HTTR Ex Pack

[GBS]

Matrix enjoys those European style month long holidays.[:D]

[Shadrach]

ORIGINAL: GBS

Matrix enjoys those European style month long holidays.[:D]

And good on 'em I say! [;)]

Thanks to Arjuna for the update, looking forward to this!

[GBS]

I hope they don't forget the #3 patch as well.

[BigDuke66]

@simovitch
Now that we have a release date could you give some more details of the rework on the HTTR scenarios?

[simovitch]

I will be doing a full on promotional AAR for Matrix to come out hopefully just prior to release.

Here's an excerpt:

The HTTR expansion Pack is a set of 13 scenarios covering all of the major actions that took place during the Market Garden Campaign in Holland, September 17-26 1944. The project began in 2006 with the conversion of the HTTR maps for mixed-mode movement. As we dug into the map conversion we discovered more and more issues that needed attention. Many parts of the maps had to be re-worked since minor and major river terrain had wiped out mechanized road movement wherever the roads were drawn too close to the river (like almost everywhere) and many new crossings were added where these roads crossed the rivers. Numerous other historical accuracy checks and revisions were made using veteran’ accounts, period aerial photographs and digital topography.

We also expanded the Eindhoven map and scenario start time to include the Irish Guard’s probe into Aalst on the morning of September 18th. But the big-ticket item included in the pack is the melding together of the Nijmegen and Arnhem Campaigns into one 10-day long mega scenario. The Map is 27 Km wide and covers the battlefield from south of Grave to 15 Km north of Arnhem. Developed, playtested and balanced by Panther Game’s beta testing team, this scenario promises to provide an experience like nothing you have ever seen before in real-time strategy wargaming.
Every scenario had to be designed to incorporate all of the new features that have been introduced into the series through “Conquest of the Aegean” and “Battles from the Bulge” including the new supply mechanics, supply entry points, and exit victory conditions.

The German and Allied OOB's for the Market Garden Campaign had to be reconstructed with the new BFTB estabs, unit by unit. All of the historical bios and unit histories were transferred over from HTTR and many new ones added that were missing in the original. Both the German and the British OOB's have been extensively reworked for historical accuracy based on new information, most of which has become available only after HTTR was released. Guards Armoured Division, 107th Panzer Brigade, Korps Feldt, 406th Infantry Division, Kampfgruppe Walther all got closely reviewed and many revisions and corrections were made based on historical research.

[Deathtreader]

Ohboy oboy oboy oboy oboy oboy oboy............[:)]


Rob.

[wodin]

The description says to me "expect a hefty price tag lads" though I maybe being paranoid and reading to much into it....yet really we are only talking about new scenarios...maybe great ones but it's not really an expansion it's a scenario pack and I hope it's priced as one similar to FoG scenario packs.

[Grim.Reaper]

ORIGINAL: wodin

The description says to me "expect a hefty price tag lads" though I maybe being paranoid and reading to much into it....yet really we are only talking about new scenarios...maybe great ones but it's not really an expansion it's a scenario pack and I hope it's priced as one similar to FoG scenario packs.

Hate to say it, but I am thinking the same. The silence of the price is similar to the original release which we know how that turned out:(. I hope i am pleasantly proven wrong. The original httr game is only $19 so would be funny to see the exp pack to cost more than the full original game.

[Arjuna]

Give us a break guys. Sorting out the price is the very last thing we do in the dev cycle. Maybe we should be more anal about it and get this sorted up front but we prefer to focus on the hard stuff first - ie the development of the product and leave this marketing stuff to the end. The only reason there is a delay on the price is because we only signed off on it a couple of days before Xmas and Matrix and us have been on leave since. I'm waiting on Matrix to get back to us regarding one aspect and then it should be sorted.

In the meantime I'd appreciate if you would keep your worst fears to yourselves. There will be plenty of time to complain after the announcement if that is your bent.

[Grim.Reaper]

Fair enough Dave....my curiosity and eagerness got the best of me. I will reserve judgement until the final official information is released.

[Wiggum]

I think today, with all the big sales the gamers get on Steam and other download stores they tend to expect more cheap price generally for games.
There are a lot of "indie" developers who go the same way, selling their games cheeper then they might like but in the end it works for them.
I know a few guys who would have already bought Command Ops if it would be around 25$.
Many play the demo, like it and then get shocked as they see the price...at least today with all those sales on Steam and co where you get great and big games for 3$.

So what Panthergames have to do is a tightrope walk for sure...
I think a "delux edition" with BftB + the HTTR expansion for the price of the current BftB full version would be a step into the right direction.
Man, there are so many great wargames i would have bought already but they all tend to be far to expensive.
Time for a change if you ask me.
The number one goal today should not be to sell x numbers of games, it all about expanding your fan base.
With a small amount of hardcore wargamers that are ready to pay 60$ for a game you will never get the attention of todays gamers.
Offering a demo for BftB was already a step into the right direction !
Wargames tend to be far to expensive (for todays gamers) and not even offering a Demo...

[Arjuna]

To all concerned ( and to no one in particular ),

Yes there are many bargain priced games on the market and that is because of the online sellers like Steam and Impulse that can make money on massive volumes. But they won't touch niche products like ours. Why? Because they know they can never sell the quantity required to make it work.

Yes you gamers are spoilt for choice and the choice is yours to make. No one is forcing you to buy our product. If you want it then you will have to pay for it. It's a simple as that. Please don't bother regurgitating the arguments about lowering price and getting more volume. I went through this whole price debate when we released BFTB and history proved me right. We sold pretty much the same if not more copies of BFTB than we did for COTA. The price was effectively irrelevant, except that we got more in our pocket. I might add it's still not enough for us to give up our day jobs but at least we get some compensation for spending the ridiculous hours developing this product.

I'm not going to say anymore on this matter but I will leave you with these retorical questions. Are you willing to give up all your spare time to develop games for others to enjoy? Would you be happy if we stopped developing wargames? Would all those cheap as chip non-wargames keep you satisfied? If the answer is yes, then why are you here on this forum? If the anser is no, then please stop winging about price.

[Phoenix100]

Well, not sure there's any need to get annoyed, Dave. It's a great game, as we tell you all the time in here. I, for one, have said I'll pay whatever you ask for the add-on, because I value it and have the cash. But not everyone has the cash, and when people chat about it they chat about it in that context, I think. No one is criticising you. Yes, it involves choices, about how to spend your disposable, and right now, in Europe at least, those choices are a bit harder. Everyone would like, I'm sure, to have as much money as poss to spend (including on your game), and for you to have as much reward as poss in your pocket, and for the game to do well. Sometimes those things don't all work out together though. I spend all my time writing books for others to enjoy, and certainly since the 'crisis' they haven't sold near enough for me to live off either. But, though I want the money, I don't think that can be why I write the things. Nor - given the niche - can that be why you develop games. You must enjoy it, though it doesn't sound like that in the last post. Certainly, the 'enjoyment' involved in creating something is a little odd - sometimes it feels like shit, but given we keep doing it, it must be that ultimately it is rewarding. Cash is hard earned, as you know. Though I personally am very happy with the price, I can see why people might 'winge' and I think they should be entitled to. Buying your game they're doing you as much of a favour as you're doing them by producing it. The one doesn't exist without the other. And, as I said, this forum is full of fullsome praise for the product and your own achievements.

Anyway, if the unpalatable facts of the matter are that in order to ensure niche games like this are still produced the players have to pay a higher price than for more popular games then so be it. Most people who are 'winging', as you put it, are still going to buy, I assume, up to a point. But if you (or, I assume, Matrix) pass that point then you won't make any money, will you? Because if you charge, for example, £200 for the add-on then even I won't buy it and you'll have spent all that time making a product that didn't shift. So there is a point to the discussion, no? To help find that point. And it might even count purely as information for you.

And you shouldn't run yourself down by describing the hours put in as 'ridiculous'. Everything of value takes time, and - these days at least - games have value. They're what we do with our spare time, and getting and enjoying spare time is why we go out and sell our labour for most of the time. I come back to my books. It takes me a year to write a thriller that gets read in max two days on the beach, then tossed aside. That's a ridiculous investment in time, on one way of looking at it. But I don't think we should look at it like that. The only way the time you put in could be ridiculous would be if we took the view that it was disproportionate to the result because the result, at the end of the day, is 'only a game' that we can, after all, all live without. But we can live without all these luxury items. That's not quite the point, is it?

[BigDuke66]

Well we talk about Grad A war games, if a wargame is made the way to reach a large fan base then something is wrong with it because the Grognards(aka we) were, are and will never be a large fan base and so those "wanna-be-wargames" that do reach a large fan base are nothing for the real wargamer except a small distraction before he gets back to the real McCoy. And already the very first of this series was something for real wargamers.

What a real problem is is simply the fact that this "Geiz ist geil"(Greed is awesome) mentality is also reaching our territory and that is quite silly, I had a talk a while ago in a German strategy forum and one was a bit annoyed about the fact that matrix games don't get cheaper after a while, after explaining to him that the bottom line is that we get games of today for prices of the past(I bought TOAW CoW edition for about 110 German Mark almost 10 years ago what is roughly 55 Euros and the new TOAW III cost only 42 Euros for example) as games tend to still be sold to prices like in the 90's or cheaper where many other things have doubled in price(like sending packages thru Germany for example).
This mentality just doesn't work here or in other niche markets, take "Rise of Flight" for example, the game would long be dead if they wouldn't have started to make money by selling planes and other stuff and why is that so? Because hardcore simfans are also a small group and those 40-50 buck game prices wouldn't have worked out, they only work with things like "Halo" or other stuff that reaches everyone from 6 to 60 and from dumbass to genius and those are the games that can be flushed away after a while for 5 bucks or less because the costs are long covered or the developer simply doesn't get anything out of it because of those silly mass sellers.

Bottom line is like Arunja said, lowering the price tag won't bring much more customers, those hand full that maybe now would buy it are nothing to the loss of money on all the other buyers and a real expansion of the fan base wouldn't happen too because the demo would have already dragged them in no matter how the price is and if not the game isn't something for them anyway and so we wouldn't expand the fanbase.

Personally I would like to see what the game has to cost on current sales to make the guys live from it, seeing this everyone would realize how cheap it is.

Oh and just for the records, I would like to see & buy a COTA Pack too but I guess that has to wait till the series gets back to the Mediterranean/African theater.

[Phoenix100]

BD66 said; Personally I would like to see what the game has to cost on current sales to make the guys live from it, seeing this everyone would realize how cheap it is.

Well, what it would take for them to live off it is not an indicator, at all, of how cheap or expensive it is - unless you happen to believe in the (Marxian) labour theory of value, which, for better or worse, no one does these days, not even in ex-communist countries.

A true indicator - we're all meant to believe - is how much people will pay for it. Even Grognards have a cut-off point. I couldn't afford - lterally, as in I don't have that cash available, in actuality - to spend £200 on the add-on, to take an extreme example. What people do when they decide whether to buy is balance the price against what they will get out of it. How much it costs to reproduce the 'labour units' (Dave et al) who made the item doesn't really come in to that. Except in a command economy if you get the balance wrong then you go out of business.

There's not a one-way favour thing going on here - Panther making games to a public that ought to be grateful and pay whatever - the people who make these choices to give their cash to Panther are the people who allow Panther to exist. And, as Dave so starkly put it, the choice is for them to make, and they will.

Maybe I should add that I have - in this forum - gone on and on about how I thought - me personally (many others disagreed) - that the price for the original game was cheap, for what it delivered, compared to all the other shite out there. So usually I would find myself on the other side of the fence.

[BletchleyGeek]

ORIGINAL: BigDuke66
What a real problem is is simply the fact that this "Geiz ist geil"(Greed is awesome) mentality is also reaching our territory and that is quite silly, I had a talk a while ago in a German strategy forum and one was a bit annoyed about the fact that matrix games don't get cheaper after a while, after explaining to him that the bottom line is that we get games of today for prices of the past(I bought TOAW CoW edition for about 110 German Mark almost 10 years ago what is roughly 55 Euros and the new TOAW III cost only 42 Euros for example) as games tend to still be sold to prices like in the 90's or cheaper where many other things have doubled in price(like sending packages thru Germany for example).

My thoughts precisely BigDuke, and nobody remembers this. V for Victory: Market Garden was actually *way* more expensive to me than BftB + the HttR expansion pack will be. I paid for it back in 1993 10,000 Spanish Pesetas, which adjusting for inflation are something like 100€. And it had six or seven (?) scenarios, no map editor, no scenario editor... just the scenarios and the bugs, which you had to live by.

[Phoenix100]

Yeah, and one hundred years ago you couldn't even get a light bulb for that.......

In fact, I'm so impressed with my Dell computer that I would willingly pay the inflation-adjusted equivalent of what a much more sub-standard model would have cost me fifteen years ago. To help Dell out....

[BletchleyGeek]

Or to put things into scale. In 1993 I could rent a three-room flat for one month with expenses included for the same price as I got V for Victory. Now it would cost me no less than 600€.

[Phoenix100]

Lol BG.

[benpark]

Well, we all know the phrase "selling out"- it refers to someone that waters something down for the masses in order to cash in on a widened appeal. This is the way to make the volume sales argument valid. It doesn't really work in this instance.

The good folks that make this game will get my money on a higher priced game again and again for two reasons:

1. They don't skimp on realism and the true spirit of a wargame (ie. they don't sell out)

2. They have a proven track record of releasing good, well coded games- and support those titles post release in the timely-est fashion they can.

Without either of the above factors, I would be hesitant/wouldn't buy. But we all know this to be a quality, state of the art game series. Would things like a 3D map be nice? Yep, and I'll pay more when that title is offered. The map maker and estabs editor also make this a sandbox, so there is a good deal of value here.

I'm not saying that this is the method for all publishers or developers. #2 is critical- if you have no support post release for a problematic title- no more of my $$$. There are more than a few recent titles that fail at either one or both of my standards (one of which I am currently fuming about), but this series is a welcome no brainer/must buy. I appreciate that, and I think the developers appreciate the player base.