There's still a part of me that thinks of 2016's Stellaris as one of the "new school" Paradox grand strategy games, even though it turned 10 years old just this week. If you were to add all of its 30+ DLCs to your Steam cart right now, it would run you upwards of $200—and that's with quite a bit of it on sale. Paradox has even announced the next batch with Season 10, bringing scenarios and nomads among other things.
When Stellaris launched, it was already clear that this DLC model, funding long lifespans and lots of transformative free patches, was working for Paradox—as 2012's Crusader Kings 2 and 2013's Europa Universalis 4 had proven. But when it began its development life, the idea that a grand strategy game could still be getting DLC for a decade hadn't become so obvious.
"It wasn't exactly clear that it was incredibly successful when I started scribbling down notes for what was to become Stellaris," said original game director and Paradox's current chief creative officer Henrik Fåhraeus. "But I guess sometime during development we realized that this is the...
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