View attachment 2206381
Someone made mod popularity comparison on hoi4 Reddit. According to Paradox statistics.
Considering that the last proper update was in January, this is not really surprising.
What's really interesting is how Toolbox Theory and the following three updates will affect the stats. The devs are obviously gunning for new heights, but I don't think this will be the case - my prediction is that these patches will provide fairly minor bumps to the player count, with none of them ever topping the post-release peak it had.
TT might have a lot of effort behind it, but it's also a mere mechanics update. There are no new countries to play, and I think that this will severely diminish its mass appeal - exploring a brand new story and setting is obviously loads of fun and easily digestible, but a mostly behind-the-scenes update that turns "always do x" into "always do x unless y, then do z instead" with some minor global flavor tacked on simply isn't as marketable as a traditional country update. I'm sure that a lot of effort went into TT, but that effort will be barely visible due to nature of the update.
Now, the other 3 updates are supposed to be more content-focused, but what will they actually change? First, we need to look at status the mod will be in at their release. According to a Dev, it's virtually ensured that all of them will release in 2021, so I'm going to be generous here and assume that they will magically hit that deadline and release in December this year, which would be the first time the TNO team would ever hit a deadline.
Even in this case - what then? The TNO community already shrunk circa 40% after 4 months of no content updates, and December is still 7 months out. If the current trend continues, the community will be roughly 25% as big as it was in January, which obviously isn't exactly a promising launchpad for a new hype train.
The content itself will also be simply not that popular. Most important countries people would actually want to play like Germany or the US are already finished, and convincing people to care about a nation they never even heard of before is an immensely difficult task. Who gives a shit about Guangdong, or the Levant? Ireland, which released with CRF, had the same issue, and barely anyone plays it - hell, most players don't even know it's playable at all.
Couple this with the issue of the team leadership being less receptive to "funny" concepts like old Burgundy or the Aryan Brotherhood, and it quickly becomes clear just how little of an impact these updates will cause. TNO will never die due to drama, but it's pretty much assured that it'll slowly fade away into irrelevancy - a shrinking community also inevitably leads to a shrinking team, which just compounds content shortage. The first wave of updates will release, and the second one most likely too, but anything past that is uncertain. It has been said dozens of times already, but I'll just reiterate the obvious here - TNO2 will never release.
