arrua: Still, I mean everything I wrote in my previous message. Back with your money certain business practices and you will be accomplice of those business practices. There are times in which, sadly, you can´t choose. We see it with the clothing business, in which slave labor is involved. Or the food business, in which eco-friendly products are very expensive. But when it comes to entertainment, one always has the chance to choose what to back.
I wear my clothes until they fall apart. What I mostly need is shoes because I walk a lot and I'm not on the light side. Whenever possible, I buy EU-made ones but that requires being willing to pay more.
Food, especially meat, is ridiculously cheap because too many bad practices are allowed. Ecological and socially sustainable food will always be more expensive. We can argue about how much is justified and how to reduce that, but it will be more expensive.
arrua: I find that 1euro/hour argument a falacy. The fact that a game has big replaying possibilities, is no excuse for impossing abusive prices or a greedy business model. I miss that videogames era in which a game got one or two expansions with actual content. Like a minicampaign and/or new ways of playing the main game (the Grim Dawn game you mentioned being a good recent example of that). And shortly thereafter, if the game was successful, a sequel was released. Nowadays, a DLC doens´t bring near that much content, cost the same, and the base game is designed to bring the minimum content so that the company has an excuse to realease "new" content for years. How old is Stellaris? How old is EU4? And it is sad, that all this I´m writing is something you already know. Everybody knows. And yet, you happily swallow all this consumer mistreatment.
There are plenty of games which are essentially static with maybe an expansion or two. However, those games typically do not invest time and resources in fundamentally changing and evolving core mechanics (even for the expansions). If you do not feel comfortable in other models, do not buy games that follow other models.
I once again want to point out that there are plenty of things people pay money for I completely do not understand why you would pay money for that. I do not spend any time on any forums ranting at them.
Your sequel argument is essentially the fallacy in my view. A good example of that would be the Tropico series. It gets expanded a couple of times and then a sequel comes out. The sequel is (give or take a few details) the baseline of the previous game again. And then you buy the expansions again to get back what you missed from the predecessor.
In my opinion, I'm getting a better deal in the Stellaris model.
arrua: PD: Regarding that last line you wrote. When I want to safe the world, I rant in the right forums. When I want to safe the game industry, I rant in a videogames forum. It´s only logical, isn´t it? At the end of the day, yelling at the wind is the only option we are allowed to do if we are not happy about the state of the world we live in. And still, we have censorship.
As far as I can see from your posts you do not really have a good understanding of what changes in Stellaris over which timeframes and why people might be willing to accept their business model for that. That is fine, to make sense of that you need a considerable investment into the game (emotionally and time, not financial) as well as the right psychological fit to be sufficiently interested in the subject. They invest quite a bit of time and energy (which cost money) into what is essentially a niche market.
I have been looking in quite a few places to scratch that particular itch and despite some grumblings and occasional missteps Stellaris still proves to be the most reliable one for this. If you do not want to pay for Stellaris, then don't pay for Stellaris. There are plenty of others out there doing something in that general direction, maybe you find the happiness with them I did not find there.
