The future of Submarine simulations
 

Hi Folks,
first: I am not the type of hardcore subsimer like many people around here, I just get an urge every few years to get into it again and sink some ships using a bit of geometry or dive away from planes etc.
But still I always enjoyed this simulation genre. But what is the future of it?
I sincerely hope it is NOT going to be Silent Hunter Online, but after Silent Hunter 5 which probably was a total failure sales-wise, this seems to be a dying genre, unless you consider sticking to modded Silent Hunter 3 to 5, which admittely are still becoming better with very dedicated people actually patching these games using extremely difficult and pretty ineffective techniques (which is really astounding and great!)
In the last years it seemed that the simulation genre itself was becoming extinct (looking at the death of Microsoft Flight Simulator for example), but now it looks like a few companies have found themselves a niché in which they can produce high quality simulations that are actually profitable and thus sustainable.
Battlefront's Combat Mission series or 777 Studio's Rise Of Flight come to mind.
Couldn't something like that be possible for (WW2) Subsims as well? What are the developers of Silent Hunter 3-5 doing at the moment? I think it was Ubisoft Romania, any chance they might become independent and develop subsims themselves and publish them as well? That seems to be the only way it works today it seems to me, self-publishing that is.
Or maybe Ubisoft could sell the Silent Hunter franchise. Today I read about all the franchises that were sold to various publishers after the bankruptcy of THQ. I think SH would sell relatively cheaply so maybe another company could take it over from Ubisoft. The same thing happened with Rise of Flight and the new owners were pretty successfull in fixing this game up and generating profit with it. Unfortunately, that seems like an impropable scenario at the moment with Ubisoft still actively developing SHO, but maybe in a few years.

So what are your opinions on this? I have no clue how big the actual potential customer group for subsims is compared to flightsim (Rise of Flight/Il-2) or tactical combat sims (Combat Mission) but they're probably bigger, although I believe all Silent Hunter games managed to generate some interest from mainstream customers. Do you think a business like I described would be possible? Could the Franchise be taken over by some other company? What other possibilities are there on the horizon?

If Silent Hunter was sold to another company, who actually tested their games, and released betas, I reckon that subsims would be stronger than ever.

See? I think what is necessary for simulation gaming company (not including those crappy German "simulations" that get chucked out every few months)
is to have a realistic picture of how big the community is and adjust content (=development time involved) and pricing. Most hard core simulation gamers are willing to pay to more since they reckon that they will be much more involved with their favourite simulation than with your average 6-hour-singleplayer+crappy-multiplayer mainstream game.
And all these succesfull sims I've mentioned do it that way. I'd also include War in the East which sells for 80$ I think.
They also limit their sims content and sell extra content. Battlefront for instance sell their games at relatively high prices which also don't get much lower over time and now go more and more into selling extra content packages at also relatively high prices.
777 has taken a different approach with their Free2Play model where you pay pretty much for extra planes or maps or weapons. I can't say I like this much, but as long as it works and keeps the company alive and able to produce more high quality flight sims I'm totally fine with it.
Now with a new Silent Hunter (or maybe a revived version of SHV) it could be just like that. A submarine simulation going from 1939 to 1945 featuring every single (lets say German) boat and every theatre around the globe is probably unrealistic. But a well functioning TypVII simulation for which you can buy extra stuff like TypeII or TypeIX boats or more remote theatres or more "NPC" ships or planes could maybe work.
I at least would definately pay again for re-release of Silent Hunter 5 if it actually did all that the original promised (and was a bit more realistic in mission terms).

I say that if SHO does poorly enough, have Subsim start a Kickstarter campaign to buy the rights from Ubisoft and make SH6 ourselves.

Wouldn't it be better to spend all the cash on development? I can't possibly imagine they'd sell the IP for cheap even if the games go poorly.

silent hunter as an IP isn't really worth much I'm afraid

There are no iconic characters, and there is no original story.

Neither does Homeworld, which is another beloved IP that so happens to be owned by Activision/Blizzard and so the chance of anyone buying it and making a new game is close to zero. Unfortunately these big corporations tend to hold on to stuff forever even if they have no plans to do anything with it.

I think you'll find that THQ owns it as it wasn't passed to Sega with its purchase of Relic.

Tbh I'm not sure I care too much about the SH brand, in some ways SHO would have benefited from not using it I think.

No Activison has it from buying up Sierra :(

A Kickstarter Subsim is really needed. I think it would really pay off for the devs and the players. I'd never thought I'd use this silly frase, but: I would throw money at my screen

Subsims are dead.

Bilge_Rat, I am very dissapoint :nope:

We should just make our own! :D

I think they are only "dead" because publishers don't want to make fund/them any more due to the risk/reward ratio... it's much easier to churn out an FPS/RTS or cute puppy game.

The market for subsims is still there. Most of the SH series achieved sales of around 300,000 which was considered a healthy number for a simulation game and sims have traditionally have had a longer shelf life than most other genre games. Ubi have developed SHO as a free to play primarily because they see the PC as being riddled with piracy, their CEO Yves Guillemot quoted a figure of 95%.

Ironically I believe in the case of SH5 it was their own "always on" anti piracy DRM scheme that negatively impacted on the sales which they may have wrongly attributed to piracy of the product resulting in a premature death of the dvd-rom series and the creation of Silent Hunter Online.

There is another interesting project - WarThunder (http://www.warthunder.com). At this moment this game is focused to the planes, but at the future the developers plan to add fleet units.

Some core ideas which may suggest submarine simulation available in the future:

• There are some modes, and one of them is a 'simulation' (FRB) with limited ammo, view, physics model where player should control some features to avoid self-destroying,
• Long time missions (for human controlled planes is 1 hour), or not limited time mission against AI,
• Destroyers are "a light warship designed mostly to fight against enemy submarines and aircraft",

Hope dies last?
:hmmm:

No more detailed info at all.

You're young enough, go learn.

Personally, I'm waiting for DCS to realise they need a sub sim in their repertoire. :D

I seriously don't want ANOTHER Uboat sim. I'm so tired of World War II. Give me a nice Cold War subsim. I enjoy Dangerous Waters a LOT more than the Silent Hunter games and play it a LOT more. Cold War subsims are a totally untapped market! EVERYONE does World War II sims. I'm sick of them. I want my modern or Cold War era weapons systems and platforms!

My holy grails right now are 1. A new "Dangerous Waters", and 2. A new "Harpoon" (that actually works and isn't a buggy mess).

That said, I think that the game industry is only focused on "Mass Market" console games or apps for iPhones now. The tendancy now is to leave the PC's behind. PC game releases are getting rarer and rarer compared to console and smartphone games.

The other problem is, sadly, that I don't see us getting much in the way of "new blood" into the hardcore sim community. The younger people who we need to flow into the community are, for the most part, not attracted to games that are slow moving, and especially not ones where they have to read a manual to learn to play. Do you know how many people my Dangerous Waters manual has scared off from even giving the game a try? I'd love to give society the benefit of the doubt, but I just don't see the younger generation, that we need to bolster the community, having anywhere NEAR the attention span that's needed to play these games. I just don't see it.

This period that we're in now kind of feels like the way that the role playing game community dried up in the 90's. After a while, when I would go to a role playing game convention, it was just a bunch of us old guys there. There was a period where the younger people just weren't flowing in to keep it alive. Sadly, I see this happening with the hardcore sim community too. Most members are old and way outnumbers the new young blood.

In order to even get a company's interest in this, we're going to have to somehow attract new blood so that we can DEMONSTRATE our numbers and our interest.

So the question we should be asking is, "How can we attract younger gamers, and keep them engaged and interested?" and "How can we grow this community?"

The next best option would be some kind of "Kickstarter" campaign. But we're not going to get interest unless we show them that our community is large enough to maintain sales and is growing.

Maybe Subsim could become the next "Sonolysts"? I mean, we have plenty of REALLY smart people who know a LOT about modern naval stuff here. I'm sure that we have people who know how to make great game graphics here. Maybe Subsim should become a forum, AND a subsim creation collective?

I have a very similar thought of this in my mind for a long time now. I think that we won't get another sub sim game from a game studio (independent or publisher-bound) because we (submarine playing PC gamers) are a too small niche for them to start a financially risky project. After experienced SH3 to SH5, SHO isn't a sub sim gameplay-wise for me and I think for most of the other members too.
So the only solution is and will be: "develop our own sub sim".
There are just 3 options to do that:
1) just start the project (open-source or behind closed doors, doesn't matter)
3) start a crowd-funding project to hire a game studio
2) start a crowd-funding project to buy SH5 (what wouldn't work because of Ubi and SHO, so there are actually 2 options only)

Each option has pro and cons and I strongly believe that none option will work all alone. But i think that a good mix of 1) and 2) with the constant influence of our community and under the patronage of SUBSIM, which would for instance allow new members fill gaps where dev-team members quit, will work. Such a project should be SUBSIM-based because here all the flotillas and the submarine communities around the web are participating and can bring in man-power. SUBSIM-based would definitely bring in more support. Using a public part of the forum for reports of the development process, binding the community to the project and attract "new blood" and a closed area for the devs only would be working great (I experienced such a method back in my 9th-flotilla times, a german subsim forum, when we were doing SH3 mods and it worked very good).

Unfortunately I have to disappoint you Blacklight. A Uboat subsim should be the first goal to approach because with this theme we know the most technically. We have countless more resources for uboats, PTO submarines and the whole WW2 era than for modern warfare and modern naval weapon systems.
I have to admit that a cold war era and modern subs tempt me and one important feature of our self-made subsim game has to be a modular architecture where you can do campaign-based content and systems (DLL, scripts, assets, etc.) So it would be possible to create a cold-war campaign later on or parallel by enthusiasts.

As I mentioned above I have that thought of building an own submarine simulation for a long time now (to be honest since half year after SH3 was released). Over time there were similar threads like this one but the necessarity to stick more to this topic was never greater than now, because few years back SH4 and SH5 were in sight. But now there is nothing comparable anywhere, no projects like Danger from the Deep, no total conversation mods whatsoever. It's good to see that more people are interested in keeping our genre alive and start such forum threads.

I've backed and am following the development of Star Citizen by legendary Chris Roberts right now and over there I've got some pretty good ideas for how to do a SUBSIM sub sim.
And right here the very important question is raised: Will SUBSIM (Neal Stevens) support such a project?

Well,suggest you to have a look to Vehicle Simulator from Illan Pappini. Have quite lot of potential concerning Aeronaval stuff,and even AJ Weber has put a close eye into it in order to build new naval platforms ( surface+submarine ) for it.
Imagine we could improve the game with more effects,full combat capability and life detection/weapon systems for each platform.

Can be an interesting future :salute:

We need the submarine equivalent to this:

Project C.A.R.S. :
- http://www.wmdportal.com/projects/cars/

Community created, PC focused, best graphics possible, best physics possible, all the realism we can put into it, continuous community based feedback and testing.
And it would certainly be cheaper, without having to pay for official licenses (cars brands, tracks, in that case) and other things.

We have a tremendous mod community that always fixed SH games along the years with impressive results... completely transforming them and adding the features we always wanted with great detail and accuracy.

All this time we have been demanding those tons of things that Ubisoft doesn't want to deliver because is not profitable in their eyes. SHO is the ultimate chance for them to make money out of the franchise... they tried dumbing it down in "SHV" to make a few more bucks and they are now desperate to make it even more reachable to casual gamers and cash some real money. We all know how big companies work.

If we want something done the way we want, we might have to do it ourselves. Subsim community is still very large and I think it can be done. :salute: