Is Steam Graphs Real

[SIDWULF]

Graph dosen't load for me

[DroopSnoot]

@ sid, there you go mate:



ArmA II & Arrowhead are sims and on steam but that is a smallish niche but with a huge community.

I think if you take Clod alone then its a small niche but if you take the entrie flight sim genre then that isnt so small by any means.

[Madfish]

I wouldn't call ArmA a sim though. It's an FPS and thus attracts a lot of people "by nature".

Steam shows a sad truth about the real numbers of an extremely small but also very picky niche. Weak sales but very high expectations. An explosive mixture.

[jibo]

sad truth indeed, add to it costly and long term development cycle
even Microsoft has given up on this, Modern Military is now even more niche than WWs you cant imagine.

The last men standing are in Russia, Eagle Dynamics and 1C, with their programming skills they could have easily left the boat, those are passion driven projects.

Btw i'am confident complex games is the only way to go all others will end up on consoles and Ipads

[DroopSnoot]

Originally Posted by Madfish

I wouldn't call ArmA a sim though. It's an FPS and thus attracts a lot of people "by nature".

.

Its a battle simulator, i say this as the aim was to accurately depict what being in a battle feels and looks like as well as showing its true pace and nature, i feel it nails this 100% for infantry and vehicle warfare making it far from mainstream FPS, its like the difference between Birds of Prey and IL2 Cliffs of Dover.

[Madfish]

Originally Posted by DroopSnoot

.

Its a battle simulator, i say this as the aim was to accurately depict what being in a battle feels and looks like as well as showing its true pace and nature, i feel it nails this 100% for infantry and vehicle warfare making it far from mainstream FPS, its like the difference between Birds of Prey and IL2 Cliffs of Dover.

I'm not saying it's a bad game, I like ArmA 2 and have all the expansions for it - it's not a sim though. ArmA 3 might take it a step further but ArmA 2 felt a little too... virtual.
It did a good job with infrantry, was okay for vehicles. But the Choppers and planes were a joke.

But then again. Think about it like this:
ArmA was 90% of the time an FPS. You had a mouse, a keyboard and you ran around and shot at things. You didn't need, and this is the important difference, ANY additional hardware. You didn't need a joystick, rudder pedals, a seat for simming, steering wheel, shifters etc.


The biggest issue todays sim games have are:

1. hardware requirements (yoke, throttle, sticks, pedals, wheels etc.)
2. little or zero support for multiplayer and community interfacing
3. boring and time wasting campaigns (unemotional, unsatisfying)

Hardware and interfacing should be obvious. Campaigns are a big problem though. Most games have decently written stories and campaigns these days. Sim titles however are just a joke. It's not hard to make a mission where you take off at airport A and a flight of X planes is heading towards you and you need to intercept. For the reality lovers such missions could be done in like a day or so by most skilled people here on the forums. But a decent campaign with voice overs, cut scenes, emotional twists and turns... a vivid living story... that's hard to achieve.

So the consequence is that the genre is unattractive to many players simply because the games are bland and boring. The fidelity of simulation DOES NOT MATTER. See World of Tanks. Totally unrealistic crap but players play it in the thousands and dump LOADS of money into that "game". In that case it wasn't the good story but the not-time-wasting gameplay and the multiplayer interfacing.

There's loads of examples but if the sim genre wants to survive they need to tune more than just their sounds, damage model, flight model or whatever.

[JimmyGiro]

There's not an inherent problem with niche markets, as long as you are the only big fish in the pond.

Having said that, there's nothing wrong with venturing into other platforms, to expand the market for your product. And one untapped field is the growing Linux community. Make a port to that system, and the starved Linux base, which uses 'wine' to play regular pc games if it can, will buy the product out of sheer gratitude.

[Madfish]

I run linux myself and I highly doubt that linux would be the best platform to pick when playing a game that needs to interface with tons of additional hardware.

Linux is a great market for casual games though.

[jibo]

talking about linux, Gabe Newell was very unhappy of Windows 8 and he's now personally in charge of the forthcoming Steam platform for linux

[SlipBall]

Originally Posted by SIDWULF

Graph dosen't load for me

Same here