I'm wondering if Ubisoft is looking at IL-2 as the model for how they are going to play things this time. When IL-2 was released it wasn't a first week blockbuster, more of a slow-train that picked up a decent amount of passengers over the course of its lifetime. Almost all of that was a result of reviews and word of mouth. Given the target demographic (flight simmers) there isn't that much competition so typing, "flight sim" into google is probably going to give you a result or two on the first page, all without Ubi spending a cent.

Maybe they're thinking, "A big ad campaign is going to have diminished results given the demographics, the required hardware, and the small market PC sales have become". It's assumed it will make money slowly over time, so why bother spending a lot of money advertising it if it's not going to see those blockbuster results?

What I really find shocking is the state of the web page. It's a screen cap used as a background, a trailer, a link to Ubi's shop, and a link to the forums. It was obviously done in less than 5 minutes and really gives you no information on the game whatsoever! What do you fly, what do you do? Is it super-realistic or a game similar to HawX? It's like the game was going to be released, then they scrapped it 4 months away from release and forgot to delete their temporary web page.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V17duGlHEYY

:-P

agreed...who ever desided to use a screenshot of a Defiant being chased by some JU88s low level over the sea to show the "Battle of Britian" needs a dam good slap and to watch the bloody movie.

Well, these days the rule without exception IS that all flight sims that gets released are as bug ridden as a night in northern Sweden ;) FSX, RoF and the last in line DCS A10-C... I think I have had 15 CTD:s already in the release version - but I still love it :)

So... We can live with a bunch of bugs, especially as we know that MG will fix them!

No not really, the developer chooses there publisher. Ultimately in this case its the developers responsibility to find a good publisher and negotiate a contract with them...

Hum, that's wishful thinking, but that's not the reality of the situation... Finding a publisher and securing a contract is a major struggle for developers. Many projects died and ran out of money before they could reach that point. It's the developer responsibility to live another day and for another contract. Any developer feel very lucky when it can line up 2, just 2 publishers for a little while, and often one will bail out without a concrete offer anyway. And I'm not talking about small studios only. Many developers handling multi million dollars projects and selling millions of their games still feel like that and are unable to ever feel secure for more than a few years. Your vision of the balance of power and bargain in the industry is quite distorted to say the very least.

Then self publish
Or release it on steam which does NOT require a publisher.

There are mountains of success stories for devs who do this, but I would like to know where your analysis comes from exactly? Did you read this?

My guess would be that Oleg is contracted to UBI after they published the original IL-2.

If thats the case hopefully after COD'S release he has fullfilled his obligations and can tell them to "P*%# Off"

That's just insider experience from a game studio with more than 100 staff and 3 major releases to the counter, millions of units sold, and only starting to get a fragile sense of security now, and that's only because of a strong association with one publisher, which comes with weaknesses and drawbacks as well. Even with success, a game studio can often come very close to being bankrupt during fragile periods between finished projects and the next ones. This vulnerability does not help the bargaining power of developers. It's really hard to secure a publisher, believe me. It's not that easy to go for an indie release on a platform like Steam when you're a studio with more than a handful of people, you've got to secure funding to make your studio cover a number of expenses, not something you can do alone. Publishers are not only printing dvds, they're also producers, don't forget that.

And remember, Steam is not putting games out there to download out of the kindness of their hearts.

They take a cut of the action, just like UBI or EA do, so it's possible that a studio might even take in less total income from a Steam release, as they will also, by and large, have a major publisher (UBI, EA, etc...) as well.