Official Fulqrum Publishing forum - Population of IL2 4.08m

Quote:

Originally Posted by Feuerfalke (Post 44103)

You should read my post, JG27CaptStubing ;)

I posted that selling numbers and quality are NOT related, nor do they say anything about the quality of food, nor did I compare the food presented by McDonalds to WoW.

What I did say, though, was that the numbers don't compare, because these two games WoW and IL2 couldn't be further apart, just like McDo and my local Pizza-Man, because WoW serves players worldwide and lives through the masses of players (hence MMO ;) ) with literally no offline-value.
IL2 however is more like the Pizza-Man next door, who makes brilliant Pizza in a great variety and serving special wishes, but only for the few people who know this and who'd like to eat some pizza. And a lot of people will never be seen in the area of the my Pizza-Man, because they order and eat at home, just like many, many IL2-players won't ever go online.

It's numbers and area of customers, not quality, that I am speaking about (or numbers and genres, to come back to games).

Coming to quality, though, you are pretty selective with the choice of games you play and which you base your opinion upon. If you just play the games with the by far largest Budget, it's pretty clear you can't complain about the support, but there are other games published by Blizzard, too, and the overall-support and quality over the last 10 years is good, but surely not untouchable great.

IMHO it's not only the learning curve you mentioned. Infact I played IL2 with my 4 year old nephew with easy settings and he was quite good with it. But why should you invest 20 bucks or more for a medicore joystick to test a game, while you can play others with your mouse? And these mouse-controlled games like StarCraft and Warcraft are even shared and advertised by friends on LAN-parties!
The LAN-Parties I visited, I was the only one with a joystick... We've got to live with the fact that Flightsims are a Niche-Product, but knowing that, I'm even more impressed to see that SoW will bind virtual pilots from a lot of eras to a single product. That will indeed be a revolution, IMHO.

Maybe it's my reading but I don't quite understand your post...

You might not know this but in the gaming industry Developers ie OM games in this case very rarely fund their own projects and products. Some have back in the day but there is quite a bit of risk to building a game for a couple years and then trying to get it to sell.

In short Publishers fund the games. They typically have the IP that will drive a game. Developers often pitch ideas based upon some technologies they've developed and or past games they've had success in developing. Publishers will then Fund the project and the developers just like with any project march to their orders. This isn't always the case but its a pretty commmon approach these days.

There are a few exceptions. ID and Valve come to mind. These guys have the horsepower to go to their Publisher and tell them they are working on a sequal to say Quake or Halflife respectively. Thats why when they are asked for deadlines etc they don't typically answer. This may be happening with IL2but I sort of doubt it.

With all that said I used WOW to illustrate two points.

1. Just how small our community really is. Even if IL2 and all their Products sold 600,000 copies it's a drop in the bucket compared to the Volume of Product sales and Revenue for WOW.

2. Publishing Giants such as UBI and Vivendi Games look at those successes and they will and dictate what a developer like OM can produce. There is a reason why OM can pitch the idea to a UBI and they listen given his success with the IL2 series however it doesn't mean UBI will listen. His numbers are tiny in comparison to other Genres and Game types.