oleg, you better hurry, RoF is releasing a ww-2 sim next

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Robert

I can't afford the risk they may not be around 8 months from now, and I end up with a game with limited appeal.

Actually you would be left with a game that doesn't work at all, thanks to the magnificent online-only DRM scheme

I too want this to succeed, but i won't help make it a success in its current unfinished state and set a bad precedent for what a company can get away with. If Oleg, Eagle Dynamics or any other sim developer released something in that state they would be torn to shreds. The only two reasons people support them is that

a) the dedicated WWI jockey hasn't had a sim with a dedicated, up to date engine for years and they are willing to settle for the bare basics and

b) Neoqb is a small company that clearly stated in their letter to the community "sorry, we ran out of money and it was a choice between releasing an unfinished game or scraping everything"

To give credit where its due, Neoqb has the foundations more or less set right, they appear to be trying hard and recently they also made some effort to keep the community in the loop as far as further development goes, despite being awfully hurt by the language barrier and the lack of an effective PR effort early on.

It's not them i'm worried about, it's the willingness of such a large part of the community to lower their standards and unconditionally support an unfinished product.
It's all fine and dandy for people to like it, it's a matter of personal taste. What's not fine is having a bunch of people telling you your reasons for not liking it are rubbish, the changes you are waiting for before you buy are not going to happen so take it or leave it, you don't have the game so you shouldn't talk about it, and so on. It's just an attitude that culminates to a very simple conclusion "Buy it now or shut up and get out".

It's even got to the point where people like ElAurens who actually bought the game are getting shouted down on the slightest mention of a thing being wrong.

The usual argument behind such tactics is that they support the genre and how they are serious simmers and the rest of us are not as "hardcore" as them. What they fail to see is that what could be a justifiable situation because of Neoqb being a small company, is something that would not be cool at all coming from an established software house. However, the big boys are watching and if an upstart company with a niche-within-a-niche product can get away with that much, they will surely be able to get away with more. Everyone talks about how RoF has a lot of potential. Not enough see a different kind of potential though, the potential to harm the genre in the long run because of setting the bar too low. Setting a precedent on what's acceptable by the masses in terms of content, quality and price is always a dangerous thing. Asking too much and the developers will never be able to satisfy the public, asking too little and the public will never get another worthy product. I would go as far as to say that for me personally, the survival of the flight sim genre as a whole is much more important in the long run than the survival of a single development house. It's not like they'll disappear if they fold, they could work on other projects in a different studio, for example making a WWI add-on on the SoW engine

It's not them that have to disappear, it's the notion that you can sell an open beta for full market price and place a bunch of restrictive design elements on top of it all.

The way i see it, i can keep flying IL2 with the community/unofficial add ons for a couple more years. I certainly won't be bored until Christmas, at which point Neoqb might release a gold version. Imagine that, working MP, a good offline campaign, more AI and flyable aircraft and a different copy protection method for $50. Now we're talking business.