Oleg Maddox leaving game development...

[Reschke]

Just saw this linked over there when I was looking up info about their newest flight sim.

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3241260/Oleg_is_leaving_game_developme.html#Post3241260

[Wotan]

Oleg Quits

[Ack-Ack]

Not surprised, rumor on the grapevine is that Ubisoft was going to drop Maddox again and he was going to be left without a publisher/distributor.

ack-ack

[Kazaa]

So who's going to gunie pig Oleg's new IL2 game for me... I mean the community?

[Reschke]

Not surprised, rumor on the grapevine is that Ubisoft was going to drop Maddox again and he was going to be left without a publisher/distributor.

ack-ack

I am not surprised by this at all. However I really don't think it hurt DCS when Ubi$oft dropped their flight sim games.

Hey Ack-Ack maybe you guys at Square Enix could pick up the torch for flight sims and move the genre forward!

[Ack-Ack]

I am not surprised by this at all. However I really don't think it hurt DCS when Ubi$oft dropped their flight sim games.

I agree, Ubisoft dropping DCS was probably the best thing that happened to the DCS guys because they no longer had the marketing weasels from Ubi telling how to make their game "more accessible".  It also helped that DCS was able to get some major venture and funding capital to help out.

I understand Oleg's disillusionment with having to work with Ubisoft, he's a 3rd party developer that is literally a slave to his publisher/distributor as they are the ones that hold the purse strings and can make him dance like a marionette and that has to get very tiring if the studio and publisher are at odds on the game, with the publisher having a set idea as to how the game should be and the studio having another vision for their game.  Ubisoft always wanted to turn IL2 into a more arcade like shooter to appeal more to the masses and elevate IL2/SoW from a niche game to a mass marketable game.

while I don't think Oleg's self-imposed retirement will stop development of IL2/SoW, I do think it will put an end to any future plans of developing IL2/SoW into a MMO like Oleg had envisioned doing at some point.

But from what I gathered from some of the posts from people close to Oleg is that he actually "left" over a year ago and someone named Ilya (sp?) has been running the show for IL2/SoW.

Hey Ack-Ack maybe you guys at Square Enix could pick up the torch for flight sims and move the genre forward!

Hmmm...


ack-ack

[ozrocker]

Maybe Voss will jump in to fill spot. Might be a Chalenge for him



                                                                         <S> Oz

[Wotan]

Ilya - is Luthier - he has worked with Oleg since Il-2 started.

Ubisoft has been a thorn in Oleg's side for the longest time. The latest is that they are forcing "anti-epilepsy" features into CoD that will break SLI / Crossfire - at least for the time being.

Wotan

[MiloMorai]

Ilya/Luthier was the reason for the mess up with Pacific Fighters.

[Wotan]

Yup - Pacific Fighters sucked in general anyway

[bcadoo]

A couple of interesting quotes from that forum:

Quote 1

"This just adds to that lingering uneasy feeling about Cliffs of Dover... Although I'd probably quit game development too... God it must suck to spends years of your life creating something for an ungrateful, whiny community... (gamers in general)"


Quote 2

"It's pretty obvious that flight simming is THE #%&*$# of a market to develop for. Whatever you do to please the market, however high you try and raise the bar, there are 1001 experts sniping away at how this feature isn't right, or could be done better or why are you taking so long? The bar can never be high enough for the "I want everything, I want it now and I want it for nothing" crowd.

And what is the payoff? Well from the overly vocal experts, usually none. He didn't model xyz correctly or it doesn't have abc feature "I'm not buying it!" In what other gaming market does the hardcore user base still regularly play extremely old games? Gaming as a business model requires that your customers regularly contribute something financially to keep your company afloat, not "I bought this sim in 1999 and I'm still playing it based on a myriad of freebie hardcore mods"

Seems like all flight sim communities are inhabited by the same people....

[Westy]

"Seems like all flight sim communities are inhabited by the same people...."

But we thank Cod on high there's only one Stiglr and we feel
sorry for the community cursed with him.

So what happens to the Cult of Oleg now?
Where do they go? Who do they follow?

[Reschke]

Maybe they can start worshiping Luthier/Ilya...he honestly doesn't do bad work but he can sure screw up a wet dream if he wants to.

[moot]

Gaming as a business model requires that your customers regularly contribute something financially to keep your company afloat, not "I bought this sim in 1999 and I'm still playing it based on a myriad of freebie hardcore mods"

Seems like all flight sim communities are inhabited by the same people....

Doesn't quite fit with AH players' regular $$ contributions.  A main difference between "new" or higher turnover franchises is that they rely on new single-serving content or features, whereas games like AH (maybe sims only) have a high or totally open-ended replay value.  You don't need HTC to write up a script for what your April 2011 sorties and missions are going to be like.  The scenarios and other events, the only actually scripted elements that compare with e.g. single player mode in more common games, are made by volunteers from the player community.   And what sets apart "hardcore" games like AH or racing sims is that you can still be learning and improving 10 years later, unlike other normal multiplayer games where the mechanics have no depth to them.. Where you can sum up everything by a few flow charts.  There isn't the almost infinite variety of scenarios that a 30+ car grid in a hardcore racing sim season, or that a scenario like BoG allows, all of that substance and variety doesn't fit in simple flowcharts.

[BoilerDown]

Games like AH are why I never bought into the console gamer's belief that "Console games are better because they just work and never have to be patched".  Its more like, console games suck and are unbalanced and will always suck and be unbalanced because they can't be patched.  Obviously this is less true with modern consoles that have hard drives, but still.  

Even in the PC world, there is clearly a lot of value in the subscription (or micropayment) model that enables continuous improvements to the game over time, regardless of the game genre, vs. making one-off games that are completed once and then largely forgotten about (except by the modding community, if you're lucky and if you give them some tools).