{"id":904,"date":"2008-03-27T15:38:24","date_gmt":"2008-03-27T19:38:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/03\/27\/really\/"},"modified":"2008-03-28T08:31:38","modified_gmt":"2008-03-28T12:31:38","slug":"really","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/03\/27\/really\/","title":{"rendered":"Really?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Chick has posted a little blurb<\/a> about his encounter with Paradox lead designer Johan Andersson. Chick seems to think that I’m crazed with rage about how EU3 deviated from the historical path, which isn’t quite the case. I understand why Paradox did what it did for the reasons laid out in the linked story – it’s just not as viable a game design for a long term historical game.<\/p>\n

But this little blurb was interesting.<\/p>\n

It almost sounds like he’s disowning the EU2 model. “Yeah, I’ve been communicating that on the forums for the last three, four years. It’s a model that doesn’t work. I mean, Crusader Kings doesn’t have it. EU3 doesn’t have it. Hearts of Iron has it, but it works. But EU2, it really didn’t work in the long run.” Furthermore, he says that EU2 was their worst selling game.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My bolds.<\/p>\n

I knew that Hearts of Iron II<\/em> was their biggest seller. It is World War II, had decent retail penetration and was the first game Paradox published on its own. So they had a popular subject and didn’t have to worry about international distributors and publishers screwing them over.<\/p>\n

But I’m very surprised that EU2 sold worse than Victoria<\/em>, which was a dog’s breakfast of neat ideas and cool innovations stuck to a frankly impenetrable economic model. And I’m surprised it sold more than Crusader Kings<\/em> considering the long tail of Paradox strategy games.<\/p>\n

Still, I would not draw the lesson that this was because EU2 was too faithful to history. Most gamers wouldn’t have known that until they had played it.<\/p>\n

EDIT<\/strong>: Chick has clarified his reporting of Andersson’s sales comment to reflect that EU2 sold the worst of the EU games, apparently not including its cousin games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Chick has posted a little blurb about his encounter with Paradox lead designer Johan Andersson. Chick seems to think that I’m crazed with rage about how EU3 deviated from the historical path, which isn’t quite the case. I understand why Paradox did what it did for the reasons laid out in the linked story […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5GFeQ-really","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}