I don’t remember if I got into the original Aces High Beta in week one, but it was surely very early on. It was a fascinating experience to watch an extremely dedicated, talented, and visionary team build up an massively multi-player online gaming platform literally from scratch. I feel privileged that I was able to be there to witness that adventure. As a software developer, having some understanding of the technological effort involved, I was extremely impressed with what a very small team accomplished is so short a time. I have the utmost respect for the HTC team, and wish them nothing but success.
I personally have moved on to other gaming mostly, but I assure you, there is no other past game company I bother to periodically go back to their forum to check how things are going and to silently root for them. I’ve opened/re-opened many AH accounts over the years, but of course can never recapture the same experience as I once had. That doesn’t really mean anything. Hitech will be the first to tell you that it is perfectly natural for most players to have a life cycle and eventually burn out and move on. There are always a percentage of hardcore lifers, but there is also a perfectly natural player attrition rate. You just hope your player acquisition rate, plus hard core lifer retention, exceeds your attrition rate.
So even though I am not currently active in the game, I have watched it closely over the last 17 years. I hope that will justify me offering an opinion that is both informed by experience, yet because I am not currently one of the obsessed, benefits from some objectivity.
I can honestly say, without a doubt in my mind, that Hitech and the HTC team has reached the pinnacle of their genre. Aces High III is the finest massively-multi-player hi-fidelity WWII aerial combat based game ever produced.
Period. Full Stop.
Sadly, in 2018, that might be like saying you are the World’s premier precision buggy-whip manufacturer.
I believe that the majority of players AH had at it’s peak, were probably not hardcore, dedicated, WWII air combat enthusiasts. I believe the majority simply wanted to play and with and against other online players and engage in combat of any kind. At that time, AH, and Warbirds before that, and AW before that, were the industry standard model for online combat (assuming you didn’t want to prance around in tights and sprinkle pixie dust in Lord of the Elves or something.)
But the majority of these players probably weren’t WWII aircraft fanatics. But they’d fly them. Because AH was the best online combat game going. When other models of combat games started appearing, they started evaporating off. Eventually you are left with a dedicated hard core of WWII air combat addicts. But that is a niche of a niche of a niche of a niche.
Hitech has made design choices I agree with, and some that made me want to pull my eyeballs out. But I don’t think anything they have done has caused these changes in the marketplace. You can argue about radars and this or that all day, but I don’t think any of that is the cause or the solution.
I accept that the Great Recession was the proximate cause of the beginning player exodus, but I think you would have probably gotten to the same place eventually anyway.
How many random internet gamers out there even own a joystick you think? HOTAS? Rudder peddals?
How many players that are dedicated to hardcore hi-fidelity WWII air combat do you think are still out there that haven’t already heard of and tried AH? I’d wager that the vast majority of that demographic has already had AH on their hard-drive at one time. I can’t imagine there is still a vast untapped pool.
I honestly can not think of any possible set of occurrences that would fundamentally alter the course of internet gaming evolution. I can not conceive of any scenario where vast swaths of players are going to drop Battlefield V and WOT and sign up to be baby seals in AH; and no possible training program or newbie arena is going to make that happen.
You have niche of a niche of a niche boutique product. It achieved a historically anomalous high player count at a time when more and more players wanted online combat, but before other competitors had “come online”. I think that was a unique point in time that can not be recreated.
What you can do now is ensure that you do gather in 100% of the kind of player who would fit your niche profile that are available. You might find a few new ones more from time to time. Hopefully at least enough to replace the elderly players that pass. You certainly need to keep the ones you have. You might outlast WWIIOnline and pull in some of those, though I expect most of those would go on to Battlefield or WOT, etc. I can’t see how you would ever reach the populations that you achieved at peak.
Hitech once told me he would never work on any other game except AH. Given the history, in 2001 I understood that reasoning. In 2018? I’m reminded of interviews I’ve seen where directors like Coppola and Scorsese talk about having to do several commercial successes in order to finance their less commercial works of passion. They do that because some things are worth doing even if they don’t rake in millions. Just for the love of it. But someone still needs to pay the light bill. HTC has vast experience in building and hosting massively multi-player online games. I hope HTC has a long future, and I hope AH has a long future.
But honestly, would one more variant of P-38 really change anything?
