Stellaris launches expansion subscription offering access to all DLC for £8.50 per month
But you need to buy the game first, and keep nothing if you stop paying
If you were to buy every Stellaris expansion and content pack separately at full price, it would run you £227.62. To make that perhaps a little less daunting, Paradox have launched an optional monthly subscription service that gives you access to all the expansions. They've done this for several of their other grand strategy games before. It starts at £8.50 for one month then offers discounts for longer terms. While I can see niche uses for the option, I certainly wouldn't want to pay for this regularly. Would you?
The Stellaris Expansion Subscription launched yesterday alongside patch 3.11. It offers access to all present and future Expansions, Species Packs, and Story Packs, as long as you keep paying. One single month is £8.50 on Steam, three months are £16.75 (a 34% discount), and a six-month sub is £24.99 (a 50% discount). You do still need to own the base game too, as it's not included.
Paradox launched DLC subscriptions with Crusader Kings 2 in 2021, later spreading them to Europa Universalis 4 and Hearts Of Iron 4 too. But the Crusader Kings 2 base game is free, while the others—and Stellaris—still cost £35. It would be more useful if Stellaris were included. The others have lower one-month costs too, with the Stellaris sub only becoming cheaper in six-month lumps. I don't know who this is for but evidently DLC subscriptions have been successful enough in the others for Paradox to expand to Stellaris.
The only use I personally would have for such a subscription is quickly checking out all the DLC. I own Stellaris and several older expansions but haven't played in a few years, so if I returned I might be interested in a brief sub to discover which of the new ones are worth prioritising buying? Or I could just read reviews. Or wait until everything's on sale, seeing as it's regularly half-price and sometimes even cheaper in Humble Bundles and such.
I suppose that if you're really into a Paradox grand strategy game, you may well already be paying an impromptu and irregular subscription fee by buying new expansions and DLCs as they come out. Paradox tend to release one £17 expansion every year, separated by one or two £8 Story or Species Packs. With £225 of stuff already out, it'd be a long time before buying everything at launch became cheaper than subscribing. But when you stopped paying the sub, you'd have nothing, and wouldn't you still want them if you were serious enough about Stellaris? And honestly, who buys everything at full price? Not to mention that Stellaris has heaps of colossal free mods that add and change far more than official content packs.
While I have previously liked the idea of subscription options for games with gobs of expansions (it'd seem particularly useful for The Sims), I've soured on subs a bit. The past few years have seen streaming video services splinter into a billion per-channel services which aren't quite worth paying for individually, while remaining big ones like Amazon Prime are adding ads and charging extra to remove them. I'm sick of chuffing subs. I don't want more. Especially as more and more games add battle passes as de facto subcriptions for newness, sometimes even selling them on top of paid expansions and cosmetics (looking at you, Destiny 2). While Paradox's strategy subscriptions are optional, I can't help but be concerned about games making more movements in the direction of subs. That might be a 'slippery slope' argument but the video games industry is not just a visibly slippery slope, it's a slope you can see many companies actively greasing.