Population of IL2 4.08m

[HFC_Dolphin]

CaptStubing I think you must read my post again.
Let me repeat: Profit is a relevant concept.
1.000.000 euros might be nothing for multi-billion Microsoft corporation and thus not find a reason to make a product with such profit, but on the other hand it might be the dream of many-many...many people in the world. I guess there must be more than 6.000.000.000 (yes, six billion) people in this earth that would dream of making a million euros out of 10 years work.

Therefore I guess you understand that there will always be room for those who have the skills to make a flight simulator. It's the skills that are missing from the gaming industry to produce a new flight sim, not the small profit that comes of them.

Closing this post, I will agree that there is not much room for bad flight simulators. And that's why game companies do not risk their money on them easily. They know they can publish a bad sports game (I really wonder what kind of creatures buy EA's sports games lol), or a bad RTS game and sell millions of copies, but they also know they can't sell a bad flight sim.

[JG27CaptStubing]

Originally Posted by Feuerfalke

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.

[Feuerfalke]

The only thing I wanted to point out with a lot of work and a maybe not so good example is that your equation (your point 1.) is wrong as you initially put it.


A market for a massive-multiplayer-game like WoW CAN never be the goal for a game that was originally intended for an offline-game with multiplayer-ability. Just as a tactical shooter like Rainbow6 can never compete with games like Quake and Unreal, though these genres are a lot closer related than Roleplaying and Flightsimulation. Any trial to create a chimera of both is doomed to fail (RB6 Lockdown/Vegas, for example).

As you posted, Flightsims are a niche-product. That's not as bad as you may think, though, considering that UBI saw the potential of IL2 pretty soon and secured their rights on the SoW-Engine.