ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins
Perturabo,
It may be easy to forget that CC was off the market entirely, with no further development planned. We negotiated and paid for the rights to the CC engine and had to recoup some of those costs, so we took CCIII and updated it. The list of improvements really was large, including the integration of some key mods and the easy availability and organization of others via the mod swappe. Also, the addition at release of a multiplayer campaign, a new full campaign, the Battle HQ for online player matching and so on was significant added value in addition to the compatibility improvements. On top of that, content additions continued after release. We looked at this as an updated "collector's edition" of sorts, the ultimate CCIII release in effect and supported once again and working on the latest operating systems. Before we did the COI release, good condition copies of the out of print CCIII were selling for more money than the COI price among gamers.
Out of print product can have much higher value because it's well, out of print. Meanwhile, CC5 was being sold in stores for ~10$ because it was old.
New campaign and new data doesn't really have much added value, as it was said before, modders do that for community for free.
What is really needed from commercial CC games are genuine new features and improvements to the engine. And asking for these results only in response that they have only one programmer or lack of any response. (Not that Atomic Games was better in that aspect. They had more programmers, but were probably too busy adding fragging minigames to make troops load on vehicles, working vehicle pathing, AI that actually works and similar things.).
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that new CC games are being worked on and I like the better modding support (namely, the transition from .adb to .txt.), but I think they definitely could use (a lot) more new features and actual engine improvements.
ORIGINAL: Gary Childress
@ Perturabo: That's another aspect of Matrix that I totally forgot about, long term support. WITP for instance has been supported 4 years after its release with patches and fixes. 2K has long written off Civ III and isn't introducing any patches to any of the bugs still persistent in Civ III. In fact the last patch for Civ III (that I see on the Civ III website) is dated 04-05-2004 (before the release of Civ III Complete). I don't think 2K has ever introduced a patch on its version other than the version itself. I'm a member of the Civfanatics forum and it has been my experience that most pleas to 2K regarding Civ III seem to fall on deaf ears. Not so with Matrix.
Now, when was the last patch for CC3:CoI?
ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins
CCMT is based on Close Combat: Marines. It's been improved and expanded and is continuing to be supported, but there are some issues that were in CC:M that are still in CCMT.
Expanded? How? There are no new game features since CCM except for 5x5 multiplayer.
ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins
CCMT is based on Close Combat: Marines. It's been improved and expanded and is continuing to be supported, but there are some issues that were in CC:M that are still in CCMT. It still remains a good simulation of modern warfare, if you play it.
Only of those aspects of modern warfare that were already there in WWII.
As for the gameplay itself...
As someone said, it's more like simulation of WH40k, but without power armour.
Right now people carry hand-cannons with great range and accuracy, while really advanced weapons like Javelin suffer from inaccuracy and lack of firepower (Javelin has trouble with destroying T-55s in game.).
If the weapons will get patched, it's still going to be more like a WWII simulation.
Except that there's no possibility to make the troops start entrenched, there's no attacking side and no defenders.
ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins
That's the primary difference between this and the CC market before COI and CCMT. These games are now being actively worked on again
Yes, by one programmer. So...
Why the CC is great enough to cost a price for a full new game, but not great enough to get more programmers?
ORIGINAL: Joram
I know this is straying considerably from the original topic of the thread but since you bring it up:
I would disagree that you are underpricing but you can always try to raise costs and see what happens!
The thing you can't forget though is that if I have $50 to spend on a game, it's not just this one genre I look at. So you are still competing for my funds with sports games, FPS, RTS and all those other acronyms!
I really do enjoy wargames but if prices go up, I certainly would be buying less of them. In fact, there are several games here I haven't bought that I may enjoy simply because it is overpriced to me.
Yeah, same here. Things competing for my money are: cRPGs (not much competition as most of the modern cRPGs won't work on my computer and don't fulfil my requirements for a good cRPG), music CDs, comics, old tabletop games, like Rogue Trader and Laserburn, books, movies, anime, various indie games and most, recently visual novels.