Forgive me for being blunt, but there is hardly a developer/publisher that can both enthrall their audience and shit the proverbial bed – sometimes nigh simultaneously – like Paradox Interactive. The story of Surviving Mars seems to fall into the latter category.
Surviving Mars is a sci-fi city-building survival game that first landed on PCs and consoles in 2018. Developed by Haemimont Games and published by Paradox Interactive, the original game challenged players to build and sustain a human colony on the Red Planet. It released on March 15, 2018 to generally favorable reviews, and has indeed amassed a “Very positive” rating on Steam by the only reviewers that truly matter – people who were playing it.
Over the next few years, Surviving Mars expanded with multiple DLCs that added depth and fan-requested features. The Space Race expansion in November 2018 introduced rival AI colonies and new sponsor nations, while Green Planet (May 2019) brought the much-demanded ability to terraform Mars into a habitable world. These additions, along with smaller content packs (like the Project Laika animal pack), kept players invested and extended support up through 2022. By blending intricate resource management, survival elements, and a dash of science fiction mystery, the original Surviving Mars cultivated a dedicated community. It helped reinvigorate the city-builder genre alongside titles like Cities: Skylines and Frostpunk, offering a level of complexity and consequence (bad decisions could doom your colony) that many players appreciated.
However, after 2019 the original developer stepped away after fulfilling their contract (whether they abandoned the game or were forced out remains unclear). Paradox handed off development to Abstraction Games in 2021, resulting in new content that, while welcome in concept, saw diminished quality. The Below and Beyond expansion (Sept 2021) let players explore underground caves and mine asteroids, and the Martian Express pack (Aug 2022) added a much-requested train system, but both had issues. Players noted that these later expansions felt undercooked and buggy, indicating that the game’s post-2019 caretakers struggled to maintain the same level of polish. By 2022, Surviving Mars was no longer receiving significant updates, and a lot of long-standing bugs and design flaws remained unresolved. It’s against this backdrop that Paradox announced Surviving Mars: Relaunched in late 2025, a surprise “remaster” of a seven-year-old game that hardly, if anyone, asked for.
What Relaunched Brings to the Table
Released on November 10, 2025, Surviving Mars: Relaunched is marketed as an updated, expanded, and remastered edition of the original colony builder. At first glance, it includes everything a newcomer would need for the “definitive” Martian colony experience. The base Relaunched package bundles all prior expansions and DLC, from major gameplay additions like Space Race, Green Planet, Below & Beyond, and Martian Express to cosmetic packs and extra radio stations, all rolled into one cohesive product. In addition, the original developer Haemimont Games, now back at the helm, has introduced brand-new content in the form of the “Martian Assembly” update. This adds a dynamic political system to the late-game: players can establish a Martian government, pass laws, and even pursue independence from Earth, an endgame scenario “never seen in the original”. The Martian Assembly essentially layers a governance simulator on top of the city-building, forcing players to balance faction demands and crises or even rule as a dictator until rebels push back. This political system is by far the most substantial new gameplay addition in Relaunched, injecting fresh challenges and role-playing opportunities for veterans of the series.
Under the hood, Relaunched also makes technical improvements. The developers rebuilt the game on a new engine to enable better performance, stability, and mod support. Lighting and textures have been enhanced for a more modern look, and the user interface has been refreshed for clarity. Numerous small quality-of-life tweaks have been “filtered throughout” the game as well, for example, the underground cave maps from Below and Beyond were enlarged, and the train mechanics from Martian Express were significantly polished in response to player feedback. In essence, Haemimont took this chance to make Surviving Mars into the game it would have been “had it not left for greener pastures,” rectifying or improving upon the work done during its absence. Even so, many of these changes are iterative rather than transformative, since compared side by side, veterans might need a close look to notice the upgrades, since the 2018 game already had a strong aesthetic and solid foundation.
Along with the base edition, Paradox offered a “Ultimate Edition” of Surviving Mars: Relaunched that includes a Season Pass for upcoming expansions. Looking to the future, two new expansion packs are already in the pipeline exclusively for the Relaunched platform: Feeding the Future (focused on advanced food production, planned for Q2 2026) and Machine Utopia (enabling fully automated colonies, expected Q4 2026). These upcoming DLCs illustrate Paradox’s strategy; by moving Surviving Mars to a new engine and re-launching it, the publisher aims to revitalize the title for further development. Indeed, the developers have indicated that certain new content “was not possible under the OG Surviving Mars’s limitations,” and that this relaunch is what enables a more ambitious second life for the game.
In Paradox’s view, Relaunched is an investment in the future of the franchise, essentially a relaunch in both name and spirit.
The fans feel differently.
Paying for Bugfixes: Community Backlash
The Relaunched edition has provoked significant backlash among existing fans of Surviving Mars. The crux of the criticism is straightforward: Paradox is charging players for what many feel should have been a free update or patch to the original game. The new edition is being sold as a separate product – priced at $39.99 for new customers – rather than as a free remaster or a cheap DLC upgrade. (Owners of the original Surviving Mars do receive a 50% discount, meaning they must pay roughly $19.99 to get the Relaunched version.) To many longtime players, this move comes off as a cash grab. “How can you relaunch a game with bug fixes instead of fixing the already bought version for everyone?” one player complained on the official Steam forum. This sentiment encapsulates the frustration: Paradox chose to remonetize the improvements to Surviving Mars rather than issuing them as free patches to the game people already purchased.
A frequently voiced grievance is that Surviving Mars: Relaunched offers little that couldn’t have been added to the original via updates. Aside from the new political system, most of the “new” content consists of improvements or expansions that veterans have essentially seen before. A displeased Steam reviewer summarized the situation bluntly: “They broke the original release by constantly adding new things to it, then instead of fixing it, they decided to redo it all over and charge for it as a new game. It feels like you’re paying for bug fixes”. This reviewer further noted the irony of Paradox having “abandoned the original game to make this”, and now returning to ask players to buy it again – raising the pointed question, “Who can guarantee they won’t do it again?”.
Such mistrust is evident in many user comments. Players remember that official support for the original game dried up after 2019, leaving some bugs (especially in the later DLC) unaddressed. Now, being told to purchase a new edition for a “fixed” experience feels to them like paying twice for Paradox’s mistakes. As one forum poster remarked, “it’s insane to me to think that people are okay with paying for essentially bug fixes… or paying even more for DLCs that are not even here yet”.
Another sore point is that Paradox delisted the original Surviving Mars from digital storefronts once Relaunched came out. On Steam, the 2018 version and all its DLC are no longer available for purchase as of November 2025. This means new players have no choice but to buy the Relaunched edition at full price, and even existing players cannot individually buy any missing DLC for their old game – the only path to complete the content collection is through the new remaster.
Thus the review bombing commences…
Indeed, Surviving Mars: Relaunched suffered a wave of negative user reviews on Steam in its launch week, driving its rating down to “Mixed” (around only 54% positive). Many of those thumbs-down reviews echo the same thesis: that Paradox should have simply fixed and updated the original game instead of repackaging it years later as a paid “new” product. The original surviving Mars game, now delisted from the store, has gone from “Very Positive” rating of some 80%+ with over 15.000 reviews to “Overwhelmingly Negative” as the owners of Surviving Mars vented their frustrations on the store page of the OG game.
From a consumer perspective, players who already invested in Surviving Mars (and especially those who bought all the DLC) feel slighted. For someone who owns the 2018 game and its expansions, Relaunched doesn’t offer much beyond the Martian Assembly feature and some polish – yet accessing that one new gameplay system costs essentially as much as a major DLC. Critics argue that for roughly $20, existing owners are effectively being sold one DLC’s worth of new content plus a raft of fixes/tweaks that arguably should have been free maintenance. “This is basically a GOTY edition with a DLC attached,” one commenter observed, “people like me that own all the DLCs are not going to pay $20 for what is effectively [just one] DLC”. Others compare Paradox’s approach unfavorably to more consumer-friendly models: for instance, the space strategy game Terra Invicta was cited for continuing to add huge new features and improvements at no extra cost while still in early access, whereas Surviving Mars charges for an engine rework and promises of future fixes.
The phrase “paying for promises of bug fixes” encapsulates the cynicism of players that feel slighted..
Is the Relaunch Justified?
Paradox and Haemimont have their counter-arguments. From a business and technical standpoint, they maintain that a full relaunch was the viable path to move Surviving Mars forward. Upgrading to a new engine and overhauling fundamental systems is a non-trivial endeavor; treating it as a new product allowed the developers to invest significant effort into changes that might have been impossible to simply patch into the old game. Supporters also point out that existing players are not forced to buy the new edition – their original game (with all owned DLC) remains playable as-is. Paradox gave players a choice: stick with the old version they enjoyed or pay for the improved one. For those who had only the base game and missed out on expansions, the $20 upgrade to Relaunched is actually a reasonably economical way to get all the DLC content in one package.
The lesson we learned from the past, and some developers and publishers more painfully than others, is that when the fans come to a majority conclusion – which here seems to be the case – the worst thing one can do is to tell them that they are wrong. Paradox would do well to tread carefully around this issue, as marginal as it may seem to them, since Surviving Mars is by no means a flagship of theirs of the type of Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron. And it is here where we get to the successes and failures of Paradox of nigh epic proportions, both on the business and the development side.
Paradox Interactive serves a grand strategy niche, but it also dominates it with an iron fist. Nobody else is putting up the games such as aforementioned titles, and also not to such a high quality, but intermixed there are severe failures of business acumen and developer capabilities. Many of its titles are launched in poor shape and are only made truly playable throughout the years of expansions and bugfixes, so many of PDX die-hard fans entrust them with the faith that these bugfixes will be ultimately delivered upon. “Nickel and diming” of their fans is also not something that Paradox is unfamiliar with, where they would charge for content that, by all intent nd purpose, should be included within the original game. Case in point is Coronations DLC for $4,99 for Crusader Kings 3 that merely brings the coronation and oaths to the main game that, one would dare complain, should have been there from the start. The “Overwhelmingly Negative” reviews on this DLC make it clear how the die hard fans of Crusader Kings feel about it. How could Paradox after 5 years of CK3 development and over 20 years of Crusader Kings franchise running not be aware what kind of reactions this move would cause?
Same goes for Surviving Mars, and this puzzles me about Paradox.
Will Paradox survive Surviving Mars?
In short, yes. But it is definitely not their finest moment.
Despite a large amount of goodwill that Paradox earned from their audiences, that goodwill is not infinite. Alone from the business acumen aspect, the Surviving Mars: Relaunch was not justified, not even to mention from the audience and their highly predictably feeling of betrayal, justified or not. Perhaps some bean counters at PDX came to conclusion that re-releasing, oh, pardon me, relaunching Surviving Mars was worth financially, and good ole Fred Wester gave his approval… It better have been a decent waddle of cash, then. I sincerely doubt it was.
Ultimately, whether Paradox should have simply fixed the old game instead comes down to one’s perspective. There’s no doubt that Relaunched has rekindled some interest in a title that was stagnating, but only people that praise it seem to be the legacy media that still want their goodie bags and paid trips to Stockholm for PDX celebrations. It has caused yet another chink in Paradox’s armor, and to no corresponding financial restitution. The cost of this course of action has been a hit to Paradox’s goodwill among its core fans. No matter how improved Surviving Mars: Relaunched might be, it is weighed down by the perception that players are being asked to pay again for fixes and content they feel entitled to from the original purchase. The situation illustrates a broader dilemma in the games industry: should significant improvements to an existing game be monetized as a new product, or delivered free to existing owners? In this case, Paradox chose the former route – much to the ire of some of its most loyal customers.
Conclusion
Surviving Mars: Relaunched should probably not have happened. The decision to withhold those improvements from the original version and sell them under a new banner years later has clearly alienated a large part of the fanbase. Many argue that Paradox should have invested in fixing and expanding what players already paid for, instead of essentially re-selling the game. I tend to agree. As the dust settles on the red planet once more, Paradox will have to prove through actions that Relaunched was more than a quick cash-grab. This can only be done through years of continuous fixes and improvements through expansions, which is something Paradox just once again lost in a substantial amount.
