Moderators: Joel Billings, wdolson, Don Bowen, mogami
ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager
ORIGINAL: Marc Schwanebeck
We have only 2 copies left.
Are you going to be able to order the DVD case edition like was purchased at Origins?
ORIGINAL: usecase
I've been in the software industry for a while as well, most of it in mainstream application development, some in the High Performance Computing arena. I see more similarities between game development and the latter.
Code reuse, oo and agile development techniques often have to take second place to performance - which is why you see arrays and static data structures rather than dynamic containers and deep inheritance hierarchies.
Having said that, it is often possible to get decent performance and incorporate at least _some_ modern techniques for reducing development time.
Now, when can I order this game....
ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl
ORIGINAL: Ron Saueracker
You and Mike Scholl (sorry Mike, but hey, you do post some really negative shiite, Moriarty."seem way too wound up over nothing.
Just a thought...[X(]
What? Pointing out that "having two left" doesn't really say anything encouraging or
discouraging about WITP's sales is "negative"? I'd call it a realistic appraisal of a "no
comment" answer. I hope the game sells well for 2by3, so they will have a stake in
supporting it for a long while. Am I frustraited that the map has some highly skewed
distances on it.., or that the Pennsacola Convoy is sailing around empty..., or that any
of several other annoiances that have come up in the AAR's still remain? Yes. This is
the only detailed game on a subject I'm interested in likely to come out in the next 10
years, so I'll be living with it's ommissions and errors for a long time. Am I going to
buy it anyway? You bet.., two copies at least.
ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins
Hey, sorry guys, we really can't discuss actual sales numbers. However, I will say that the convention was a great success, with sales higher than expected and WitP selling very well. Thanks for all your interest and support, we'll get it in the online store as soon as possible.
Regards,
- Erik
ORIGINAL: Marc Schwanebeck
ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager
ORIGINAL: Marc Schwanebeck
We have only 2 copies left.
Are you going to be able to order the DVD case edition like was purchased at Origins?
Yes, from august on. We will keep you updated on this. Waiting for Digital River to staret this service.
Just interested if you managed to expand your customer base any with that kind of exposure.
ORIGINAL: Paul Vebber
The giant game box banners we had hoisted up high so you could see them from anywhere in teh exhibiters hall helped too!Just interested if you managed to expand your customer base any with that kind of exposure.
ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980
Valid point, Jim, concerning the market for these games. The only place one can then legitimately affect the bottom line is the labor issue. Only through the introduction and incorporation of new design, coding and management techniques can the amount of time and effort to produce a top quality title be reduced, thereby making it more attractive to more developers entering the industry. And that may be part of the problem.
The money is so tight in this genre, that it simply does not attract enough new talent with new ideas. Or, on the other side, it pays so poorly that only entry-level types tend to do it, and as family needs grow, they move on to higher paying business jobs. And then you are left with the only senior people in the business being the truely religious die-hards that do this out of nothing but love for the genre. And those folks tend to get stuck in a developmental rut quite often. Ala Gary Grigsby. Trying totally new developmental techniques is obviously too much of a risk in such a marginalized business, I suppose.
And my impression may be all wet, but I have this picture of this genre basically being run by the senior die-hards who came up in the early days of computer gaming who have stayed around out of love, not money, managing a small number of most young, entry-level programmers (kids with les than 5-7 years of experience, mostly in the 20's and early 30's) and designers who learn to do things a certain way. When I can finally extract an answer from a real developer concerning a "why do you do it that way", that answer tends to be along the lines of "we've always done it that way...". And that is always a sign of a stagnation of ideas from a development perspective.
I agree with you that labor issues and redundancies in development processes can help the bottom line, but I think the real problem lies with us the marketplace itself. Matrix decided to charge $70.00 instead of $59.95 or whatever some of their past titles cost and the resounding cry of foul from the cheapskate wargaming community was deafening.
We keep shooting ourselves in the foot by forcing companies to charge similar prices other companies charge for games that sell in excess of 500,000 - 1,000,000 copies easily. And when a company like Talonsoft goes under we bemoan the death of our hobby and wonder why no company wants to touch a wargame these days.
For an intelligent bunch of guys we can be pretty dumb sometimes. If you bought UV 2 years ago how many hours of fun do you suppose you got out of it these past couple of years? 100, 200, more? For the price you paid I’d say it was probably the best bang for the buck you got out of any entertainment related purchase you made for either of those years.
If the wargamers would step up to the plate together as a group and support higher prices for our desired games, I bet we’d see an influx of wargames similar to the flood that hit the board game market when SPI started publishing back in the 70’s. This is our hobby, and I think those who work so hard to bring gems like UV and WitP to us deserve the same success any other professional deserves at their jobs of choice.
Let them charge $100.00 or $150.00 for a massive project like WitP and I bet you’ll see development schedules fill up with wonderfully inspired future projects overnight. Some people pay thousands of dollars to support theatre, opera, ballet, golf, etc. Why shouldn’t we try to support our chosen interests with the same kind of good will?
ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag
Well said Jim.
You only missed the part about the added headache that we hamstring the developers by having the oldest collection of computer crap that fell off the shelf at the third hand store! [:D]
ORIGINAL: kaleun
I kind of upgrade every 3-4 years, however, for the grog games, this is not neccessary, not even advisable. I had to stop playing PACWAR and WIR when I got the W95, because the security system that they used asked for a particular word in a particular page of the manual; unfortunately the page and the number of the word came out garbled in my new laptop screen[:@]
My Silent Service II disk quit working when I upgraded to an XP laptop. (I know there is a way to make it work, but I'm not geek enough to be able to complete the instructions)
So every time I get a new system, I wonder which of my favorite games will not work with it.
[8|]
Now LETS GET THE DOWNLOAD!!!!
ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980
I can definitely agree with that, of course. But realities are realities, and at $70 Matrix is probably at the very top of the price tolerance range. So the reality is, that to squeeze more money out of the genre's titles you have to get them to market with a lot less manhours behind them without sacrificing quality. And the only way that could ever be possible, to any meaningful extent, is software engineering and project management methodologies.....because the market is what the market is....
ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980
Well, I keep an old copy of OS/2 on a small partition for the sole purpose of playing old Dos games, because it is REAL DOS with a full 640K of usable DOS near memory. Win9x's DOS emulation and NT's command prompt simply will not run PACWAR or WWR very well without some memory glitches because they do not provide enough base application memory. But OS/2's DOS was even better that real DOS. PACWAR runs like a champ under OS/2. You can even get the details of carrier air groups up without the video corruption and out of memory errors, you get using NT's or XP's emulation mode....
ORIGINAL: kaleun
Hey thanks for the link; I'll give it a try.
