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| IL-2 Sturmovik The famous combat flight simulator. |
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#1
09-26-2010, 01:41 AM
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#2
09-26-2010, 09:16 AM
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@VectorForFood
The most simple assumption you can make when you see no time frame for release is that they don't have it. Marketing wise is absurd not to start promoting your game with 6 months before release... especially now days. So at any given time before a word about a possible release date posted on a dedicated site for SoW BoB we should predict at least 6 month to go... like from now on. Given the fact that all we have as updates are simple "repetitive" photos and no clue about other things that go into the game (apart from "it will be awesome" etc etc), signs of switching technology in the course of development, no clear producer, no clear distributor, we have... or should have, if we're not completely and forever mesmerized by "Oleg's Myth", the bad feeling something is not working as expected. Most simple assumption here is the game developer doesn't have enough resources and is barely struggling with keeping the project alive. No producer or publisher would accept to release a product without a minimum of marketing unless it gives no cash for it, which means little cash for the game itself, which means slow or near death production rate. I partially understand that if this is the case... Oleg coming here and asking for donations or patience till he finds other funds and admitting publicly the possible demise of the project will be an even worse move. I even understand the people that "want to believe"... is their choice of keeping the spirit and hopes. Personally, as I've said it before, I have bad feelings about it... only looking at 4.10 patch that comes close to a joke by now and is quite clear things don't go well... ..then again, that's life. to all those "believers" that prepare to bash/flame... I feel you bros... but... 
Last edited by zaelu; 09-26-2010 at 09:19 AM.
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#3
09-26-2010, 01:12 PM
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I feel ya, OP, and I have to say that OM and his team sure does have a defensive way of approaching the market. Much to the fact that they have a large and loyal fanbase.
From a general marketing standpoint, what they're doing is not very clever in terms of making lots of money and spreading the word, but let's just hope they eventually will release the damn thing.  After all, if I were a developer on their team, I'd be very grateful for having this large bunch of weirdos giving feedback every day, helping me make an awesome sim, but then again, atleast I would have said something if things weren't going as they should and the game development was in danger of being cancelled.
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#4
09-26-2010, 01:39 PM
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Once I got there and we implemented a sales strategy, we set records every month right up until the time the company was bought out lol. The moral there is not that I am an awesome sales and marketing guy but that there is a different mindset between engineers and sales/marketing types. What you hypothesize might be the truth OR it could just be the fact that Oleg's team is full of software people who are very good at writing code and developing a sim but that have little understanding of marketing. (no offense to anyone....don't ask one of us marketing types about writing code lol). OR...and most likely....the plan is already in place and being implemented. Splitter
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#5
09-26-2010, 02:23 PM
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Only the really big games get a 6 month marketing campaign. I would think 3-4 months is more likley for SoW but some games only get an 8 week campaign.
Technically there's nothing to market yet and Sow differs from many other titles because most big games have already got a publishing deal in place early on and the publishers would be 'teasing' by now. Plus it's such a niche title that they won't need to do a huge marketing campaign because they know that they have a very specific market and therefore can target the marketing accordingly. The lack of any marketing for this game can only be because thay haven't yet got a publisher in place or the game is way off being finished. I think (and hope) it's the former.
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#6
09-26-2010, 02:24 PM
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Vectorforfood,
I'll try to answer this. I am not affiliated with Oleg or team in any way, but I have some experience in game and entertainment industry. There are some 3 or 4 reasons, IMO, which can explain the 'long' development time (long, if you count since first announcement in 2004): 1) the sim was not developed with full studio resources before something like 2007 2) the sim has a entirely new game engine. The engine is specifically developed for complex combat simulation, weather simulation, flight simulation etc, and supports further extension, maybe even realistic land and/or sea combat. Writing and coding such a engine easily takes 2 years or more, and eats up a great deal of your resources. This is what the 'common' gaming public most often underestimates. 3) if you want to build historical aircraft, tanks, vehicles, ships and so forth in a correct way you put yourself in the most difficult situation, much more than for a modern racing sim. Most of the stuff you want to build doesn't exist anymore. Want to climb into a Ju88? Forget it. He111 or Me 110? Thin on the ground. And where are they? Scattered sparsely over museums all over the world. And that is just for visual documentation....I am not even talking about the can of worms which is technical performance. And then there are the high standards you put up for external and internal 3D modeling, based on actual factory blueprints (which you have to get first from official archives, factories, private collections etc) : Oleg said some years ago that the 3D building, coding, etc, of one single plane of such high standard takes up to a year for one guy. Having worked with 3D teams, and having led them as art director I know he tells the truth. Now, lets say, you want to make 12-15 flyable planes (the gaming community will already whine at you why you make so few planes flyable)....make the math: You need 5-6 full time modelers to make those planes in two years. And you haven't done the terrain yet, no vehicles, ships, buildings, trains, correct airfields (another can of worms) and so forth and so forth, and ALL of them have to be historically correct also! Why do you think 80% of the games are fantasy and SF stuff? Because nobody in the gaming communities will whine that the laser gun doesn't have the historically correct barrel. That is the reason we are not seeing true and correct, say, 1800's sea warfare sims, or 1600's japanese land warfare sims, or 1200's european middle age warfare sims. I am not talking about the fake historical stuff, like Age of Empires, or Call of Duty, Red Orchestra, or a hundred others, but about true sims, like IL2, Blackshark, ROF, or Steel Beasts. The more you go back in time, the harder it gets (and the more your audience shrinks). It's a shame really.....I would love to see a WW1 land war sim of the quality of steel beasts, or a 1800's naval warfare sim for that matter. 4) last reason: Oleg has not the money to throw against a project like companies as Electronic Arts, Ubi, etc have. Frankly......I think we should thank the god's of gaming every day on our knees that something of the quality of SoW has the chance to see the light of day. In the current situation, PC games retreat more and more from the scene, and real sims even more. It's a shameful situation really....the games business makes more money worldwide than the entire movie production business, and there are more and more development companies, some swimming in the money. (Blizzard) Yet, we see less and less serious PC sims, the times of thick handbooks are only memory, and so forth. I could go on for a long time. It's depressing.
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#8
09-26-2010, 07:37 PM
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#9
09-26-2010, 08:57 PM
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Struggling to comprehend the load of bollox posted here. Last edited by KG26_Alpha; 09-26-2010 at 09:05 PM.
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#10
09-27-2010, 04:26 AM
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xilon however does not comprehend or speak english very well, and he can only partially grasp what others posted here. from that garbled information he then makes further confusing posts (most of which are completely of topic)
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