Europa Universalis V released seven years ago, and since then it's amassed a frankly intimidating amount of post-launch content. It's a fairly common predicament when it comes to Paradox's strategy games: as they grow over time, knowing what to buy and what to ignore is hard for new players. But Paradox has a plan to make that process a bit easier.
The company announced on its forums today that it's testing a subscription service for Europa Universalis V. A new patch, 1.29.4, is designed to accommodate the testing and will not, the studio ensures, affect the game in any other way.
The studio writes: "We have heard for years from existing and potential new players that the cost of getting the game and all expansions all at once is quite expensive (and might be discouraging for completely new EU4 fans), it's been supported for almost 7 years after all. A subscription model has been suggested to us on many occasions, so we thought we'd run a test to see how popular such a service would be."
Participation in the test will be offered to "a limited group of people" and aspects like costing will be determined by the outcome of the test. Whether the subscription service eventuates or not depends on how the test goes.
Presumably to address similar problems with Crusader Kings 2, Paradox made that game free last year, with its huge library of DLC still sold piecemeal or as part of bigger packages. In the meantime, if you're keen to jump into Europa Universalis 4 for cheap, its currently on sale for $1 on Humble Bundle.
