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warspite1 -> RE: OT where have all the good games gone? (11/24/2016 6:21:44 AM)
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ORIGINAL: wdolson
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ORIGINAL: warspite1
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ORIGINAL: Jorge_Stanbury
long time passing?
I think the biggest problem is the complete lack of creativity/ talent. Very few new developers are now coming with new ideas, instead they just recycle old concepts in better interface or "eye candy" graphics.
There are of course some exceptions, but few
warspite1
I suspect its not a lack of talent - its a lack of money/reward i.e. good old fashioned economics.
A few comments I have seen on forums here in recent weeks pretty much confirms what most have suspected for a long time. The hobby is niche and the returns are probably just not there for spending time/resource on experimenting with new games/concepts and different subjects (that may or may not sell).
Look at World In Flames. It's not like someone had to invent a game. An award winning, brilliant, beautiful game was there and ready. It just needed someone to bring it to the computer in a way that was economically feasible.....[:(] Well that's where the problems began.
Look at DC: Barbarossa. Decision cards may not be for everyone (and fair enough) but here was something a little different, a little exciting - perhaps the start of something. But the economic reality is that is unlikely to be the case.
There is a period of WWII that screams out to be war gamed. A game that is genuinely winnable by both sides without having to insert faux balancing items, a game that could appeal to the naval war gamer, the air man and the land war devotee in equal measure. One problem. The War in the Mediterranean is not the Battle of the Bulge, The Soviet / German war or any of the other 'staples' that cost conscious developers need to concentrate on. As was pointed out the other day in the DC:B forum, if it doesn't sell in the US then forget it, the returns are just not there.
No, I suspect there is a world of talent and creativity out there. But this is the wrong area of the gaming world to get their attention.
Many years ago there was an editorial in the Avalon Hill magazine The General about the size of the wargame hobby. I believe the writer was one of the head people at AH and knew the industry well. He pointed out that a mega hit in the wargame industry like Advanced Squad Leader would sell around 10,000 copies over its entire lifetime. The popular games sold by Hasbro all sell more than 100,000 copies a year. Hasbro drops games that don't meet that threshold. When Hasbro later bought AH people were scratching their heads because AH was such small potatoes compared to everything else in their line up, but they were looking to the rights to some of AH's more popular multiplayer games like Diplomacy to turn them into online games. That never really happened, but that may have been their thinking.
The computer game industry is a bit different from the physical game industry, but the same scale of economics apply. Games like Grand Theft Auto sell millions of copies and the studios that create those games have lots of cash to invest in new games. Though they still do all they can to recycle the old game engines because creating a game engine from scratch is not easy and once you get something right, you milk it for all you can. Games that can be played on multiple platforms are also desirable in the industry. Games limited to one platform are limiting their market from the start.
In the gaming business real time games sell better than games that take time to play. Those who don't play real time games, tend to be on game systems like iWin or play Facebook games that have fairly simple game engines compared to what it takes to run the sort of wargame Matrix releases. The sort of people who have the patience for a slowly unfolding game like AE are few and far between. And of those people, there is some percentage who wouldn't be interested in the subject, and another percentage who never heard of Matrix.
I can't go into details, but having seen the extent of the guts of AE, it would be a pretty daunting task for anyone to build an all new engine that did the same thing better. For a lifetime sales of 10,000 if you're lucky, the payoff is not worth it to most developers. Playing in the mainstream game arena where a big hit can bring in millions vs a niche game that might make $100K-$200K over its lifetime of the entire engine, only those who are doing it for the love of the game are going to bother.
AE was developed by a handful of people who were fans of the game. If we did it for the money we'd all be living in cardboard boxes now.
Bill
warspite1
I'm pretty sure I read once (but sadly cannot recall the source) that World In Flames - voted Game of the Year, best wargame ever and other such awards etc etc - and which has been going since the 80's, only ever sold 60,000 copies in total. So we live with the economic reality.
Another Bulge game anyone? [8|]
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