Welcome, to the new (Fake) Dev Diary, Donte's Inferno!



As you may or may not have heard, today's dev clash was postponed in favor of allowing the development team (the majority of the participants), to focus their time on the current work-in-progress patch.



We pride ourselves here at Paradox on having a bit of fun with what we do, and the streams are a large part of that, not only are they great for promoting our games and engaging with the players, but they are short moments of light relief form the normal tasks and duties of the staff. However, it is important for us to keep in mind that we're here to make great games, so sometimes we end up in situations like today where we needed to team to focus on the development of the patch, rather than participate in the stream. On top of this, Daniel has also had to focus his attention on the patch, rather than write you a dev diary, so here I am as a quick and dirty stand in!



These things happen, it's game development, it rarely goes according to plan, but it's still good fun at the end of the day.



As a quick introduction for anyone who doesn't remember the last time I did one of these, my name is Bevan, aka Dnote, and I'm a Product Segment Owner. Very fancy title, but essentially, I'm part of the Product Management team, responsible for the "business case" of a game, bringing together the various disciplines involved and ensuring that everyone is working towards the same goal. This is usually broken down into two parts, Production (they make games), and Marketing (they talk about and sell games). In other companies, I'm the suit in the background controlling the money and making all the decisions you players usually hate!



On top of this though, I'm also responsible for the strategy games part of our portfolio of games. This means every strategy game that Paradox develops and publishes is my responsibility to some extent. I'm also responsible for growing that part of the portfolio, so I get a very large say in what games we make next. It's always fun to work with the talented creative leads we have and at other studios to come up with new ideas and opporunities, then do some revenue forecasts and cost estimates to determine if we can actually make it work or not.. so far we've been pretty lucky with that.



So, I want to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about where we are at and where we are headed. This isn't strictly a Stellaris dev diary, as I like to think I'm smart enough to leave the actual development of the game to the specialists in that area. Daniel, nor Martin before him, has come to me with an idea that was too crazy to do, so I feel a little confident in leaving them to it (though I still complain about how expensive it is to do everything).



Where we are at right now is pretty good, we have Europa Universalis 4, Crusader Kings 2, Hearts of Iron 4, Stellaris and Battletech, in what we call a live state. They are launched and have active ongoing development, focused on a mixture of free updates and DLC. The cadence and types of updates and DLC are things that are determined by the individual teams, but they all seem to have found a healthy approach that works for them and the players of those games.



Going forward, we do have more games in development, we break this down in various ways but out of those that we've announced, we have Imperator: Rome from PDS, Age of Wonders: Planetfall from Triumph and Stellaris Console from Tantalus. Whilst technically Stellaris Console isn't a new game, we do have a different development team on it, so we treat it as it's own thing. And I'm pretty sure this isn't a secret (I don't stay up to date on everything), but these three are all planned to come out this year too.



On top of this, we have other strategy games in development as well, both at our internal studios and at external studios, which we aren't ready to talk about. Suffice to say we're pretty confident you'll enjoy them and I don't know the exact timing of things but you'll probably want to make sure you attend or tune into PDXCon later this year. Our road map forward is solid and builds on the expertise we already have, with a focus towards delivering the types of games we know you, our current players, enjoy.



Then there is the theoretical part of the portfolio, which is the fun part for me. What are we going to do beyond that!



At this point, we don't really know (much to the annoyance of Management and Acquisitions). It can be quite hard for us, or anyone in this industry to identify new opportunities, as very few companies publish data about their games and the audiences (people that buy and play them). We need to find our own ways to figure this out, through a mixture of market research, player engagement (we do talk with you every now and then) and gut feeling.



So my question to you, is what would you like to see?



Now, I know you're going to say the usual things, but what I'm really curious about is the unusual things. What features in strategy games are important to you, what features in other games would like to see come to strategy games? Maybe you would like to see something that brings epic large scale wars to life, with tactical battles (imagine control the Khan's horde as it rampages across Europe), or a game where you unite the HRE but each of the major dynasties are fleshed out with personalities and story arcs beyond normal procedural content, or something else entirely?



Every year we look at what is coming next, its an ever updating plan and right now, in this moment, we're looking for something special, something that really stands out from the crowd.



Anyways, not a proper dev diary, and not really Stellaris focused, but Daniel and Jamie will be back soon with more info on the patch and the dev clash will resume next week if all goes well with it.



I also wouldn't mind hearing about where you would like Stellaris to go? We've made some pretty big changes to the game over the last 18 months, but what would you like to see added to it, flesh out, or changed?