sell on Steam?

[sburke]

Well some quick numbers Steve for one I think anyone would consider a hit Skyrim

Over 20 million in sales generating over 1 and a quarter billion dollars. Advertising costs, 85 million. 320,000 concurrent players on steam. Those figures are a year old. Stop drooling. LOL.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/skyrim-the-elder-scrolls-v-statistics/

[Chazz]

Oh come on.....Wargame EE is an actual Wargame now? Don't get me wrong I played and enjoyed the first one  (Wargame:EE). It is a splendid (and at the time, underrated) RTS. But no way I would call it a wargame. Just because it has some elements resmbling wargames doesnt mean it is automatically one. Similarly, I would not call (the excellent) Men of War a Wargame just because it models some level of armor penetrations just like wargames do.

[Sgt Joch]

if you want to check out the popularity of games on Steam, you can view the game stats which lists the 100 most popular games:

 

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

 

Notice that neither "Rise of Flight" or "IL-2: Battle of Stalingrad", two fairly realistic flight sims which are sold on Steam are in the top 100. In fact, I have never seen either one on that chart.

 

personally, I don't have an opinion either way. I have a lot of games on Steam which I play. As a consumer, I appreciate Steam. However, I don't care whether CM is on Steam or not, that is really BFC's decision.

[Canada Guy]

Steve,

 

I do not disagree with you and it is your company so you can run it the way you want. I am also unfamiliar with how Steam works as a distributor so forgive my ignorance.

 

What about for games that were released a long time ago? Could you release CMBB and CMAK through Steam or as a company are you obligated to release everything that you make through Steam once you sign up as a supplier of games? It would save me from having to keep my hard copies of these games on my shelf (along with the Win7 updates to allow me to play them).

 

This may make some sense for games that have been around for a while (and I think I saw CMBO on GoG) as it would not cannibalize your sales of your current money makers (if this were allowed)

Edited January 6, 2015 by Canada Guy

[Battlefront.com]

The thing I don't like about Steam's approach is they require us to do a bunch of work, pay $100, and then they decide if they want to carry the game. If they decide to "greenlight" us then, and ONLY THEN, do they reveal the terms and conditions they require us to agree to prior to allowing the game to be carried on Steam. They also have some sort of NDA clause in there that prevents developers from talking about the terms and conditions. I also know they have a "take it or leave it" attitude, though I suspect the big boys have room to negotiate.

Having dealt with retail publishing contracts over a long period of time, their process doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that I'm going to like what I see. Based on the dribs and drabs that have filtered out into the public domain over the past years, I'm even more suspicious that we'd rather not sign on the bottom line.

If we thought Steam offered us something worth pursuing, we'd go forward and find out what the deal is. But we don't, so that takes away the incentive to see what the fineprint looks like.

Steve

[Doug Williams]

Canada Guy, those games (CMBB & CMAK) would be more in the realm of GoG than Steam, IMO.

[Chazz]

Canada Guy, those games (CMBB & CMAK) would be more in the realm of GoG than Steam, IMO.

 

 Yes I agree, in fact probably all of BFC's catalog is more appropriate for GOG than Steam, if BFC decides to go that way.

[SgtHatred]

I think we have different definitions of what a "hardcore wargame" is. That game is in the RTS category, which is not the same thing. RTS games have an inherently broader audience than wargames do. Good RTS games often appeal to wargamers (I like 'em!), but it doesn't work the same in reverse.

If we wanted to tap into the RTS market in any significant way we'd have to come up with an entirely different game than Combat Mission. CM violates almost all of the tenants of successful RTS games except that it can be played in realtime.

Steve

 

I still think you are underselling the appeal of Combat Mission by lumping it in with classic wargames. Sure, it's not Starcraft, but it also isn't "War in the East"

[Battlefront.com]

I still think you are underselling the appeal of Combat Mission by lumping it in with classic wargames. Sure, it's not Starcraft, but it also isn't "War in the East"

Oh, no argument there. But experience tells us that you can't play in the gray areas between genres. Games that try to do that tend to please nobody and sell worse than if they focused on just one customer base. So Combat Mission, deliberately, is aimed at the guys who like "War in the East" more than not.

One of the biggest reasons game developers fail is they don't know who their audience is. Another is not understanding their own limitations in appealing to that audience. We don't sell ourselves short, but we don't plan our expenses around wishful thinking. We have maintained a successful business in an industry littered with far more failures than successes. It is in no small part due to being comfortable with who we are and who you, our customers, are.

Steve

[Canada Guy]

I do not even know who I am so if you know, please tell me. I was planning on visiting an ashram in India to find myself but I should have come here instead  

[Baneman]

I do not even know who I am so if you know, please tell me. I was planning on visiting an ashram in India to find myself but I should have come here instead  

Well, you're here now and apparently, you're a guy from Canada. Don't worry, I won't hold BLSTK against you.  

Now that you've found yourself, happy Combat Missioning

Edited January 6, 2015 by Baneman

[BlackAlpha]

Oh come on.....Wargame EE is an actual Wargame now? Don't get me wrong I played and enjoyed the first one  (Wargame:EE). It is a splendid (and at the time, underrated) RTS. But no way I would call it a wargame. Just because it has some elements resmbling wargames doesnt mean it is automatically one. Similarly, I would not call (the excellent) Men of War a Wargame just because it models some level of armor penetrations just like wargames do.

 

I'm a bit surprised that there are not more people here who have played the game. I've been thinking about whether the Wargame series qualifies as a wargame and I've been comparing it to other wargames. So, it's a military, fairly large scale tactical game, that is modeled after real life, has semi-realistic game features and is abstracted quite a bit. Isn't that what many wargames are? In fact, most wargames are abstracted much more, up to the point that they don't really resemble real life as accurately, yet we still call them wargames. So, why not call the Wargame series a wargame?

 

Here's a video of the Red Dragon. Compared to European Escalation, its gameplay pacing has been increased a bit but it has also received quite a few new game mechanics that have made the game more complex, so maybe it's better if you take a look at that game instead. The video has commentary so that people who've never played the game can get somewhat of an understanding of what is going on. Watch it entirely and see what you think:

 

 

Note that it's all about unit positioning and getting the right covering angles. The game mechanics are fairly complex and you might not notice the majority of them by watching the video, but I can assure you that a lot of real life logic applies to the gameplay in that game. It's still more arcade than Combat Mission, but it's very, very far from being a Command & Conquer clone.

Edited January 6, 2015 by BlackAlpha

[Doug Williams]

 Yes I agree, in fact probably all of BFC's catalog is more appropriate for GOG than Steam, if BFC decides to go that way.

 

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be an insult to BFC or not, as I am a big fan of GoG (much bigger fan of GoG than Steam, in fact).

 

I'll remain neutral on this....for now. ;-)

[von Luck]

This is an interesting impasse – Steve is confident that NASA’s margins from Steam are so slim that it’s not an attractive option. The Steam Cosmonauts swear otherwise and feel confident that the markets in Steam are a valuable resource. The problem appears to be that the venture appears fruitless and thus any time or money spent on it is a waste. What if in a grand gesture you offer to greenlight some of your older games but you crowd source the funds needed to pay for the transaction. Add some lofty stretch goals and see what happens. This is like free money and advertising.

von Luck

[danzig5]

crowd source

lol

[Baneman]

... What if in a grand gesture you offer to greenlight some of your older games but you crowd source the funds needed to pay for the transaction. ...

 

There's still the

The thing I don't like about Steam's approach is they require us to do a bunch of work...

 

Now the minimum amount of people to "do a bunch of work" is one. So... half of BFC's programming crew.

Good luck getting that on his to-do list - only earlier today he was being castigated in the Tech forum for not fixing the Red Thunder patch bug fast enough.

Edited January 6, 2015 by Baneman

[Chazz]

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be an insult to BFC or not, as I am a big fan of GoG (much bigger fan of GoG than Steam, in fact).

 

I'll remain neutral on this....for now. ;-)

 

Oh haha, I finally understood what you meant. It is certainly not an insult as the 'Old' in GoG no longer applies  

[Doug Williams]

Oh haha, I finally understood what you meant. It is certainly not an insult as the 'Old' in GoG no longer applies

 

Ah, well then. :-)

 

GoG is great, but anything CM2 is too new for GoG, or at least my understanding of GoG's business model.

 

Wait. Isn't CMBO already on GoG?

[AttorneyAtWar]

GOG is one of the few places you can buy games with zero DRM which is amazing, as for Wargame: European, it is a wargame definitely but no where near hardcore. I think Wargame is a great stepping stone for getting into more hardcore games though.

[Battlefront.com]

I'm a bit surprised that there are not more people here who have played the game.

Without being snarky at all, this should tell you something. Contrary to some people's belief, our customers have other gaming interests besides Combat Mission. They are also always on the look out for something else besides Combat Mission. This is a pretty well informed group, so if they aren't playing something that looks to be a wargame it is probably because they don't view it as such.

I've been thinking about whether the Wargame series qualifies as a wargame and I've been comparing it to other wargames. So, it's a military, fairly large scale tactical game, that is modeled after real life, has semi-realistic game features and is abstracted quite a bit. Isn't that what many wargames are? In fact, most wargames are abstracted much more, up to the point that they don't really resemble real life as accurately, yet we still call them wargames. So, why not call the Wargame series a wargame?

Because it is aimed at the RTS market. What you said is true, but it can also be applied to many other RTS games. In some respects it can be said of some FSP games. In fact, when I tell people I make wargames they often say "like Battlefield?". No, not like Battlefield

There is certainly overlap between some RTS games and some wargames, the best example being Close Combat. But inherently they are not the same thing. Close Combat sales were a fraction of what the average RTS game sold. Again, that tells us something because Close Combat was certainly a very good game.

 

Note that it's all about unit positioning and getting the right covering angles. The game mechanics are fairly complex and you might not notice the majority of them by watching the video, but I can assure you that a lot of real life logic applies to the gameplay in that game. It's still more arcade than Combat Mission, but it's very, very far from being a Command & Conquer clone.

Indeed, but within any genre there is a range of products for a range of player types. You can have really "cartoonish" FPS games, you can have very "realistic" FPS games. But inherently they are more similar to each other than to games in other genres.

When I look at Wargame I see an example of an RTS that has potential appeal to hardcore wargamers who don't hate realtime. I do not see a realtime wargame that has an appeal to the RTS crowd. The developers seem to view things the same way since the subsequent releases were aimed at who? RTS guys or wargame guys?

Steve

[BlackAlpha]

Or maybe it's a Wargame on the opposite end of the realism spectrum? As in, it's a not so super realistic wargame but still a wargame?

 

I think that who you advertise for does not necessarily dictate what sort of game you got. Look at Arma for example. They got a pretty hardcore military FPS simulator that is excellent for communities who play coop in a realistic fashion and it's a game that doesn't follow the usual FPS game rules. Yet, the devs advertised it for the mainstream FPS crowd and were very successful (at the moment, they are still 12th on the top sellers list on Steam and have been pretty high up like that for a long time, when the game released they were in the top 5 for a long time), and they advertised the crap out of it. I guess they received a lot of new fans that way. But I still wouldn't call it a regular FPS game that appeals to the mainstream. It's not another Battlefield, many people who enjoy Battlefield hate Arma. No matter who it is advertised for, it's still very much a hardcore military simulator, with mods that make it so you have to eat MREs every few hours, which tells you something about the community that plays the game.

Edited January 7, 2015 by BlackAlpha

[Mord]

I'm a bit surprised that there are not more people here who have played the game.

 

I checked into it last year. It looks like fun. But I had a couple problems;

 

I couldn't find a demo. And demos for me are very important when it comes to seeing how well my comp will handle something. That's my first priority...next would be actual game play.

 

The second being that it's RTS...the thing I dislike most about these games is built right into the name; Real Time. These guys make these incredibly beautiful games, like Rome II and Wargame, in full glorious 3D, but when you play them (as you see in the video) it's from the nosebleeds, and you are all over the screen clicking this little unit and that little unit, and something goes boom, so you jump over here, and something goes boom over there, so you jump over there, and you are all over the place. Meanwhile, you have these gorgeous, jaw dropping graphics going to waste because you are so busy clicking everywhere you don't have time to enjoy them. I never understood the point of the 3D when you spend the entire game well above the battle. Now, if there is a save feature where you can re-watch afterward that goes a long way in helping with that, at least you can go back and see 80% of what you missed while you were just trying to beat the scenario.

 

But that is exactly why I like CM. I can play in WEGO and get the benefit of the VCR instant replays on each turn which do play out in real time. I don't have to miss any of what the game was supposedly designed to show me. The 3D graphics are there to enhance the game play and immersion, if they weren't then all these games would look like Steel Panthers. LOL. It's not that I am old, or crotchety (like a lot of RTSers will tell you), it's that I want to enjoy all the game has to offer, not just the clicking faster than my enemy part.  It's really hard to find that happy medium with these full on Real Time games. For every one cool thing you get to see, you are missing twenty on the other side of the map. I want to see all of it.

 

But I'll probably give this one a try eventually.

 

 

Mord.

 

P.S. does it have a replay feature, and single player missions? A battle editor? It was almost a year ago when I checked it out.

Edited January 7, 2015 by Mord

[BlackAlpha]

I know what you mean. I mostly play with friends against AI for that reason, less pressure that way. If playing PvP, I always play with someone I know, so that we can divide the map among us, sort of like dividing the workload and we communicate a lot (call out contacts, coordinate attacks, and such) which helps a lot.

 

The reason the graphics look fancy is because sometimes you need to zoom in to check the terrain or the line of sight. Other than that, you spend your time zoomed out because you then can see more. Pretty much like in Combat Mission. The fancy graphics also help to lure in people who otherwise would've never tried the game. When Red Dragon was released, you should've seen the amount of topics that went like: "I want a refund because when I looked at the screenshots I thought this was like Battlefield!" I'm not kidding, that actually happened frequently!  

 

There are replays after the mission is over. In singleplayer you can slow down time up to slow motion (1 in game second takes 30 real life seconds). Not sure if there's a pause button, never tried. There's no editor.

Edited January 7, 2015 by BlackAlpha

[Mord]

Thanks for the info. I'll probably put that in my list for after I get Black Sea and the rest of Rome II and Shogun II's DLC.

 

 

Mord.

[BlackAlpha]

Wait before getting Rome 2 and see first how the new Attila game is like, it's coming out in a month or so. Most of Rome 2's bugs are fixed by now but Attila might be better because Creative Assembly always releases a crappy/buggy game using a new engine and then they re-use the engine to create a good (working) game.

Edited January 7, 2015 by BlackAlpha