Crusader Kings 3
Paradox plans to raise the price of Crusader Kings 3 DLCs. The strategy, perhaps one of the most popular ever, has been supported for some time by the development team, with the release of various additional content. However, content that will undergo a price increase over the next few weeks.The reasons behind these increases are due to Paradox's strategy of increasing the perceived value of the same. "The increase is necessary to reflect the quality of our content," reads the release launched by the development team. “This change will also be addressed to all Flavor packages, to maintain production quality”, continues the press release. Difference, however, with regard to the edition of the game.
This price increase policy will obviously not be limited to Steam, but also to other stores where the game is present. If you have played Crusader Kings 3 on Xbox Game Pass, therefore, in order to purchase the DLCs you will need to pay the same price as the one on the Valve client. So, if you had doubts about buying a certain content, then perhaps you should hurry up before the price increase decided by Paradox becomes effective: you have just under a month to be able to buy the content you want.
Watch out: Crusader Kings 3 flavour packs are about to double in price
Audio player loading…Paradox has sent the Crusader Kings 3 community into a tumult after announcing a retroactive price change for CK3 flavour packs that almost doubles their cost.
The change, which is due to take effect on September 13, will ratchet up the price of CK3's smaller DLCs from $6.99 to $12.99 (though regional pricing means the scale of the increase might change a bit depending on where you are). It affects the two previously released flavour packs—Northern Lords and Fate of Iberia—plus any flavour packs that are yet to come, whose cost will 'be more in line with this price point' when they come out. Neither the base game nor the game's bigger expansion DLCs will be changing in price.
Inflation seems like the most obvious explanation. With everything else in the world getting precipitously dearer, why not CK3 DLC? But Paradox's announcement doesn't mention the global economic situation at all. Instead, a Paradox community manager says only that, 'These changes are being made to keep up our quality level with the increase on all Flavor Packs and related content'.
Paradox has been through a lot of turmoil recently. After a much-feted announcement, work on Bloodlines 2 ground to a halt before Paradox took the project off Hardsuit Labs and gave it to a new, still unknown developer (opens in new tab). During that time, Paradox lost CEO Ebba Ljungerud after her resignation in 2018. Her replacement, returning CEO Fredrik Wester, almost immediately had to issue an apology (opens in new tab) over his 'inappropriate behaviour' toward a colleague at a company conference held that same year. These crises have all carried a price in terms of time, morale, and money, and it may be the case that price hikes like these are part of an attempt to make up for that.
Players haven't taken the news well. The Paradox forum post (opens in new tab) announcing the price hike is flooded with comments from fans upset by the unexpected and—to be fair—pretty significant leap in price. Paradox has recommended that players pick up the currently available packs before the price change kicks in, and suggested that players could avoid the pinch on future packs by buying future expansion passes (opens in new tab). If anything, those suggestions only seem to have fueled the community's belief that these changes are motivated by greed rather than necessity.
CK3's flavour packs are the bitesize cousins of its bigger, full-blown expansions. Where expansions bolt on entire new layers to the game as a whole, flavour packs focus on adding more specific cosmetic and mechanical differentiators to the game's myriad cultures and religions. The two that have been released thus far have focused on adding new customisation options and mechanical intricacies to the game's Iberian and Norse cultures, but there's almost certainly a lot more to come if CK2's gargantuan library of DLC (opens in new tab) is anything to go by.
If, like me, you have a crippling and self-destructive addiction to buying Paradox DLC and then not playing it, that habit is now going to cost us around twice as much from September on. Maybe I can get a loan from the Pope.