion or that we want to take over GDC with a ridiculously large booth.So, in a world of infinite money and time, I would say yes to most requests, but alas it is also for me to sometimes set tighter deadlines and/or budgets due to whatever constraints we may face. Normally we sit down and try to agree together on how to best proceed. But that GDC booth will probably not happen...but I can tell you what will happen!We are very happy and grateful that more of you than ever are playing EUIV. Without your continued support and feedback, we would not be writing these diaries. I just checked in the Wiki and this seems to be our 244th dev diary for EUIV which is quite crazy! So once again, thanks for being a fantastic community giving us both praise and critique, inspiring us to do even better. Our hope is that we can continue to bring you fun and exciting moments that you can share with your friends and with the community in 2018.We had a busy 2017 with three expansion releases; Mandate of Heaven, Third Rome and Cradle of Civilization and two Patches; Hungary and Japan. While all performed well, Third Rome was the one that was met with the most scepticism. It was the one expansion that differed from our typical releases and, in hindsight, perhaps we did not explain the rationale for it well enough. We named it an “Immersion Pack” to distinguish it from our regular, larger expansions that usually cost around USD 20 (or the equivalent in your local currency).So why did we introduce a new type of expansion? As you may know EUIV is on its fourth year now and some may wonder if we there really are more things that we can introduce to the game. Even though there may be as many opinions as there are players on the value of each expansion that we have released over the years, we believe that there are still aspects of the game that can be improved upon, fleshed out or just given a bit more attention.And that was the exact purpose of the Third Rome Immersion Pack. We wanted to bring you more tightly themed content focusing on a specific area, in this case Russia, to give the possibility to delve deeper, try out a new nation or new strategies, i.e. “immerse” yourself a bit more into that particular region, all in the hope that we can bring you something that helps keeping the game feel fresh and interesting. We know that a more narrow scope may not interest everyone, but the ambition is that we can give some of you something to sink your teeth into without having to wait to integrate it into a full fledged USD 20 expansion. These larger expansions usually contain quite complex changes to the game mechanics and hence take longer to code, get tested and finally out to you.Something we learned from the release of Third Rome and your feedback on it, it is that we should have content that can be more universally applied eg: is available for nations other than just those focused on in the Immersion back in order to ensure that once you have finished playing that particular campaign, there is still value from the Immersion Pack regardless of where or what you are playing the next time. This means that even though some of the new content may be primarily constructed to be used in the region/country that the Immersion Pack covers, the basic mechanic should be possible and interesting to use elsewhere in the game.So why am I spending time discussing Immersion Packs? Primarily because we do plan to release more Immersion Packs going forward, all themed around a region or a concept. It does not mean that we will stop releasing larger expansions, but they will be interspersed with smaller packs. The next DLC coming out will be an Immersion Pack...the question is what region or theme it will focus on? Suffice to say that it will be focusing on one of the most played starting countries and it is in Europe…I am sure that DDRJake will reveal more in next week’s Dev Diary! So stay tuned!With those words I wish you all an excellent start to the new year and happy gaming!/Firebolt