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Stellaris Summer Update



Hello everyone!

Although challenging, we’ve had a great start to the year. The launch of Federations was a huge success for us as a game and we passed 3 million base game copies sold in March.

The 2.7 Anniversary Update gave us an opportunity to add some game features that timing didn’t allow us to fit in for Federations release, add a little more life and ambiance to the galaxy by refreshing some of our in-game visuals, as well as remastering our sound assets.

Also, in case any of you missed the Anniversary Trailer, you can watch it here:

As some of you already know, most of Paradox takes a Summer break during July, and after the 2.7 Update and associated hotfixes, the we have been busy planning the future development for Stellaris. Since we want everyone to have an opportunity to have a break, especially with the world in the state that it’s in, we’re having a Dev Diary hiatus until later in the Summer.

We don’t yet have any specific dates for when the Dev Diaries will resume, but rest assured, we remain committed to working on the game, making important improvements, and adding some new fun stuff. We will be sharing more progress after the summer!

We hope you all will enjoy your summer, stay safe, stay healthy and we’ll be back later in the Summer!

Pocket Gamer Connects' Big Screen Gaming event returns - here's what's in store

Following the debut of the PC gaming track, Big Screen Gaming, at Pocket Gamer Connects London 2020 earlier this year, the event will feature once again at this week's Pocket Gamer Digital show, which is live right now. The Big Screen Gaming section, which also explores developing and publishing in the console, streaming, and XR spaces, has got a hearty batch of shows lined up, with speakers from Sega, Paradox, Square Enix, Wizards of the Coast, and more.


The Pocket Gamer Connects Digital #2 Big Screen Gaming event launches this Thursday, June 11, and kicks off with a talk from King's Bounty 2 publisher, 1C Publishing's director of BD and publishing Anton Ravin, on working with independent developers.


Following this, throughout the day there are talks on topics such as "Are you Sega's next big hit?", licencing and business development at Cities: Skylines and Stellaris publisher Paradox Interactive, "Game production in a nutshell" by Final Fantasy XIV developer and publisher Square Enix, and even a talk by the recently relaunched MicroProse, which is looking at the studio, "Then and now".


Read the rest of the story...


RELATED LINKS:

Stellaris gets a "free weekend" for its fourth birthday - which starts today

Stellaris' Anniversary update lands next week - here are the 2.7 Wells patch notes

Paradox is evolving away from being a strictly PC gaming brand


Patch 2.7.2 now live!




Hello everyone!

We're finally done with the verification process of 2.7.2, and in addition to the fixes on the beta branch right now we've added a few more. Thank you for your patience :)

If you wanna read the full patch notes, see the forum post here

Save games shouldn't be adversely affected by the switch from 2.7.1 to 2.7.2, but just in case you do encounter issues, you can roll back to a prior version via right click on Stellaris in library -> properties -> betas -> choose the desired version.

If you want to do crossplay MP between Steam and our other release platforms (Plaza/GOG/MS Store), you need to opt in to the crossplay beta "stellaris_test" by the same method.

2.7.2 Beta Patch Released



Hello everyone!

We know you've been waiting on us to fix the performance issue, and we have finally found the cause and fixed it! However, we haven't properly tested this build yet. So in the good old fashioned "getting you the fixes as soon as possible" way that we work here on Stellaris, we have set up a beta branch in Steam that you can opt into while we continue our verification process in-house!

For the full patch notes, see the forum post here.

Please note that 2.7.2 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.

If you want to play crossplay multiplayer with your friends on non-steam platforms you can opt into the "crossplay-rollback" branch in steam.


Also note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 2.7.1 game going, don't try to load the save in 2.7.2.

Stellaris Dev Diary #180 - DLC Visibility Experiment

Hello everyone!

We hope you are enjoying your time with 2.7 and the 4 year anniversary of Stellaris! It’s very fun to see how far the game has come, and just as interesting to imagine what the future can hold.

We want to make sure that Stellaris is well-prepared for more content in the future. Something we’ve learned, especially with CK2, is that a long tail of new content can make it very difficult for players to see what kind of DLCs are available for the game. As we recently announced, Stellaris has more than 3 million players, and we want to make sure that players – both new and old – have an easier time finding content that they might like.

In order to improve visibility, starting today and lasting for a couple of weeks, we’re going to be running a couple of experiments that will be looking at DLC visibility within the game. We will be running a controlled experiment that will split up the player base into different groups, where each group will get a slightly different experience (or no change, in the case of the control group). The experiment will only affect the main menu and empire creation/selection, and will not have any effect on the game as you are playing. The purpose of this is to gather some insights into what kind of visibility features are actually helpful.

Before you grab your laser-powered pitchforks and plasma-illuminators, and complain about development focus, rest assured that all of this work has been done by an external team (who has done a great job btw!) and has had no effect on the development of Stellaris as a game :)

I want to emphasize that even though we want to improve the visibility of content for the game, it will never come at the expense of the game experience itself, so you don’t need to worry about that. It is very important for us that our players are able to immerse themselves in the Stellaris universe and to have fun while they play.

And because a dev diary can’t be complete without pictures or teasers, here’s two icons related to some future content. What could it be..?