Hacker News Reader

Comment by mablopoule | Hacker News Reader

It's on my bucket list since, but I was afraid of falling down the rabbit hole, same as Anno, Civilisation and other cool games.

I'm so glad City Skyline had such a success, because I feel that other Paradox Interactive games wouldn't have existed otherwise.

As an avid player of Stellaris, and as someone eyeing the Crusader Kings series or Europa Universalis, I'm feel that Paradox games have DLCs done right. They are clearly on the expensive side, but they are contentfull, and feel less shameless than EA counterpart (especially with the Sims who has the same DLCs over and over again).

On a side note, there is also Caesar III (& Pharaoh) on Gog, and it's still a gem.

View on HN

Is there some backstory to the crucial-ness of Cities Skyline? I thought they’d had a pretty good thing going for a while by then, with their various funky history simulators.

Maybe not then, I haven't done my homework on this subject to be honest.

I mostly said that because of a gut feeling that CS is their main cash cow, while their others series are solid but with a more niche player base.

> while their others series are solid but with a more niche player base

Might have been so in the past, but Paradox games are relatively mainstream, although they seem a bit niche.

Hearts of Iron IV is the 32th most played game at Steam right now (https://steamdb.info/charts/), while Cities: Skylines is on spot 56. Might have something to do with recent news or released addons, but still, other Paradox games are wildly popular and Paradox would surely do just fine even without Cities: Skylines.

More interesting stats comparing Hearts of Iron with Cities: Skylines

> Cities: Skylines - 18,280 players right now | 24,541 24-hour peak | 60,386 all-time peak 8 years ago

> Hearts of Iron IV - 32,652 players right now | 44,193 24-hour peak | 70,997 all-time peak 5 months ago

Interesting. Thanks for the detailed comparison, and glad to be proved wrong.

I think they improved their Clauswidtz à lot in the past 3 years.

Really night and day in term of bugs. Idk what they did, better hire, better process or more people on it (or all 3), but it made multi-player bearable on EU4, and great on Hoi4/stellaris (I do not like the game that much, but it's a better MP game than EU4, let's be honest.)

Anyway, Hoi4 isn't niche anymore. It's like top5 MP strategy game.

Cities: Skylines is published but not developed by Paradox.

The games Paradox itself develops are the grand strategy games in the Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, Stellaris, Victoria, and Imperator: Rome lines. The flagship games here are the strongest games in the genre, and even among the broader category of strategy games, they're definitely in the most-played games, with the main competitors being the Civilization, Age of Empires, Total War, and Mount & Blade series.

I don't think that has any merit, Paradox have launched and developed a bunch of successful (in their genre) games, and owns multiple studios while doing the publishing for even more. It's a successful company and would have been without Cities: Skylines as well.

Probably parent meant the developer of the game, Colossal Order, which only developed Cities in Motion before, which was successful in it's own right but not on the scale of Cities: Skylines. But then "other X games wouldn't have existed otherwise" doesn't make sense, because Cities: Skylines is the latest game they've launched, and it was in 2015.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com