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Also, where did you hear that they're one of the biggest game companies? They had 479 employees as of March 2020 and make niche games. They're certainly not small, but not massive either.
To add to this, most games these days are made in game engines that are a frankenstein of off the shelf tech. Few companies to none build their engines from the ground up these days, to many moving parts. And with the more complex systems in play the more chance of them interacting in the wrong ways. But if you haven't build them yourself it's hard to predict where problems will crop up.
The sheer size of games make the existence of bugs inevitable. You're aware that basically everything you use in life has 'bugs'? The food you buy has blemishes, the packaging are only 99% consistent in their volumes. Tthe building you're in is filled with little bugs, a window is a little crooked, a door doesn't close smoothly, that one small room has wonky walls. Keeping everything in 100% condition is impossible, the same thing applies to complex pieces of software like big strategy games.
There to many systems interacting to predict how it will unfold. We don't have AI even remotely smart enough to do this for us so it must be done by hand. But if a playthrough takes 30 hours and a bug will only show up for one character and there 500 characters that's 15.000 hours of testing. That's 375 weeks of fulltime testing. So if a game has 3 months between production and release that's over 30 full time testers just to find those specific bugs if nobody misses any of these one time bugs. But then you'd basically have to do that with every patch, impossible.
Now I'm not saying companies should release buggy software. Buggy software is a travesty and should be minimized but the idea that games like CK3 can be bug free is ludecrous and detached from reality.
To step away from generalisation and talk about CK3 ...
YES. IT IS VERY HARD TO MAKE A GAME BUG FREE. IT IS NEAR IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE A GAME LIKE CK3 BUG FREE.
Especially so in a "patch it later" and "work on the next thing" culture.
See. There can be nuance.
You also did prove my point with your reply. You simply aren't going to be willing to accept the real answer. They have limited time and resources, meaning stupid bugs aren't a priority due to how hard they can be to fix. That is your answer and literally every video game I've ever played is like that too. To be completely honest, I've played ck3 for hundreds of hours and I've never encountered these horrible never ending bugs You're whining about. Some bad bugs near launch but they fixed them very quickly.
What are you talking about?
According to the numbers, most gamers do play games on their PC. Steam has more active monthly users than Xbox and Playstation, by quite a landslide.
Paradox is in fact very well known and a very large company. Paradox is also a billion dollar company. They make millions in revenue each month. You can easily look this information up yourself through a quick Google search.
They're not "niche" anymore, they haven't been in a long time. They make the best historical/strategy games out there, you'd be extremely hard pressed to find another company that makes historical/strategy games that can even compete or compare with Paradox.
You can disagree with me all you like, the fact of the matter remains, Paradox is a billion dollar company. When a company is valued over a billion dollars, and when a company has revenue of millions of dollars per month, it's kind of hard to see it as a "small," or "niche," or "not well known" company.
Your estimation of how many gamers have heard of the company is most likely incorrect, though on the other hand, gamers probably rarely investigate companies that produce games they just aren't interested in or don't play, so who really knows? You mention Nintendo and Gamefreak, Mojang, etc., and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if people who play little kiddy games like Pokémon and Minecraft and such never heard of Paradox or their games - why would they if all they care about is little anime-esque cartoony creatures in the first place?
Also, I wasn't comparing Paradox to companies like those you mention? I wasn't comparing it to any other company. I was stating the facts, which is that Paradox is valued at over a billion dollars and makes piles of cash, so it's absurd to try to make it out to be a "small, niche," etc. company when that's simply not the truth.
As far as the employee count goes, that's almost never what anyone is actually referring to when they speak about how "large" a company is. When someone is talking about the "size" of a company, they're virtually always referring to how robust it is financially. You could have a skeleton crew running the show - if it's successful and being valued at over a billion dollars, yea, that would be deemed a "large" company.
First, The shilling "best game eva" crowd is going to give them 5 stars no matter what because it has the title of their most loved game with a new number at the end of it.
Then, they know that steam will burry the negative reviews unless it's a new DLC for EU4 where every review is bad.
Third, they don't have to release final product games because they can fix their game through download updates after they already sold it to us.
and Fourth, because we keep buying them, even though we know they aren't done, and because we have become accustomed to their business model of release now, fix later.
Truth be told, its our fault for the most part.
You can't make a game that's completely bug-free. Nonetheless, many of the previous posters are far too quick and too generous with the free out-of-jail card for modern developer studios that choose to cut costs on QA and QC (which obviously Paradox has had issues with too). Their arguments aren't fully persuasive, especially when they are trying to convince a customer that it's perfectly okay for a seller to ignore defects in a product and focus instead on making new products that will provide a more direct profit or a higher margin. You couldn't really claim that it would be perfectly reasonable and acceptable for laptop manufacturers to focus on making new laptops and ignore defects or inconsistencies (things not working as designed, not delivering on the promises) and instead focus on making more laptops because that's where the money is for them. You simply can't proceed from the premise that maximizing the developer/publisher's shareholders' premium is paramount or especially that it should be the paramount concern for the customer.
Again, you can't just tell customers that they should accept e.g. some parts missing or not working as designed or as advertised, so that the seller can make more money by making new products for sale instead of bringing non-conforming products to conformity.
In short, you can't reasonably expect the buyer to put the sellers' shareholders' profit (or other interest) above his/her own interest. And this is the flawed argument that defenders of gamedev companies keep making.
Although it could be reasonable to expect the buyer to settle on an equal balance between his interest and the developers' shareholders', but then you would necessarily have to expect both sides of the relationship to be equally reasonable and accommodating, not just the buyer/customer.
Honestly, it kinda looks like a lot of you guys are making a sort of Stockholm argument due to having been taught by corporations to consider a corporation's interest as paramount. So it's kind of like a moral tenet or a principle of logic to some of you that the corporation's interest or even the investor's interest is more important than the consumer's and even that the consumer should put the investor's profit before his own right to get his value for the money or get whatever was promised or could be reasonably expected. And again, that's a flawed line of reasoning, and you wouldn't even try it outside of the game industry.
You guys would never, for example, expect Volvo's or BMW's customers to live with things and accept defects in the product or inconsistencies with the description just so that Volvo's or BMW's shareholders could turn a bigger profit (the company making some savings still translates into the shareholder making a bigger profit).
That argument is as flawed as treating shareholders, investors and managers who are on a profit-share scheme as someone who is almost destitute, desperately needs money, needs a lot of compassion and very special empathy, so that we might as well basically just pass the hat around in a relief effort for them.
Obviously, they are not in that kind of need. And they are obviously not in a bigger need than we are. That's a way of thinking that corporations are teaching us to think — and obviously not just in the game industry and not even just with the customers. They try the same thing with vendors (people they pay for raw materials, utilities such as water and electricity, for services, etc.) and employees (the usual 'we can't afford to pay decent wages because then the board members would need to settle on three houses instead of four'). Again, that's flawed logic.
So of course gamedev companies can't be expected to overinvest in QA/QC just so bugs never happen, especially if that would mean operating at a loss or close to, as opposed to merely downgrading the margin from extremely lucrative to very lucrative. But they can be expected to sacrifice some of the pursuit of the highest possible margin in order to establish and maintain proper QA and QC. There are perhaps some bugs that can be ignored, but that's not the majority of bugs, and the need to fully maximize the shareholders' profit is not a good excuse. A line must be drawn somewhere.
Having said the above, I tend to regard CK3 as not crossing the line when it comes to pure bugs, narrowly defined. (This is even though I have serious gripes with other types of flaws and areas of the game, mostly seduction/cheatingt proliferation, bad AI and lacking design logic (mostly events not accounting for situations and factors they should account for). Where of course some of the AI behaviour is what you could write a bug report for, but the problem is more with designing the AI properly.) My first experience of the game was a graphical glitch, ironically, but otherwise I recall the game crashing once on me in like 1000 hours (which is way below industry average), one achievement not getting awarded properly (which is very trivial), and losing 200 years of progress due to a problem with cloud saves, one negative event double-firing (the Pope tanking your piety for not participating in a crusade)… and that's probably it. I'm pretty sure there must have been some minor bugs I can't remember, but if I don't remember them or especially if I didn't notice them, then they obviously haven't detracted much from my experience. There are plenty enough things that detract from my experience, but they aren't bugs (unless we're ready to classify logical inconsistencies in events as bugs). The game is practically as good as bug-free for me, if we stick with the narrow definition of bug.
Edit:
Well, it could make a lot of money without achieving a lot of fame. Not all rich people are famous, just like not all people are rich. The same goes for companies. A company could also be rich (especially on paper, such as some holding companies or pass-through subsidiaries that own second-tier subsidiaries) while being extremely lean-staffed, operating from a small office, etc.
BUT, a company with a significant net worth, size and income is obviously not a basement modder studio staffed by a scarce handul of teenage volunteers.
And things like small staffing or some other kind of low resource allocation are obviously an excuse for the people who work at the company and make the products (or services) but not for the company itself or the managers who make the staffing/other resource-allocation-related decisions, or the policymakers.
And, obviously, the breadth of the fame is not a highly relevant argument to the matter we're discussing.
Indeed. While CK3 is emphatically not full of bugs (and in my subjective experience it is quite bug-free), calling Paradox a small and niche company is crossing the line of overzealous defence that flies against facts or logic. Obviously, one can perhaps bona fide feel that way (due to attachment to figures from like 20 years ago), but that's still counterfactual.
Well, there are some companies, which we could call 'boutiques', which we could agree are small but making big money (e.g. small crew, small office, just the HQ, no branches, owner-managed, etc.). A lot of law firms, design studios, clinics and such like outfits, mostly professional firms. Maybe some artisans too. But the fact of the matter is that Paradox is not something like Ossian Studios (several former BioWare employees who teamed up and formed their own company to work mostly as a subcontractor for other companies). That's what a small, niche gaming company is. A small team of experts or an indie studio that decides to make it a job that pays the bills. A small, niche gaming company is something bordering on indie, and Paradox at this point is very far from that point. Not with the billion numbers you mentioned, not with the half a thousand employees, not with being publicly traded, etc.
Well, you could probably call PDX somewhat niche compared to EA, but that works only because of EA being as enormous a colossus as it is. The Plantagenets could be said to have been kinda niche compared to the Karlings, but that doesn't put them on a level with the de Geneves. ;)
Just a billion a year is pretty small fry for a game publisher. Bandau Namco has three times that per year. Hell that's less then CD Project Red and they barely put out any games.
*checks the internet*
Hilarious, paradox had a revenue of 216 million last year. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-02-23-paradox-reports-best-year-ever-in-2020 That's not even 10% of Square Enix, the 10th largest publisher. Paradox is a small publisher for niche games. It's certainly growing but that doesn't make it big or well known...
Strategy these days is an incredibly niche genre. Call of Duty alone sold more copies then Paradox sold in the last decade. That's only one game. The fact they dominate a niche genre doesn't make them big or well known... They're a big fish in a tiny pond.