Former Older, your lack of vision is deeply dissapointing.
Oleg will never prosper banging out the same two mission types over and over again. I doesn't matter where you place your waypoints or what planeset you choose. I just isn't enough. Oleg knows this now. The whole experience of developing the Il-2/FB and the clamour for new content has proven that his next sim will have to be massively expandable or he will die.
You think developing Il-2 Sturmovik was so amazingly lucrative for him, he's going to use the same strategy again???
If he is going to make a decent living out of this (SoW) he needs to give the game far more substance than his present sim has. Detailed graphics and modelling, however brilliant, will not put his son through university. He needs to declare
war on Microsoft and try and steal the flying-club crowds that make up the majority of FSX's fan base. Not the 747 vs ATC flyers, but rather the short-hop enthusiasts who want to take a Tiger Moth from Croydon to Dover, or some other vintage aircraft through a thunderhead. He needs to build in the perameters to satisfy both the dogfight
and the vintage enthusiast crowd.
Don't kid yourself thinking that Oleg will ever retire comfortably on the few pissing dollars that you and I will send his way. Remember the flight sim convention that Mystic Puma filmed awhile back? Rows and rows of companies representing their wares for additions to Microsoft's FS series. Thousands of enthusiasts standing three deep at those booths, while Oleg and Luthier sat on plastic chairs in the corner with an early beta of SoW and just a handful of il-2 fans stopping by.
He needs to expand his fan base massively to survive. He knows this. Are you suggesting that he will provide such a complete combat experience, that new players will flood in? From where? From Counterstrike and Quake servers?
No. If he is going to win over anyone in large numbers, it has to come from the already massive FS community and industry. These people are already predisposed to the notion of flight sims. Oleg just needs to capture the vintage aircraft market by doing it better than MS can. Let them have their passenger jets and flights into Los Angeles, but Oleg needs to take a big bite out of the rest. Five years from now, we need to see every third-party commercial release both FSX
and SoW compatible. We need thousands of enthusiasts at flight sim conventions standing three-deep at booths selling wares for SoW.
The Storm of War doesn't need to be over the Channel. It needs to be an all-out assault on Microsoft. Some people are quite content to take off, hit 8x time skip and pick their nose all the way to the target. But that won't make Oleg rich. It will hardly shift 35000 copies before SoW goes into the bargain bin.