This right here!

Going to the N.American Ubisoft site I'm met with a flash bar with 15 titles. Every single one of them is a Console title. About 1/2 of them are ported to the PC. This should be all the proof you need that COD will be a "redheaded-stepchild that crazy abusive daddy keeps locked in the basement". They, like most publishers now are fixated on consoles and the initial "big bucks sales". They care about titles that ship a few million the first week, not some title that might ship 100,000 over a 10 year period, 90% of those sales at a discounted rate years after initial release.

What might really hurt COD is the way Ubisoft sells it.

If Ubisoft don't make it avaliable to people at the same time, in physical and downloadable formats then there is the chance that people will pirate it in larger numbers. It's that initial week where you make a most of your sales (for most games) and if Europe is playing it for 2 weeks before N. American and Australia, then you're going to see a lot of people who can't wait and say to themselves. . . .

"I want this game so bad, and everyone is playing it, maybe I'll just download it, play it for a week, and then buy it when it's avaliable."

They download, play it, and when it hits stores or their favourite download site they don't bother deleting the pirated version and skip the legit copy.

It's happened before, and could happen again. With a little bit of planning Ubisoft could avoid losing some of those "on the fence" players.

We also have to remember that we are a "special" group. We know far more to some extent than do most Gamers about the development of this game than most do about other mainstream titles, usually you read somewhere about a title going gold before you ever hear anything about the game other than a few tidbits of info that has indicated that it's being developed, with the exception of maybe Duke Nukem Forever no other title has had so many champing at the bit for information and that's what is bad about it we have known this was coming for Years and now we're so impatient for info it's driving us all mad. The Webpage will probably be ready when the game is there is nothing to do for it right now, do you know of any other title in development that has a working website up and no indication of release date?

If ubisoft could pull off a trailer like the Dead Island one then maybe CoD would get some more attention. Dead Island is a game that's been in development for quite some time but a lot of people -including me- hadn't heard about it until a couple of days ago. It could actually be the best game trailer I've ever seen because most game trailers are to be fair, xxxx. This is 5-star viral marketing, no expensive TV-ads, no posters just a darned good online trailer. Now remember, this game was quite unknown until a few days ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZqrG1bdGtg

Who would care about $100k or even $1mio over a 10 year period? That's not even peanuts.

Problem with this line of reasoning is that the publishers were willing to spend money to make that video to promote dead island. I don't think that UBI is willing to spend money on the bandwidth to even email game sites a press package.

Didn't mean to add that "$" there. Meant 100,000 copies.

If I recall correctly - which I couldn't say with any certainty - the deal with Ubisoft is only for distribution. The marketing aspect is up to 1C and I'm sure they have stuff coming but I'm betting they want to clean up and tweak a few things first.

Either way don't expect a Call of Duty type marketing campaign anyway as there just isn't a budget for that. There's still a month to go and don't figure just because we may be on the edge of our seats for it that Joe Consolegamer is even aware of IL2's existence.

Vilifying UBI with sophomoric "corporate bigwigs" stereotypes is simply not very realistic to the actual situation or conducive to relevant discussion but vent away if it helps you pass the time.

So Ubisoft is going to rely on 1C to do the marketing world wide?

That's so nice of 1C to spend money on advertising in markets they have no access to because Ubisoft has the the distribution rights to them.

Optimizing basically means taking more stuff out the game to try and get it to run.

In computer science, program optimization or software optimization is the process of modifying a software system to make some aspect of it work more efficiently or use fewer resources. In general, a computer program may be optimized so that it executes more rapidly, or is capable of operating with less memory storage or other resources, or draw less power.

I agree, but along with optimizing they've had to remove some features for better frame rates. I'm sure Tree understands this, he just enjoys twisting meanings for another opportunity to trash the developers.