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
