What got you interested in WWII submarines?

[Mush Martin]

BBC "The War Years" as a child
and
Silent Service for 8 bit Nintendo
as a young adult

[ReallyDedPoet]

Living by the water for one ( near the Atlantic Ocean ) and Fast
Attack

[Armistead]

I loved subs from that first arcade game where ships passed before you like ducks and you had to time your shots.

Seems my first sub game was by Microprose.

[Red Devil]

Das Boot is probably the most authentic u boat film ever made, even down to the contempt the crew held for the 'political officer'. I have it still on VHS and on DVD.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by mikica1974

I have been playing for years 1-5 silent hunter I find the men who served on submarines as the günter prien're right heroes have been in the naval warfare and were every day exposed to death and who are my great heroes who are very brave in the naval war against the enemy in order to fight this because I inspire to the u-boot and their teams and have read many books about the u-boat war

Welcome Aboard

[neilbyrne]

Like most war babies of the forties, I watched a lot of WWII movies and TV growing up, Victory at Sea, Silent Service, etc. Read a lot also and have a considerable naval library.

What I really wanted tho was a great WWII surface battles game, but none has materialized.

I have my own surface game for miniatures which is quite extensive. After I retired from the USN, I had a consulting business for the following ten years. Three times I convinced one of my clients to send me to the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) the gaming industry's primo convention in LA. It's a gas, but the E-ticket runs $600+, mostly I found out to keep the curious kids out. In any case, I made several aquaintances in the industry there and pitched my game at them for computerization. Folks at E3 are unfailingly polite and forthcoming unlike most of the Defense Dept. conferences I've attended. Finally, one friend, a producer for Microsoft X-Box put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Neil, forget it. Naval games don't make enough money and the industry thinks they are more boring than C-Span."

So SH is the closest I can get and my model ships still come out of the display case and duke it out on the living room floor.

[TorpX]

Originally Posted by neilbyrne

Finally, one friend, a producer for Microsoft X-Box put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Neil, forget it. Naval games don't make enough money and the industry thinks they are more boring than C-Span."

So, nobody invests in naval sims because they aren't successful, and, they aren't successful because nobody invests in them?

[neilbyrne]

So, nobody invests in naval sims because they aren't successful, and, they aren't successful because nobody invests in them?

No I don't think that's what he meant. The last two of these SH games just barely broke even if that. So it's not worth the investment to them to then not make a profit or take a loss.

One of the lessons I drew from my involvement with the gaming folks was that the industry resembles other forms of entertainment to the extent that as Fred Allen once remarked, "Imitation is the sincerest form of television." If sitcoms are hits make more sitcoms; it's why there are so many sequels in movies.

The production costs for a top flight game are now so enormous, they take as few chances as possible.

Sid Meier is the Steven Spielberg of game designers. Last time I looked, something like 20% of the games in the hall of fame were his designs. I sat thru a speech of his once at E3 in which he lamented just this issue. Where's the innovation? Why can't we do something other than Call of Duty XXII and Assassin's Creed XI?

For almost all the formative years of the industry, they were hardware limited. The machines couldn't do what the designers envisioned, but Meier made the point in his speech that those days were over. The hardware was approaching movie quality graphics capability and now they were imagination limited. This hardware advance has actually worsened the imagination problem tho. Every year the bar gets ratcheted up to get even better graphics because the hardware can do it now which increases development costs which then increases risk avoidance strategies even more.

So if you are a development house like Creative Artists say and you are going in to pitch a new startup game genre or a revision of a dead line to a production company like Sega and that genre has a crappy sales record or none, you're in for heavy sledding. You're asking them to bet ~$25-50 million on your idea. At $50 or even $75 per box, that's a lot of boxes before they even make their nut back and profits start coming in. So you can see the issue with naval games. No one is going to invest the money required to mine the market based on uncertain interest and past poor performance.

We know that we'd accept less than current industry standards of graphics to get a decent game, but that's not sellable because the largest demographic slice that buys games is young males early teens to late twenties. Most of whom are enthralled with the coolness of graphic violence, have been unencumbered by the education system with historical curiosity and are uninterested in things that happen at the blinding speed of 10-15 knots.

[merc4ulfate]

Naval games don't make enough money and the industry thinks they are more boring than C-Span


You could not prove that with all the 688 fans there used to be on the internet playing multi-player submarine battles and co-ops against each other. I'd say Sonalyst disproved that myth.

These days there is a desire for realism.

Give them a multi-player online-realitime naval war game ... they will eat it up.

Lets see ... new russckie sub out now. Chinese and Iranians making diesel-electrics9which everyone knows is quieter than nukes), global instability, sea ice melting so now there is controversy over who owns what and a brand spanking new Russian naval base up there since the ice melted and opened up new water ways ... sounds like someone could make a mint with a new naval warfare strike package.

I can see the game working on a couple of fronts. Russian aggressors and Iranian militants along with Chinese paranoia and Japanese disputed territory.

Perhaps two sides:Aggressive militant
Russian obstinance

and

United States and the British new boat.

Nuke hunter killers against diesel-electrics.

ROE's can get a little dicey when your ordered not to fire unless fired upon even when you know that D/E boat is up to no good. You fire to soon and mission over game calls you out for being to aggressive. Hone your hunting skills waiting for the right moment to attack.

Might also switch back and forth from air ASW search (better hone your listening skills and arrays drop zones) and submarine command.

Maybe you have a D/E and there is a nice U.S. Carrier swimming up the Persian Gulf. Take it out ... but will the ASW take you out as well or maybe you have a Virginia Class nuke on your tail and you do not even know it. Open your tube doors and your dead in the water before you say ... allaggggrrrrhhhhhh as you drown from spraying sea water.

I think they would find a new generation of subsim fans with a game like that.

[neilbyrne]

You could not prove that with all the 688 fans there used to be on the internet playing multi-player submarine battles and co-ops against each other. I'd say Sonalyst disproved that myth.

You want this to be true and so do I. I'd love to see a good naval game, but you don't know what you're talking about.

Sonalyst didn't disprove the myth; they affirmed it. The partnership between Sonalyst and Janes that produced 688 and Dangerous Waters was terminated by Janes because, ta-dah, it wasn't profitable.

You may think you know a lot of folks who played 688, but do the math. A $25 million dollar game needs to sell 500,000 boxes before it's in the black. A $50 mil game, 1,000,000 boxes. SH4 sold 275,000 which was enough to barely break even in 2007-8 and wouldn't pass the so what test in today's markets.

Here are some stats for the big games of 2012-13.
Grand Theft Auto V - 34 million boxes
Call of Duty Black Ops II - 24.2 million
Battlefield 3 - 20 million
Call of Duty Ghosts-19 million
Diablo III-15 million

Starting to get the picture here? These are the kinds of return on investment numbers that the production companies are looking for. I couldn't even find sales stats on 688 or Dangerous Waters because they have never even placed in the top forty in any year since production. These were not popular games. 688I though was cited in the Guiness Book of World Records in 2000 as "the hardest video game in existence." Oh yeah, that's just a wonderful selling point for a production company marketing to Millennials with their short attention spans. Sega is going to absolutely juice in their jammies to give us a contract.

These days there is a desire for realism.

I don't know who told you that, but it wasn't a video game designer. The ones I've talked to personally tell me, "the folks who place realism above all, we have a name for them, grognards. We don't make games to satisfy grogs; there aren't enough of them to worry about." Now I'm with you; I place realism very high, but the industry doesn't.

They think the AI's job is to give the player a good scare and let him win.

Lets see ... new russckie sub out now. Chinese and Iranians making diesel-electrics9which everyone knows is quieter than nukes), global instability, sea ice melting so now there is controversy over who owns what and a brand spanking new Russian naval base up there since the ice melted and opened up new water ways ... sounds like someone could make a mint with a new naval warfare strike package.

"How many boxes did the last game of this genre sell?"

"275,000 but that was in 2007-8."

"Thanks for coming in; we'll be in touch."

Sure.

[Lexandro]

Neil is spot on in this respect, naval games cant muster the same returns on investment as a modern AAA title can. However, indie developers can fill some of the gap, though with less sim and more simplistic systems.

One another point though; The vast majority of people who cry out for "realism" are not actually for realism in gaming. Its actually people who want a game to be a specific way they themselves expect, who then make the claim its in the interest of the game due to "realism". But the reality is complexity = / = realism, and what some people want is overly complex systems just to satisfy an OCD style mentality. (PS not directed at you Merc, just a general point)

Its like someone saying; "This game needs more water effects for better realism!". Well for realism sake I could come around to someone's home while playing and chuck buckets of water around them every time the on-screen character gets wet. But almost all players do not want that level of realism.

Some people demand things that are simply non-starters, because to translate them in to a game would simply be zero "fun" for the majority of the intended market. Someone may find it fun to click eleventy jagillion menus in a game, but for everyone else its simply far far to tedious and not "fun". While fun is a subjective thing, it can be quantified in some respects for a collective group. Which is why people support teams in sports, or go to concerts and the like.

Unfortunately for the Naval sim game, its simply not popular enough.

Oh and Neil check out "Victory at Sea" on steam, its based on the tabletop naval combat game.

[Haukka81]

Originally Posted by Mush Martin

BBC "The War Years" as a child
and
Silent Service for 8 bit Nintendo
as a young adult

Silent Service here too in my nintendo 8bit , It was 1989, 90 or 91 i think when i first played it.

[neilbyrne]

Lexandro, thanks for the rec on Victory at Sea. I finally got around to looking at it on Steam. It doesn't appear from the reviews to be what I'm looking for tho.

The largest departure from reality appears to be the gunnery accuracy which is the mistake the surface games that I've played have made. Naval gunfire is the furthest thing from a death ray you can imagine. Hit probabilities at what you would normally think to be mean hitting ranges run in the single digits percentage wise.

This was one of the issues with the gaming folks when we talked a realistic WWII surface game. "No one wants to fire a half dozen broadsides and come away with one hit or none." One of their solutions was to have three modes of play. An arcade like GUI where the player aims himself and is rewarded with hits based on his hand/eye coordination similar to the way SH handles gunfire. The second mode would be probabilistics driven via a data base populated with actual stats where available and then a third mode which would allow the player to determine by what percentage increase he wanted to corrupt the second mode to feature more hits than would be historical. Of course we never got that far.

[cdpca]

Victory at Sea and Silent Service TV series in the 50's...kinda shows my age!

[Padi Muffdiver]

Simulations in general have always interested me. I've worked with every flight sim since the old 2D Jet for PC and the various console games. Before PC's, I spent a lot of time at the arcade playing the "feed me coins" torpedo game; I can't remember if it was Torpedo Alley or Up Periscope or something else. It was pure fun along with the Flying Tiger shooting game.

Submarine warfare grew on me after reading one of my Dad's books -- Run Silent Run Deep, and most likely seeing the movie. My dad served in the WWII pacific campaign in an Avenger Torpedo dive bomber for the 8th Air Force division of the USMC so I've always had interest in the Pacific campaign. The capper probably was when my dad took me through the WWII sub exhibit in Chicago (U-505). Even as a youngster and having cutout hatches, it was very cramped in there.

TV and movies have had an impact also. As a scuba diver, I read Shadow Divers then followed the TV show and series.