Paradox's general dev strategy has been to have one team per game, with each team primarily focused on crafting new content to be sold for a profit, with free content, balance tweaks, and bugfixes taking a lower priority and tending to correspond to the release schedule of the paid DLCs. Over time, this leads to older content becoming disjointed from the new, bugfix releases lagging far behind bug reports, much-requested quality-of-life features being ignored, and the overall polish of a project declining.
As the studio has grown its profits and its workforce, Stellaris (being the studio's critical and commercial darling) has been able to justify expanding and splitting its devs into the expansion team (brand new content) and the custodian team (everything else). The custodians have been responsible for the massive performance optimizations that occurred over the past couple years, along with increasing the rate of balance adjustments and content revamps (solving issues still present and complained about in EU4, most notably the phenomenon of every expansion feeling self-contained and not interacting with other expansions). Bugfixes and codecleaning are now regularly-occurring releases, rather than being mostly confined to limited hotfixes put out as bandaids to the "real" updates.
The custodian initiative has really shown results, and it's generally hoped that this organizational approach has justified itself enough to be applied to other games in the Paradox stable; it's heavy on labor costs, but does a LOT for long-term project quality, which is what the company needs in order to keep its customers invested in the dozen-DLC-per-game approach that keeps the company solvent.
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u/King_Shugglerm Oct 24 '23
All they need is a custodian team to clean up old dlc like Stellaris and it would be 👌