I know this is from way back on Page 11, but I think it might have been better had CLOD never existed.
(hear me out first before you grab the torches, this is only my opinion)
Cliffs of Dover was hyped as the next great WWII combat sim by Oleg Maddox. The guy made IL2, and it's been the gold standard for the last decade. Everyone who might have considered making an actual WWII air combat simulation (a realistic flight sim) stood back and said, "Oleg is making one, no use us doing the same as nobody is going to buy ours since his is going to be the only one anyone plays for the next ten years.
So (follow with me), maybe CLOD stopped other capable studios from even trying to make a realistic WWII flight sim, instead turning to more "arcade-ish" ones or making a game for another genre. So CLOD, just by existing,
could have hindered the WWII flight sim market in that it scared off other similar games as they assumed they could never compete with CLOD.
Also. . .
Since CLOD was made, and has done very, very badly sales wise (
estimated to be around 20,000 copies sold ) other game publishers might now be saying, one of the two. . .
1. "See, this market is dead, and they are never going to make back their money. This game has possibly killed a studio, and might have crippled a publisher. There isn't a market for realistic flight sims, so we shouldn't even bother trying!"
or they might say...
2. "See, I told you that realistic WWII flight sims are too time consuming, difficult and expensive to make. Even Oleg's studio couldn't make a modern one and they made IL-freaking-2 for gods sake! There is no way we could ever make one in a decade if they couldn't even do it in 6 years with millions of dollars! Nope, we're not going to ever try that!"
This is just me playing devil's advocate, but it would be interesting to see if any other studios were planning a new WWII flight sim some time around 2004-5, and then abandoned the idea.