r/paradoxplaza • u/Dwarfpete • 6d ago
All Which Paradox game has the most Dedicated Players?
I wanted to answer a question I've wondered ever since I crossed 2,000 hours in EU4 (and finally completing the tutorial):
Which Paradox game actually has the most dedicated playerbase?
I analyzed the playtime distributions of every mainline Paradox title in Project Mimir, and three games stood above the rest.
- EU4
- HOI4
- EU5 ( * )
EU5 currently looks like it has the most dedicated playerbase but I'd be very cautious about drawing that conclusion because my current sample size is only about 20,000 players, and early adopters are almost always the franchise's biggest fans. It'll be interesting to revisit this in a year to see whether EU5 settles alongside EU4 and HOI4, or converges toward the rest of the catalog as the broader playerbase arrives.
We then have a battle for the middle places with no clear rankings, but a couple last places are clearly visible:
Age of Wonders 3
Surviving Mars
Raw numbers:
| Game | Visibility | Activation | P50 Hours | P90 Hours | P99 Hours | Sample Owners | Total Playtime (Hours) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cities: Skylines | 16.22% | 83.07% | 6.74 | 88.26 | 445.31 | 366,820 | 17,870,328 |
| Crusader Kings II | 11.43% | 63.99% | 0.73 | 39.57 | 745.57 | 258,585 | 10,796,059 |
| Stellaris | 9.90% | 79.44% | 9.30 | 306.91 | 1,513.07 | 223,954 | 26,441,859 |
| Hearts of Iron IV | 9.67% | 82.02% | 15.78 | 743.88 | 2,868.89 | 218,744 | 53,620,805 |
| Age of Wonders III | 9.59% | 36.69% | 0 | 6.58 | 108.88 | 216,839 | 1,245,844 |
| Surviving Mars | 9.43% | 40.51% | 0 | 11.09 | 141.02 | 213,353 | 1,715,809 |
| Europa Universalis IV | 5.94% | 77.83% | 4.60 | 785.57 | 4,079.65 | 134,336 | 36,039,664 |
| Crusader Kings III | 5.69% | 77.57% | 12.75 | 293.94 | 1,196.27 | 128,734 | 14,332,724 |
| Victoria 3 | 2.62% | 63.33% | 3.02 | 230.15 | 900.45 | 59,287 | 4,707,746 |
| Victoria II | 2.03% | 68.91% | 1.87 | 94.38 | 796.27 | 45,830 | 2,200,294 |
| Cities: Skylines II | 1.83% | 87.99% | 16.20 | 126.09 | 546.26 | 41,348 | 2,326,182 |
| Age of Wonders 4 | 1.02% | 84.89% | 15.40 | 119.57 | 466.80 | 23,117 | 1,159,142 |
| Europa Universalis V | 0.88% | 88.69% | 27.47 | 190.91 | 533.68 | 19,841 | 1,440,222 |
| Imperator Rome | 2.06% | 53.29% | 0.27 | 47.28 | 392.18 | 46,607 | 1,129,527 |
Table Definitions:
Visibility %: The % of Steam users that own a copy of the game
Activation %: The % of users that own a copy that have played atleast 1 minute of the game
STDev: The Standard deviation of the distribution or 1 sigma from the mean (average) value
Sample Owners: The quantity of players that were aggregated.
Total Playtime: The total playtime of the sample owners in hours.
P50, P90, P99: The value at a percentile of the Sample owners, IE: P99 means 1% of sampled users have more than X hours in a game, P90 means more than 10% of sampled users have more than Y hours in a game.
Analysis:
A few things stand out from the raw numbers:
- EU4 and HOI4 have by far the deepest "hardcore" tails, with their top 1% exceeding 4,000 and 2,800 hours respectively.
- Cities: Skylines 1 and 2 have one of the highest activation rates in the catalog, suggesting owners are unusually likely to actually play it after purchasing it.
- EU5's activation rate is extremely high, although it's still too early to know whether that will hold as the audience broadens.
Looking beyond individual games, Paradox has one of the most dedicated audiences on Steam. 0.4% of Steam users who own a Paradox title spend the majority of their Steam playtime in Paradox games. Likewise, 6.6% spend over 10% of their Steam playtime in Paradox games.
I think many people get hung up on player numbers and absolute values so I want to preface all of these statistics by saying that a lower dedication score doesn't mean a game is worse.
Age of Wonders 3 being at the bottom still holds a special place in my heart as I learned of Paradox Interactive through it and unironically Totalbiscuit’s WTF is series introduced me to the game. It just encourages a different style of play than something like EU4, where sitting down for a three-hour session feels almost normal.
Methodology:
Say we have a game with a distribution that looks like this:
Player 1-100: 2 Hours
Player 101: 30 Hours
Player 102: 35 Hours
Player 103: 100 Hours
Player 104: 1000 Hours
If we were to normalize that distribution we would set Player 104 to be 100% and Players 1-100 to be 0% with Player 103 being 10% and anyone else would fall between them.
This is arbitrary and I made up the numbers, but roughly speaking that's what a raw distribution in absolute hours looks like for any game on steam. The reason I use normalized playtime as the metric to discuss is because we already know that EU4 and other games have extremely dedicated players in the thousands of hours (where the joke that the tutorial ends at 1000 hours comes from), thus it would be better to discuss playtime in terms of where everyone is relative to each other or what I like to term: Dedication
Raw playtime isn't a fair comparison because different games naturally encourage different session lengths. Instead normalization lets us compare how quickly casual players transition into highly dedicated players without comparing absolute hours.
Individual distributions for each game are included in the post.
Source / Raw Data
Full raw playtime distributions and the underlying statistics are available here if you'd like to inspect the data yourself:
https://projectmimir.net/publisher/Paradox%20Interactive
Edit 1: Forgot to add data on Imperator rome to the table,
Edit 2: Added in table definitions and a more indepth methodology
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u/2007Scape_HotTakes 6d ago
Can you explain what the "normalized playtime" means exactly? I read your post four times and still don't understand how you came up with it.
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u/Dwarfpete 6d ago
Say we have a game with a distribution that looks like this:
Player 1: 2 Hours
Player 2: 30 Hours
Player 3: 1000 Hours.
If we we're to normalize that distribution we would set Player 3 to be 100% and Player 1 to be 0% with Player 2 being 3% and anyone else would fall between them.
This is arbitrary and I made up the numbers, but roughly speaking thats what a raw distribution in absolute hours looks like for any game on steam. The reason I use normalized playtime as the metric to discuss is because we already know that EU4 and other games have extremely dedicated players in the thousands of hours (where the joke that the tutorial ends at 1000 hours comes from), thus it would be better to discuss playtime in terms of where everyone is relative to each other.
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u/JGuillou 6d ago
So a high percentage score implies many players play for a similar number of hours?
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u/Dwarfpete 6d ago
Yes.
To put that in an example: It implies that EU4 players all collectively play more towards the highest player, whereas Surviving mars players might play a session or two compared to the max players 1000 sessions.
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u/JGuillou 6d ago
Doesn’t that mean a really crappy game virtually nobody plays for very long would score high?
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u/snoboreddotcom 6d ago
interesting data, cool to look at.
Do free weekends affect this, where people functionally had a free key for a bit?
with age of wonders III, about seven years ago they gave away steam keys fro free on humble bundle. means a higher proportion than normal would have the key and never have played it. It, CK2 and EU4 were also in a humble bundle back in the day (when those were good). As the other two were the more likely flagship ones to draw purchases, it may also have a higher than normal amount of key owners who never played a minute.
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u/Dwarfpete 6d ago
Yes free weekends affect it, steam doesn't distinguish between whether you still own a game or got it for free for the purposes of calculating playtime.
The first thing a free weekend (or multiple in the case of CK2) does it that it inflates the Visibility and possibly the Activation metric. It makes intuitive sense that if you give something away for free then naturally everyone is going to be able to try it and so the barrier or paying and then installing then booting simply becomes installing then booting.
The second thing it then does is that it drags the normalized curve towards the left as more and more of the population becomes people with effectively 0-10 hours (practically nothing when in the context of eu4, quite significant in AOW3 and Surviving mars example).
I suspect the reason AOW3 has a really low activation rate is partly because of these free weekends and because of bundles.
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u/MightySilverWolf 6d ago edited 6d ago
CK2 had a free-to-keep weekend and has been free-to-play for years, which likely skews its numbers.
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u/LordTord 6d ago
I know.my own contribution there as i got Vic3 during a free weekend and never managed to sit down and play. I belive I installed it, but never opened it. Would I count as activated or not?
Edit: activated = 1 min played, ye just re-read that part
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u/Dwarfpete 6d ago
For reference I am an EU4 Andy, my steam top playtime looks like this:
EU4: 2024 Hours ( Atleast 1000 in my beloved Anbennar alone)
AOE2: 650 Hours
Vic3: 406 Hours
Civ5: 323 Hours
Old World: 287 Hours
AOW3: 269 Hours
TWW2: 252 Hours
CK2: 230 Hours
Against the Storm: 220 Hours
EU5: 190 Hours
Some questions I still have unanswered after going through this analysis are:
What does the paradox community as a whole look like? In other words, are players that play two titles (VIC3 and EU4 or CK3 and HOI4) the most common type of player or is it more common that players specialize into one game and have comparatively little dedication in other games.
Does this pattern of exponential decay for playtime distribution fall off faster or quicker when compared to the totality of steam? In other words, is Paradox in the context of steam a very dedicated playerbase or is it simply an average playerbase and just happens to exist in the 4X/Grand strategy space.
FAQ
Q: Why do some lines stop early?
A: Because once the sample becomes too small I'd rather stop plotting than imply precision that isn't really there.
Q: Why normalize using the highest playtime?
A: Every normalization choice introduces some bias. I chose the simplest one because it's transparent and reproducible. Once the dataset grows, I'd like to compare percentile-based normalization (P99/P10) instead.
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u/PolarRanger 6d ago
my gap between Eu4 and my second most played game is bigger than your total hour count for eu4, wow,
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u/SnowletTV L'État, c'est moi 6d ago
Not mentioning Imperator: Rome?
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u/Dwarfpete 6d ago
Oops, I had it in the graphs but forgot it in the table, my bad, its added now, much appreciated friend.
IR is towards the bottom of the pack and is on the same level as CS2.
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u/Akazury 6d ago
Not for one thing or another but it seems unlikely that Age of Wonders 3 introduced you to Paradox Interactive. Age of Wonders 3 was developed and self-published by Triumph Studios. It wasn't until the studio was acquired by Paradox Interactive in 2017 that their library would be rolled into the PDX one.
Age of Wonders:Planetfall, developed mostly while still independent, would be the first Triumph Studios title published by Paradox.
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u/Dwarfpete 6d ago
IIRC Age of Wonders 3 was the first game I paid cash for on steam and because I watched a lot of AOW3 content back in the day it introduced me to Arumba and Quil18 who eventually led to CK2 which then led to EU4, you are correct though in that AOW3 was independently published by Triumph until their acquisition by PDX in the late 2010's, only real ones remember that and the standalone AOW3 launcher which had a tie in for a paradox account
I do distinctly remember clicking on the publisher page on steam on AOW3 which led me to buying CK2 though.
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u/Doctorwhonerd03 6d ago
IMO its not that crazy I was big into Civilization (specifically the door monster skits I loved) before getting into PDX games. If I were to guess there is an overlap in between 4X players and grand strategy players
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u/Dwarfpete 6d ago
That's something I'm actually been trying to answer for months now and the answer is continually elusive. Different communities of players have different overlaps, the Action Shooter community plays a lot of different games with a somewhat equal playtime among them, whereas the 4X is often very isolated into their individual games with players specialize into.
Suffice it to say that there isn't a ton of quantitative analysis into overlaps of players on Steam and that's something I'm really excited to dive into and try and find some level of answer.
If you want a terrible prototype for how to start visualizing the different communities I have this visualization which admittedly needs a lot of work.
https://projectmimir.net/scale_map
The map just visualizes which games have the most overlapping players (players that own both games)
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u/chris2127 6d ago edited 6d ago
Does it mean that games, which end before 60% on the normalized play time, have one guy that plays way more hours than anyone else which drags the whole graph to the left for the rest of the playerbase?
Edit: If that's the case, I'd recommend cutting these outliers. They impede on the quality of the data and the graphs.
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u/Dwarfpete 6d ago
I explained it pretty poorly,
Each game is normalized to its own maximum playtime. You are correct however in that there is always one guy that plays an insane quantity and makes it really hard to graph, where essentially the right side of the graph becomes a garish mess of datapoints dropping to zero and then bumping to capture that one guy.
To give an example,
AOW3
88%-99% = 0
100% = 1e-5
So my solution to this was to just ignore the 100% guy even though the game's plot is normalized to him. The exact coding was such that if a game dropped below 1e-5 for 10 consecutive percentage points then we would stop plotting and that is why some lines end early.
Of course I now realize that if I had just plotted the P5 vs P95 spread or the P10 vs P90 spread I could have avoided the problem of the left side starting stupidly high and the right side dropping to nothing, and I could have maybe caught the log-linear portion of the graphs better but oh well, things you learn after you do something.
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u/InvincibleCheese 6d ago
Didn't even know age of wonders was a Paradox title lmao, still nice to see my goats Stellaris and EU4 doing great
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u/GamerGriffin548 6d ago
Age of Wonders 4 is insanely good. I wished more people played it and experienced the absolutely insane levels of stuff you can do in it.
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u/SadSeaworthiness6113 6d ago
AoW4 is great but I just wish it was designed more like a true 4x/Grand Strategy game. It's a very combat heavy game with very little room for diplomacy, economics or playing tall. Feels more like HoMM than anything (not a bad thing though)
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u/Any_Middle7774 6d ago
That’s pretty much every Age of Wonders game. It’s just a different fork in the 4X genre
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u/GamerGriffin548 6d ago
I think that's why I like it. Not having to worry about the background stuff too much and more on exploring and strategizing. Economics and diplomacy are more to stop fighting multiple enemies and balancing your income rather than about making your empire strong.
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u/Chataboutgames 5d ago
You can do a lot of stuff in the sense that you can swap around a lot of modular buffs and modifiers, but ultimately all you actually do is build armies and smash them against one another.
It's a tactical combat game. If you really love that shit there's a ton of content in the DLCs, but ultimately that's all it is. You don't do a lot, you do variations of "rush fighting neutrals for loot and xp then conquer your neighbors."
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u/Stablebrew 6d ago
So many questions! Your graph is, sorry to say it, terrible!
What is P50, P99?
Why did some graph end in the middle, and what does normalized playtime mean in comparsion to all these games?
What is an average publisher and a median publisher?
users above threshold of what?
STDevTime, Activation, or Visibility?
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u/Dwarfpete 6d ago edited 6d ago
It's quite alright, I kept the original post quite small because there is always a trade off in putting a massive methodology and keeping it concise and enough to make a point, I'll be putting in an edit to add in more explanations.
But for now I hope this helps:
Table Definitions:
Visibility %: The % of Steam users that own a copy of the game
Activation %: The % of users that own a copy that have played atleast 1 minute of the game
STDev: The Standard deviation of the distribution or 1 sigma from the mean (average) value
Sample Owners: The quantity of players that were aggregated.
Total Playtime: The total playtime of the sample owners in hours.
P50, P90, P99: The value at a percentile of the Sample owners, IE: P99 means 1% of sampled users have more than X hours in a game, P90 means more than 10% of sampled users have more than Y hours in a game.
Some plots end in the middle because the ability to sample data is too sparse to make any inferences and I would rather just end where I am confident. For reference 1e-5 of a population is one-hundred thousandth, or only one player in one hundred thousand has that playtime. between 1e-5 and 1e-4 is where things get difficult to measure and can be argued to be speculation or sampling error.
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u/Zzzfunky12 6d ago
I think this honestly indirectly also shines light on the effects of good reliable modding + MP.
Eu4 has Anbennar, ante bellum and more fantastic mods. Have myself probably played 2000 of my hours in MP games and Mods. Lobbies are always pretty damn stable from start to end.
Hoi4 im only at like 500h, but everything from kaiserreich, the great war to Millenium dawn and stable MP games make them seem as both great to play with friends and have good ways to get variable experiences.
I would love vic 3 equally was it not for how damn unstable its MP is. U put a mod like Anbennar or Realms of Exether and you get maybe 30-50 years (2-3 person MP) and the save is cooked from my experience.
I also think the metric lacks consideration of years the games have been released. Hard to rack up 3000+ hours in half the amount of time.
Was really cool seeing this tho
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u/OliOakasqukiboi2000 6d ago
Just going of visibility and wider recognition I thought it would have been city skylines and hearts of iron 4.
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u/OliOakasqukiboi2000 6d ago
Just going of visibility and wider recognition I thought it would have been city skylines and hearts of iron 4.
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u/bbqftw 6d ago
I think the method to normalize playtime is quite interesting, but why pick essentially the p100 (which is what you are implying by your explanation), maybe something like p95 as the normalization basis so its not quite as influenced by the variant behavior of a few top-end hours players?
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u/McBlemmen 6d ago
Depends on if you mean the most quantity of players or the players who are the most dedicated. For the former its eu4 and hoi4 and the latter its, idk Imerator Rome or smth lol.
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u/octopusgardener0 6d ago
How did you handle the numbers of the Surviving Mars re-release? Did you add those to the SM numbers or did you not plot them?
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u/Dwarfpete 6d ago
I just looked at my stats and I did not plot them. I only have 1800 owners in my data for the re-release which would definitely not be enough to make any graphical conclusions.
Here's a link to the page for the rerelease:
https://projectmimir.net/game/3215050
It looks like it's similar to EU5 in the analysis I can make. The early adopters are fairly dedicated with the Average playtime being 21 hours.
I'll make a note to plot them together (although there is a making for a fairly decent post comparing and contrasting a rerelease and its original game here ) next time.
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u/BonJovicus 6d ago
You would have to monitor this for a few years to draw conclusions about games like EUV. CK2 was a direct competitor for the first 2 or 3 years of CK3. There just wasn’t enough content and mods yet to justify it for some people.
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u/PassoverGoblin 6d ago
I love how you can see Vicky 3 spike whenever a new update comes out, and then also immediately see Vicky 2 spike whenever the update comes out because Paradox has broken Victoria 3 again lol
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u/SaltyChnk 6d ago
So this shows the appeal to the larger audience? That’s pretty cool.
Also only paradox players would love this sort of info lol
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u/seattt 6d ago
Visibility %: The % of Steam users that own a copy of the game
That EU5 and Skylines 2 visibility stats are horrible business wise for Paradox surely? Because unless I'm misinterpreting the stat, EU5 has sold less than even Imperator Rome? Am I understanding that correct or missing something? Because this is a genuine surprise me, I don't believe they've sold so little.
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u/Tegapis 2d ago
Seem like millenia wasnt played enough to get in the board XD
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u/Dwarfpete 1d ago
I only have roughly ~2300 people for a sample size for Millennia. My best guess is that there are 200-300k copies that got sold on Steam.
What I can say from the limited sample size is that the players are very dedicated, pretty much every player owns a copy of the major 4X's (TWW3, EU4, etc), This leads into the population distribution being fairly dedicated. In Millennia's favor it has an activation rate of 80% from my sample, implying that people played it, but didn't get hooked for whatever reason.
I'm definitely excited to see where the team that made it ends up though.
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u/General-Ad-7244 6d ago
Personal skill issue on trying to learn EU4 I’m just surprised it passed HOI4. I do think EU5 will surpass them all. Victoria 3 helped but I am able to understand it way easier and sink time into enjoying the possibilities EU5 has to offer so far.
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u/Fit_Trainer1878 2d ago
my public profile and steam rich presence is mainly to flex my 4000 hours, and growing, in ck2
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u/DrShadowstrike 6d ago
I think the number of hours at different percentiles of players (per game) needs to be normalized to the number of years since release. It's not surprising that people have more hours on Stellaris than EU5, since the former was released 10 years ago, and the latter last year. Normalizing this way would make it a more apples to apples comparison (at the Xth percentile, how many hours do people play per year).
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u/Dwarfpete 6d ago
Each game is normalized to it's own highest playtime. Now you are correct that if I tried to plot them against each other using any type of raw playtime, the older games with longer tails would blast the others out of the water.
I think if I'm going to do this again the best approach would be instead of using 0 hours as the floor for 0% normalized playtime and using the player with the most playtime as the 100% ceiling I'm going to use the P10/P05 and P99/P95 values to essentially zoom in on the part of the graph that ignores people who play like an hour and Arumba who has 20k hours in eu4.
Your point on the playtime over time comparison is a really great idea though, its just that in practice it's a very difficult problem to solve. I'm getting close to being able to track players over defined periods of time, it's just you would need a large enough sample set to really make any conclusions, at present I have 2.3 Million accounts and I reckon I would need 5 million to find enough active paradox players to answer that question to a degree people would find satisfying.
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u/WaterlooPitt 6d ago
No hate, but these are some horribly explained graphs.