Friday Update, February 24, 2012

[Fredfetish]

Hi Swiss, not trying to aggravate you, just my POV. Hope my reply doesn't offend you.

Originally Posted by swiss

But spending 45min in the air just to lose a DF vs a spit is ok?
Why cant my tank just spawn at the frontline, 3 min away from the battle?


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True... I guess, but why can't I have my plane spawn near the action then? Not very simmy if you ask me, but I guess not the end of the world.

On the other hand, someone mentioned having arcade game play for tanks whilst planes have full flight realism... Not my cup of tea. Sorry, it is either arcade on both levels or full sim, not a mix. Why would I bother with full sim if the opposing player will have an unfair advantage?

Originally Posted by swiss

So only a few competitors turns it into a huge business opportunity?
What if there are only 3 competitors because it's an unprofitable market?
If I remember correctly luthier said something about $8M they already invested, if that's correct it's more like 9 by now.
How many copies have they sold?

Another option could be to take $200 for a copy, won't sell for this price though.

And the market for a decent WW2 CA simulation is huge
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Point of this is the only reason MG is able to make a business is because they're not competing with the big players. Once you remove that limitation, customers will be able to make 1 on 1 comparisons. Just because the flight sim market is unattractive doesn't mean they'll be able to make better revenue in a broader market. E.g the larger market is more saturated whilst the flight sim market, although very small, offers little competition to MG. Hence, they can make a living at least. If you take a $50 price per unit times the amount of views on this post alone you already $1mil in compared to the $8mil that went into the production. Which is ok... but to compete with larger software houses, are they prepared to dump 30mil into production like BF3? No? Then you'll see it in the quality and the amount of people purchasing who are expecting BF3 type of quality.

All said and done, why include the flight sim portion then at all into the game if we're talking market percentages? Seems to me the flight sim aspect places the greatest constraints on requirements on the engine in the form of map size, field of view, flight models etc which is not so relevant for producing a tank/vehicle simulator/fps.
Can MG compete with WoTs vehicles gameplay ? The scenario in my origal post says no.
Would it make any difference to a player in a tank if he is being bombed by a AI or human player? Minimal. Would his game play experience be affected by the flight sim requirements? Hugely? I'd say yes. Does this sound like a reason to attract mass market clients in their thousands? I'm thinking no...