Paradox respond to the accusation that they fix games with paid DLC - "we try to find a middle ground"

rockpapershotgun.com:

Fire up the Steam page for Stellaris, one of my favourite space sims, and you will see 28 pieces of DLC, ranging from free character portraits to £35 expansion passes that span a bunch of species and story packs. Stablemate Europa Universalis 4 has 37 DLC packs under its banner, while Cities Skylines is streets ahead with a whopping 62. Paradox Interactive have long built their core game business around putative forever-projects that trail an enormous mantle of paid expansions. It's seemingly this, as much as their institutional expertise with 4X, that justifies their commitment to grand strategy games, whose worlds and systems can be fleshed out for literal decades.

One drawback of this approach is that Paradox may at least appear to be deliberately withholding features in order to sell expansions down the road. It's certainly a fair conclusion to make when said DLC expansions are later folded back into the base game, which implies that they should have been there to start with. Pretty much every Paradox game I know of has a vociferous group of players who accuse the company of releasing games that must be "fixed with paid DLC". This is especially true of sequels, which inevitably look skinny and malnourished next to their much-expanded and updated predecessors. At the company's Media Day last week, I asked deputy CEO Mathias Lilja how exactly the company assign resources between main game and DLC development, and how they address the perception of "fixing with DLC" - especially given their more recent experiments with subscription models, which arguably bake in the practice of holding material back.

Lilja began by making what struck me as a slightly unhelpful comparison with painting, designed, I think, to illustrate that game development is a messy, open-ended process. "I think that's one of the things that we're trying to do - to address that [perception]," he said. "The reason that our business is sustainable is that we launch a game, that is good enough. But,