Steam Marketing

[CptTrips]

That's swell, but a lot of people take "This is why it hasn't been done." as an attack.  It's not "Interesting".  It's been done to death.  But people don't want to hear about "What else?" all they want to hear is discussion of whether it's a good idea, or a really good idea.

Or it could be that is a perfectly awesome idea and I'm too stubborn and close-minded to see it.  That's a possibility too.  I've seen lots of ideas in my experience that would have been easy to shoot holes in at first that later, with work proved to be really great ideas. 

When the first automobiles were made they were laughed at.  Except for limit use-cases in urban centers for delivery, they were completely impractical.  Not enough of a distribution system for the fuel, not enough skilled mechanics to keep them running, impractical for all the rural dirt roads.  There were a million reason skeptics could point to and claim they were a waste of time.  To a large extent they had valid concerns, yet the sub-problems were solved.  The visionaries who we laughed by the people who "knew" eventually turned out to be right.

[Wiley]

Or it could be that is a perfectly awesome idea and I'm too stubborn and close-minded to see it.  That's a possibility too.  I've seen lots of ideas in my experience that would have been easy to shoot holes in at first that later, with work proved to be really great ideas. 

When the first automobiles were made they were laughed at.  Except for limit use-cases in urban centers for delivery, they were completely impractical.  Not enough of a distribution system for the fuel, not enough skilled mechanics to keep them running, impractical for all the rural dirt roads.  There were a million reason skeptics could point to and claim they were a waste of time.  To a large extent they had valid concerns, yet the sub-problems were solved.  The visionaries who we laughed by the people who "knew" eventually turned out to be right.

Which is usually the kind of thing people first post when someone shoots holes.  They rarely move to the all important "yet the sub problems were solved" step.  That happens through discussion, not agreement.

Wiley.

[hazmatt]

I threw some ideas out off the top of my head hoping that it would get others to think of their own ideas.

I believe that if we want to come up with a solution we throw out our ideas, which make other people think of other ideas which they throw out there which makes other people think of ideas etc.

I never said my ideas were going to be any good. My goal was to get others to think instead of complain.

I could care less if you say all my ideas suck, but, if you do, please sprinkle a little of your genius ideas in here instead of just beaching

[Wiley]

However, if you do think all my ideas are crap, please bless us all with a little of Your genius ideas to help us move this forward in a positive direction instead of another beachfest.

Never said that.  I've just said they've all come up before.

I have in the past.  There's no productivity in belaboring the points.

Wiley.

[CptTrips]

That's a nice idea.  Not really sure what WBs would bring to the table, as it's more or less an earlier iteration of AH.  I wonder what the compromises to mash AH and WWIIOnline together would look like.

Well, WB does have some residual customers.  Not as many, but every bit helps. 

They still seem to have more name recognition.  I don't know why, but they do.  I guess just left over glow from the heyday.  With their relationship with Microprose, they could bring more press recognition to reforming a combined company. Wild Bill is a dork, but he is a salesman.  You don't put someone like that in charge for cripes sake, but they do have their use, properly supervised.  A successful company needs a salesman.  You need someone out there beating the bushes, smoozing, take press out to lunch, getting free advertising making interviews, making deals, etc.  The kind of stuff engineers neglect because they hate that kind of stuff.  I'm sure he still has lots of contacts in industry that could be useful and guys like that aren't shy about picking up the phone.

HTC I believe has hands-down the best flight and vehicle model.  I also believe their terrain system is superior. 

WWIIOL has at least a basic infantry system.  It needs work, but it's something.  Alpha-dog pilots can sneer and laugh, but that really help broaden the appeal and I'm not sure there are enough flightsim purists left to support a company anymore.  I also think their supply and higher level strategic layers have the possibilities. 

Bottom line, 3 companies splitting that market simply mean none of them can get enough critical-mass to be healthy and have the resources needed to move forward at a reasonable pace. 

You end up with zombie-companies they can just keep the lights on, barely. Yet with bandwidth and server hosting prices coming down over the last two decades, even a company with volunteer developers can limp along for quite a while. 

Now I suspect we are headed for another economic downturn in a year or two.  That might be the final straw.  When that tide goes out, we might figure out who's been skinny-dipping. So maybe two of the three go belly up and release some market to keep the third alive.  My fear is none of them have the reserves to survive that stress and all 3 die off and the genre vanishes completely.  I hope I'm wrong.

Odds of it happening?

    

[Wiley]

I hope I'm wrong.

    

Can't disagree with any thing you said there.

I just watched a bit of WWIIOL footage to be sure, but IMO the FPS there suffers from the same thing it does here.  Look at gameplay from there, look at BF4.  Graphically, it's like looking at something from the Quake era.  I understand why that is.  IMO the vast majority of gamers don't care about that.  All they see is less fidelity.  Chasing that market seems to me to be at best an extremely uphill battle.

Unless the gameplay for the FPS is absolutely mindblowing, they're just not going to get past the graphics.

Wiley.

[Wiley]

Actually, further to that, I wonder what Wild Bill's reputation is?  As players, there's a lot of people in here who have a less than favorable opinion of him.  We saw the reaction the new Microprose stuff got in the O club.  I'm curious what people who are actually involved in the industry think of him.

Wiley.

[CptTrips]

Unless the gameplay for the FPS is absolutely mindblowing, they're just not going to get past the graphics.

Well, like I said, it needs work.     However, they have been building some knowledge and expertise and could get better over time.  It is it's own knowledge domain just like flightsims.

I do think that given an unique genre and scope that can't be found anywhere else, some level of forgiveness will be allowed for less than AAA graphics. 

One reason I think things could improve is that they are apparently moving to Unreal 4.  Once they have moved away from a proprietary system, it is much easier to find permanent or temporary talent to move the product forward.  More resource flexibility.  You also are offloading engine development to a team of people who specialize in that and dedicate their lives to pixels.  Your team can them focus more of your unique content and experience creation rather than the low level plumbing.

Also you open yourself up to huge libraries of pre-made inexpensive components that you can leverage just by plugging them in.  The modern platform asset stores are impressive. The kind of stuff you can find for less than $100 is amazing considering the amount of work it work take if you did it yourself.  https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/animated-ww2-characters-128368  https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/ufps-ultimate-fps-106748

Of course, it's all in the implementation, but moving to Unreal might help them greatly accelerate their quality improvement by leverage a larger ecosystem.

Now, if they asked me I would have suggested Unity instead.  I wouldn't have said that 2-4 years ago, but I'd say that now.  Unreal is certainly a reasonable choice, and in the past it was clearly superior, but I think Unity has caught up now and will probably surpass them.  I think C# is just so much more productive an environment and C# developers are so much more prevalent now days. Which means talent will be easier to find and less expensive.  But Unreal is nothing to sneeze at.


....other topic

I think people would have much more respect for Wild Bill as VP of Sales than they would as CEO.  Everyone has a skill.  It's about finding the right role and fit.  There have been plenty of salesmen who made companies I've worked for millions that I'd never consider putting in charge of anything.  That doesn't mean they can't sell/market.  I know I couldn't do that, so you need those guys.

[TequilaChaser]

Why would Dale even consider teaming up with his old WarBirds game that he built/designed and owned, and sold (and who knows? He might even still possibly drawing royalties off of, depending on the details of the selling of it)

As for Steam, and Steam Marketing.... I don't care much for Steam, they remind me of the IEN gaming network, back when they hosted Nascar Racing in the 90's.....

Steam should allow HTC the ability to remove disgruntled reviews.... That are blatantly clear that they are posting just to make Aces High look bad.....but from what I have seen, Steam doesn't have the integrity or Class, to Acknowledge and help HTC when and where they should.....they just are another money grubbing outfit...

My view on the matter

TC

[CptTrips]

Why would Dale even consider teaming up with his old WarBirds game that he built/designed and owned, and sold (and who knows? He might even still possibly drawing royalties off of, depending on the details of the selling of it)

Why did Steve Jobs go back to Apple?

[Wiley]

Well, like I said, it needs work.     However, they have been building some knowledge and expertise and could get better over time.  It is it's own knowledge domain just like flightsims.

I do think that given an unique genre and scope that can't be found anywhere else, some level of forgiveness will be allowed for less than AAA graphics. 

Hehe...  I believe our estimates of what level of forgiveness there is would be separated somewhat.

One reason I think things could improve is that they are apparently moving to Unreal 4.  Once they have moved away from a proprietary system, it is much easier to find permanent or temporary talent to move the product forward.  More resource flexibility.  You also are offloading engine development to a team of people who specialize in that and dedicate their lives to pixels.  Your team can them focus more of your unique content and experience creation rather than the low level plumbing.

Also you open yourself up to huge libraries of pre-made inexpensive components that you can leverage just by plugging them in.  The modern platform asset stores are impressive. The kind of stuff you can find for less than $100 is amazing considering the amount of work it work take if you did it yourself.  https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/animated-ww2-characters-128368  https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/ufps-ultimate-fps-106748

Of course, it's all in the implementation, but moving to Unreal might help them greatly accelerate their quality improvement by leverage a larger ecosystem.

By "They" going to Unreal do you mean WWIIOL or AH?  I assume WWIIOL.

Now, if they asked me I would have suggested Unity instead.  I wouldn't have said that 2-4 years ago, but I'd say that now.  Unreal is certainly a reasonable choice, and in the past it was clearly superior, but I think Unity has caught up now and will probably surpass them.  I think C# is just so much more productive an environment and C# developers are so much more prevalent now days. Which means talent will be easier to find and less expensive.  But Unreal is nothing to sneeze at.


....other topic

I think people would have much more respect for Wild Bill as VP of Sales than they would as CEO.  Everyone has a skill.  It's about finding the right role and fit.  There have been plenty of salesmen who made companies I've worked for millions that I'd never consider putting in charge of anything.  That doesn't mean they can't sell/market.  I know I couldn't do that, so you need those guys.

Yup.  I don't know.  My experience where it appeared it was Wild Bill making the decisions gave me a distinct used car vibe.  Like you say, maybe it's the role but I tend to trust my gut explicitly when I get that feeling.  It says "Do not trust."

And to drag it back to the OP like I meant to last post...  I think it was an enormous mistake to list this as free to play on Steam.  Regardless of reality, if gamers perceive you're "trying to pull a fast one" they're savage.  You nailed it on the head, it's not about being technically right it's about winning.  When I first saw it was listed as free I really thought that was a horrible idea.

What someone really needs to do is grab the engine from Star Citizen and put it to use on something like this game.  The size of the maps is miniscule compared to a planet, so you could cram in way more detail to everything.  I wonder if they could just bolt HTC's network stuff onto it and have the limiting factor be the graphics...

Wiley.

[AAIK]

HT, you want a hug?

[CptTrips]

By "They" going to Unreal do you mean WWIIOL or AH?  I assume WWIIOL.

Sorry, yes, I saw in the dev blog they were planning a transition to Unreal 4.  I assume that is still in the works.  Of course, rumor is, WB is too.

Yup.  I don't know.  My experience where it appeared it was Wild Bill making the decisions gave me a distinct used car vibe.  Like you say, maybe it's the role but I tend to trust my gut explicitly when I get that feeling.  It says "Do not trust."

Yeah, well, so has ever salesman I've ever worked with at every company.  I just assumed that's how they are all.  Somehow they still sell. It's what they do. 

[Wiley]

Yeah, well, so has ever salesman I've ever worked with at every company.  I just assumed that's how they are all.  Somehow they still sell. It's what they do. 

Heh.  I've seen good ones.  Maybe they were just better than my BS detector.

Wiley.

[CptTrips]

Heh.  I've seen good ones.  Maybe they were just better than my BS detector.

OH, not particularly work safe language.