Hi everyone! but wait?! this isn't Wednesday? Indeed its not, its the one year anniversary of the release of HOI4!
To thank everyone who has been playing the game the last year we figured we wanted to give something out, even though Death or Dishonor is right around the corner. So once the build was done, and the team jumped on prep work for the next thing and 1.4.1, our awesome artist made you guys a bunch more non-historic portraits (fighting the good fight against clone army). As well as more custom division symbols to pick from. We also got a cool surprise when a member of the community contacted us about helping out with Polish troop voice overs (our resident team pole is on parental leave which was our original plan!). They sound super nice and its always cool to have members of community to come buy the office for stuff like this :) On release we also gave out the free DLC "United and Ready" that was focused on Poland to everyone, so we felt this was a fitting followup.
DLC should automatically show up (might need to restart steam). More info and details on the DLC page here.
First year in hindsight
Since we released HOI4 the game has has had 8 patches and 1 DLC. The second DLC (Death or Dishonor) is coming on Wednesday next week together with the 1.4 patch.
Some people may have been at PDXCon and seen my presentation, but I figure now might be a good time to to show some of that here too (the presentation also went over future plans, but thats a diary for later).
First up playbase growth is really nice, we broke 500k earlier this year and it just keeps going up as you can see:
Playerbase is cool and all, but the numbers I care about the most is active players actually playing the game and HOI4 has a really solid community there:
A "normal" game would just have that first spike and then head straight down, but our aim is to keep people playing with patches, dlc releases and mod support and grow amount of active players more and more over time (looking at graph we broke active player record several times since release numbers).
Speaking of mod support, mods have been a massive hit for Hearts of Iron IV. 60% of players use some kind of mod (although the most common stuff is things like colored buttons, or extra names for equipment), but what really makes me happy is how popular the big mods are: Millennium Dawn, The Great War, Kaiserreich and Road to '56 are all very popular and have daily playing numbers between 8-20%.
Its also really interesting to see what nations people play the most and this is one of the things we use to decide what nations to focus on in the future (the other are how relevant they were for the war and if they have interesting positions/opportunities). Early on Italy was the king for a few days (tutorial nation), and after that Germany has taken over. Here are the current numbers:
Overall a number that hasn't really changed much is majors vs minors. its gone from about 35% to 39%. We feel pretty comfortable with it there. (the DoD nations are not on the list since it was intended to be part of "Where are we going in the future" of the PDXCon presentation and numbers will change a lot with DLC release. They sit around Turkey level though, except Czechoslovakia obviously ;) ).
That is almost it from me today, but I figured I'd show a cool thing:
Yup, the MXY7 Ohka,rocket powered human-guided anti-shipping kamikaze attack aircraft (phew) now gets custom art and works again with the new air interface (we broke it in 1.2 if I remember correctly so it wouldn't launch).
See you tomorrow again for a regular diary. That one is gonna be a bit of a mix (axis subject levels, AI & Balance, UI improvements etc) as we cover all the bits and pieces left before the final diary drops just before release with the full patchlog.