Hey Ubi, consider this...

[wetwarev7]

(I know, this isn't Ubisofts website, but they have very good ears here)
You know, when stores lose lots of money due to shoplifting, they usually bump the prices up on everything else a bit so the paying customers make up the difference. Not so great for the customer, but it is an established and accepted practice.

Considering that I've always thought any of the Silent Hunter games were worth more than I paid for them (once they were patched that is), why not have a less intrusive protection validation system and just charge a bit more based on how much you guesstimate your loss to be?

Let's do some math. I don't know the actual figures, so lets get a nice range. Lets start by saying the game cost $40. You sell 10,000 copies. That's $400,000. Let's say 1% get stolen, which would be 100 copies or $4000.

1% of 10,000 = 100 copies (at $40) = $4000 loss
10,000 - 100 = 9900 copies = $396,000 sales

Ok? I didn't misplace a decimal or anything did I? Good. Let's spread that $4000 loss over the other 9900 copies that got paid for.

$4000 / 9900 = $2.475

So what if the thefts were higher, such as 10%?
10% of 10,000 = 1000 copies (at $40) = $40,000 loss
10,000 - 1000 = 9000 copies (at $40) = $360,000 sales
$40,000 / 9000 copies = $4.44

What about 1,000,000 copies and 20% theft rate?
20% of 1,000,000 = 200,000 copies (at $40) = $8,000,000 loss
1,000,000 - 200,000 = 800,000 copies (at $40) = $32,000,000 sales
$8,000,000 / 800,000 copies = $10

So, you could have charged from $2.47 to $10 extra instead of having an always online requirement.

I would have paid more for SH5 than you currently charged to avoid the always online requirement. I'd have grumbled a bit, and maybe been a bit more vocal about the bugs, but I'd have paid it and would still be willing to buy your next product. And it just seems to make more sense to charge a bit more than to commit to the financial liability of running servers 24/7.



EULA: MyIdea is trademarked by me. If you use MyIdea, any products sold using MyIdea becomes my intellectual property rights and all profits must be handed over to me. Too late, you've already read MyIdea, you can't return it, you have to agree to this now or uninstall MyIdea from your brain. You may purchase the uninstaller program for MyIdea for $100, and yes, it does look quite similar to a hammer....

[janh]

Well, a rough estimate but it carries the idea. But now add the resale of software (which in contrast to a download is always a full lost sale), you may get quite different numbers. Just what is the rate (probability) at which people resell their games? If I consider myself, then I'd say I resell about 30% of my games after about 3 weeks (the bad eggs), and about another 30% after a good year or two.

Now, do the math. Surprise? What was it all about...answer yourself.

price (x/1-x), with x= sum or each of {stolen, pirated, resales etc.}

[Sonarman]

I dont know how true the figures are but in this month's PC Format magazine (UK) they quoted the ELSPA figures rellating to Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and they looked pretty bleak for the PC Platform...

PC Sales: 300,000
PC pirated downloads: 4,100,000
Console sales: 6,000,000
Console pirated downloads: 970,000

Call of Duty was selling at a ratio of 1 PC to 10 console titles

9.78 million games were downloaded illegally in Dec 2009 alone.

What percentage of SH5 copies are stolen is anyone's guess.

[theluckyone17]

If you consider the following off-topic, you might want to read it a second time.

My favorite band is Gaelic Storm (http://www.gaelicstorm.com). I have a $15 Rhapsody To Go subscription, which means I stream all the music I want, or download it directly to my MP3 player. I'm not sure how much of a cut GS gets from my subscription, but it's probably not much.

Last Thursday, they played Revolution Hall in Troy, NY. Troy's better days have come and gone, and it's been described as the armpit (or worse) of the country. And yet, GS still came and played. I got off work early, camped outside the doors for an hour or so until they opened, paid $23 in cash for my ticket. Grabbed an Oatmeal Stout from the bar ($4.50, locally brewed by Brown... good stuff, by the way) and waited in the standing room only for an hour or so.

GS got up on stage, played their hearts out, ten feet from me. It was AWESOME. :rock: For a couple hours, I sang, screamed, stomped, clamped, and did the "Standing Darcy Donkey Run" with the rest of the crowd. All that hooting and hollering tore my voice out, but it was worth it.

Afterwards, I spent $25 on a t-shirt. Their new album comes out in August, and I will spend $15 on it, regardless of my Rhapsody subscription or not. Rumor is, they might hit the Irish Festival in Altamont later this summer. If they do, I'll be there. I'll buy another t-shirt (maybe two).

For those of you who don't still don't get it after reading it twice through, GS gets my hard earned cash. It's not just about the music... I already get that through Rhapsody. It's because they've earned my fanaticism... if that's a word. They're great live entertainers. They provide additional products alongside their music that can't be pirated (haven't heard of someone on the black market selling GS t-shirts, at least :shifty:).

So c'mon, Ubi... there's a whole forum full of fanatics that love SH. That should be evident. Step up to the plate, and find some way to separate us from our cash in a way that makes me feel like GS does... like you earned it!

[Takao]

theluckyone17,

Ubi has come up with a way to separate you from your cash
Its called Silent Hunter V!

1/2 a game for full price! No Type II, IX, or XXI. Game ends in'43, when the war ended in '45. Its SHIII with prettier graphics, but a lot less content, Big deal...

If I wanted to play a Type VII only game I'd play "Danger from the Deep", and its free!

That's why I voted with my wallet. As much as I enjoyed SHIII and SHIV, I have no motivation to play SHV.



wetwarev7,

Average retail markup is about 50%. So if local big box store is charging $50 for a hard copy, Ubi is probably only seeing $25 or less. Having helped run a gaming store, long since defunct, we would get games from a wholesaler for, say $20, then sell them for $40. So, if the wholesaler was marking up the games at 50%, then the gaming company would be selling them at $10. Although, i don't know what wholesalers mark up their product at. Also, I don't know if the big box stores are going through a wholesaler or dealing directly with Ubi. Still, I don't see Ubi getting $40 as their cut on a game. Finally, I don't know what the business model is for downloaded games. How is that cash spread around, seeing that it is just data being transferred, with no real hard copy to produce, box, and ship. You would think downloaded games would be much cheaper than they are, since your cutting out the middle man and there is little overhead concerning production costs of a product.

[kylania]

They provide additional products alongside their music that can't be pirated (haven't heard of someone on the black market selling GS t-shirts, at least :shifty:).

That's really the key to fighting piracy of games, music, movies and whatever else. Give us something that MAKES us want to buy a product and we will. Treat us like criminals and constantly slap us in the face with "don't pirate this or else" warnings and restrictions and we won't WANT to buy the product.

If every game came with a nice solid quality and accurate manual instead of a slip of paper telling us to read the childishly horrific PDF, real cloth maps instead of tatters of string loosely glued together, laminated keymaps instead of tissue paper sheets and Quality Tested software instead of crunched out bug fests I bet it would do more for fighting piracy than OSP ever could hope to.

[Placoderm]

That's really the key to fighting piracy of games, music, movies and whatever else. Give us something that MAKES us want to buy a product and we will. Treat us like criminals and constantly slap us in the face with "don't pirate this or else" warnings and restrictions and we won't WANT to buy the product.

If every game came with a nice solid quality and accurate manual instead of a slip of paper telling us to read the childishly horrific PDF, real cloth maps instead of tatters of string loosely glued together, laminated keymaps instead of tissue paper sheets and Quality Tested software instead of crunched out bug fests I bet it would do more for fighting piracy than OSP ever could hope to.

:sign_yeah::agree:I Couldn't have said it better, Kylania! Thats one of the things that has continued to bug me about new releases...the total lack of any tangilbe hard goods in the package. I have literally hundreds of PC games going back to the late 1980's, and the one thing that really sticks out is the huge manuals, maps, and just plain cool stuff that came with them. Stuff you could'nt pirate...Stuff that makes me still keep the games to this day, even though I can no longer play them.

I have printed ship recognition manuals with a leather-like binding that served as copy-protection for one of them...I think it was Silent Hunter 1 or Silent Service 2 (but I am too lazy to check right now). I still use the fold-out KM map from SH3 and sometimes just for kicks I pull out the hard-back 3-ring binder that made both the manual and the packaging for Falcon 4.0.

Publishers like Ubisoft and EA Games have made it easier for the pirates by eliminating the tangible treasures that used to be considered standard in older titles...and in doing so have really hurt both the consumer and more importantly, themselves.

Pirates would generally never bother to re-print a nice thick manual...but give them a digital PDF 'manual' and "click", it's done and distributed in an instant. I really no longer fault the pirates...I fault the publishers who, out of their own laziness and greed have made the pirates job easier...and the honest consumers reward ever smaller and harder to find.



:salute:

[daft]

While I do love the printed, thick manual and other stuff, increased production values is probably not a viable option for the PC platform at the moment. The sales aren't great and increased production values will simply be to costly and in the end it would be the consumer that has to carry the burden with a sharp increase in sales price. I doubt that would stimulate the PC market to any great extent. Unfortunately.

The publishers seem to struggle with finding a proper way of dealing with the PC market. The most obvious choice is to spend a lot fighting piracy, but as we all no, a illegally downloaded copy does not equate to a lost sale. The PC consumer base is extremely sensitive to any sort of sales control forced upon them by the supplier, so I struggle to see how this deadlock will be resolved. I doubt we'll see the death of PC gaming any time soon. Maybe the answer lies in producing sim friendly peripherals to consoles so hardcore sims become a viable solution for the console market. But I sincerely doubt there is much support for such a scheme in the sim community or the marketing department at the publishers.

[Morpheus]

EULA: MyIdea is trademarked by me. If you use MyIdea, any products sold using MyIdea becomes my intellectual property rights and all profits must be handed over to me. Too late, you've already read MyIdea, you can't return it, you have to agree to this now or uninstall MyIdea from your brain. You may purchase the uninstaller program for MyIdea for $100, and yes, it does look quite similar to a hammer....
Damn, where is the uninstall button? :har:

[wetwarev7]

I dont know how true the figures are but in this month's PC Format magazine (UK) they quoted the ELSPA figures rellating to Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and they looked pretty bleak for the PC Platform...

PC Sales: 300,000
PC pirated downloads: 4,100,000
Console sales: 6,000,000
Console pirated downloads: 970,000


I really, really doubt those figures are accurate. According to those numbers, that would mean 93.2% of all PC copies are pirated. That just doesn't sound very plausible.

I've said it in other threads, I'd have more sympathy for the game companies if I thought their 'figures' were accurate, or even just unbiased. I buy my games, every one of them, and I really don't think I'm in the minority.

[janh]

PC Sales: 300,000
PC pirated downloads: 4,100,000
Console sales: 6,000,000
Console pirated downloads: 970,000

Regarding such "assessments", there is a very recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which provides and analysis questions for Congress.

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10423.pdf

It is a long document, but even if you only read introduction, conclusions and browse the headlines, you'll find that they conclude that the loss estimates made by MPAA etc. are bare any basis. Their data sources are not reproducible, and their employed analysis methods lack. For example one very trivial statement that they characterize is that every pirated download equals a lost sale, which is just by reason evidently not true (in contrast to a resell!). So, this is official evidence that you can smoke above numbers... ;-)
I assume that piracy estimates in the 10-30% of sales volume range would be more accurate, but I would be curious if someone could try an experiment to show that even if all torrents went away today, the sales wouldn't increase much in the next year, two, three... But I assume that reselling software is a big thorn in the eye of software companies. I kind of can understand that, and I guess if I were the boss, I'd probably try to close that down too unless customers would start to rebel against it... But that doesn't make it any better!

[kylania]

I really, really doubt those figures are accurate. According to those numbers, that would mean 93.2% of all PC copies are pirated. That just doesn't sound very plausible.

Plausible or not, it's what they'd like you to believe (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars).

[janh]

Plausible or not, it's what they'd like you to believe (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars).

Nice summary of the GAO article. Hopefully time for alledgements is passing an industries start to take a closer look at what they are doing. For most of them sales have dramatically increased in the last 5 years (with exception of the economic downturn year 2009), also Ubisofts. Technically they don't have anything to complain, except if they'd want to rip of customer even worse than now.

I agree that if they want(ed) to fare better (and see piracy decrease), then they should start delivering valuable products again. No "beta releases" with serious patching already expected in the first month, add manuals that are interesting, informative and even educative again, and add some nice gimmicks like a good KM-Map. Add new features to your software, instead of just polishing the graphics and thereby remove older features that people are used to from predecessors (such as other sub types, 43-45, etc). Advancement means to deliver more, not less! Or why could you expect anyone to buy a new edition of a book that lost half the original chapters???

I think software industry is whining on a very high (success) level, and it is doing so because in the past decade it hasn't be questioned, criticized or "shaken up". They have experiments with a lot of "nasty" things on customers, and they have gotten through with it. So, they learned that they can go even further...

PS. What really annoys me is actually not that they keep delivering "sub par" quality software for a quality software price. That's their problem, and they can do so as long as they can find someone to buy it. I won't, but enough people will fall for it. But if their sales suffer from that, then they ought to attribute it to the right reason (themselves), and not just point fingers at some easily attackable entity ("pirates", "used sellers",...). And then even have the loyal customers suffer this nonsense.

And I really hope we'll soon see a "2nd SHV release date" -- the no-DRM release...

[rocker_lx]

I don't like the new online DRM, but I wish they hadn't cracked it (even partially).

So you could clearly see on the sales figures if they go up or not, of course you would need to compare during several game releases. Piracy ratio between a "call of duty" and a "silent hunter" game a probably quite different. Of course you can not compare with sales of older titles, as current economic situation also influences sales.

[Phantom Mark]

The crazy thing is that I bet at least 10-20% of the pirated downloads of SH5 are actually for people who have bought and paid for the game.........someone like myself who is considering it who has no internet connection during the working week because I work away from home.....thats when things start to get crazy.

[wetwarev7]

If every game came with a nice solid quality and accurate manual instead of a slip of paper telling us to read the childishly horrific PDF, real cloth maps instead of tatters of string loosely glued together, laminated keymaps instead of tissue paper sheets and Quality Tested software instead of crunched out bug fests I bet it would do more for fighting piracy than OSP ever could hope to.

I think this is a really good point. One of the reasons I buy games a the store instead of online is to get a paper manual. Or at least it used to be. I can't remember the last time I got an actual paper manual that discussed the game.

Anyways, without little items like a real map or paper manual, there is less incentive to buy a legit copy at a store. The reason I think this is important is that buying and downloading a game online is really only a click away from just downloading the game (without the buying).

If I were a software company, I'd stick with store sales only and include things like paper manuals, maps and pewter figurines that can't be easily transmitted over the internet.

Heck, remember when you used to have to pull up a certain page from the manual and type in word three, from paragraph four? Why not include a better version of that that can't be scanned, like a decoder ring or something?

Or heck, why not a freakin USB hardware key?

<Sigh>:damn::damn::damn:

[jason210]

I think this is a really good point. One of the reasons I buy games a the store instead of online is to get a paper manual. Or at least it used to be. I can't remember the last time I got an actual paper manual that discussed the game.

Those days are long gone! You only need to walk into GAME - you'll find just two stacks of shelves with PC games - and half of that is for World of Warcraft stuff. The rest of the place is full of Wii ****.

The game on CD DVD is a thing of the past - it's all DLC and the big corporations are just waiting for the Internet badnwidth to catch up so they can centralise it more - rather like digital TV companies do.

[kylania]

I think this is a really good point. One of the reasons I buy games a the store instead of online is to get a paper manual. Or at least it used to be. I can't remember the last time I got an actual paper manual that discussed the game.

It's like Ubisoft is reading our minds and totally ignoring what we want...

Ubisoft Doing Away with Printed Manuals (http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/63373)

Ubisoft's digital game manuals will provide multiple benefits for the player and the environment. Including the game manual directly in the game will offer the player easier and more intuitive access to game information, as well as allow Ubisoft to provide gamers with a more robust manual. (emphasis added)

[janh]

It's like Ubisoft is reading our minds and totally ignoring what we want...

Ubisoft Doing Away with Printed Manuals (http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/63373)

(emphasis added)

Good find! If they cut the price of their games by 50% in return then it would be fine, but for >=40$ is still have to think back to my old Aces of the Pacific, Aces of the Deep or Jane's Longbow printed manuals with 100s of informative and educative pages...

I think they are presently pressing forward quite fast to get to a pay-as-play games basis with monthly user fee per title or so. Then you'd already have conditioned your customers to purely digital manuals. I'd be really surprised if my notion is wrong here and it is just to save cost, or even if it were really the s*t they keep telling people... robust... LOL

[Phantom Mark]

Those days are long gone! You only need to walk into GAME - you'll find just two stacks of shelves with PC games - and half of that is for World of Warcraft stuff. The rest of the place is full of Wii ****.

The game on CD DVD is a thing of the past - it's all DLC and the big corporations are just waiting for the Internet badnwidth to catch up so they can centralise it more - rather like digital TV companies do.


As I am sure you know this is nothing new, PC titles have been thin on the ground for the past 3 years in all the major UK outlets, in fact I would suggest the past 5 years has shown a very significant downturn in on the shelf titles, PC world is pretty much the largest stockists of FSX addons now :nope:

[mikeydredd]

Entirely agree with the overall tone of the last posts.

It surely is self-evident to any business that you provide your customers with a service/product that

A: is what they want, and

B: is good value for money.

Can we just remind ourselves that this game, including the first patch, was cracked on DAY ONE.

This version of DRM is responsible for a lot of things but it stopped the "pirates" for NOT ONE MINUTE.

Are UbiSoft really that stupid?

Draw your own conclusions. . .

Dredd :arrgh!:

[daft]

Entirely agree with the overall tone of the last posts.

It surely is self-evident to any business that you provide your customers with a service/product that

A: is what they want, and

B: is good value for money.

Can we just remind ourselves that this game, including the first patch, was cracked on DAY ONE.

This version of DRM is responsible for a lot of things but it stopped the "pirates" for NOT ONE MINUTE.

Are UbiSoft really that stupid?

Draw your own conclusions. . .

Dredd :arrgh!:

Was the game leaked and cracked before the retail date?

[kylania]

Was the game leaked and cracked before the retail date?

Yup, a few days before. It was just the game though, not the campaign missions. It only took a few weeks before they had a fully playable campaign as well.

[Fincuan]

Was the game leaked and cracked before the retail date?

IIRC it took about 48 hours before the cracked version appeared, which is pretty well by today's standards(normally the cracked versions are out before the game itself), but not quite enough to warrant calling the protection system succesful.

[IanC]

but not quite enough to warrant calling the protection system succesful.

:lol:

[wetwarev7]

Those days are long gone! You only need to walk into GAME - you'll find just two stacks of shelves with PC games - and half of that is for World of Warcraft stuff. The rest of the place is full of Wii ****.


You need to stop going there for PC games. Try Bestbuy. It's still only 2 shelves, but the shelves are bigger....
:rotfl2:

Seriously though, which way will the trend end up when all is said and done? On the one hand, you've got corporate suits that think using the internet for everything is the 'wave of the future' and therefore MUST be the answer, and on the other you've got reality with hardware keys and stuff the customer wants to pay for. Hopefully the current trend will reverse itself sooner rather than later, as most trends tend to do.

If I may misquote a wise old sage with a bald head and yellow skin:
Ah, the Internet. The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems...

[ERPP8]

(I know, this isn't Ubisofts website, but they have very good ears here)
You know, when stores lose lots of money due to shoplifting, they usually bump the prices up on everything else a bit so the paying customers make up the difference. Not so great for the customer, but it is an established and accepted practice.

Considering that I've always thought any of the Silent Hunter games were worth more than I paid for them (once they were patched that is), why not have a less intrusive protection validation system and just charge a bit more based on how much you guesstimate your loss to be?

Let's do some math. I don't know the actual figures, so lets get a nice range. Lets start by saying the game cost $40. You sell 10,000 copies. That's $400,000. Let's say 1% get stolen, which would be 100 copies or $4000.

1% of 10,000 = 100 copies (at $40) = $4000 loss
10,000 - 100 = 9900 copies = $396,000 sales

Ok? I didn't misplace a decimal or anything did I? Good. Let's spread that $4000 loss over the other 9900 copies that got paid for.

$4000 / 9900 = $2.475

So what if the thefts were higher, such as 10%?
10% of 10,000 = 1000 copies (at $40) = $40,000 loss
10,000 - 1000 = 9000 copies (at $40) = $360,000 sales
$40,000 / 9000 copies = $4.44

What about 1,000,000 copies and 20% theft rate?
20% of 1,000,000 = 200,000 copies (at $40) = $8,000,000 loss
1,000,000 - 200,000 = 800,000 copies (at $40) = $32,000,000 sales
$8,000,000 / 800,000 copies = $10

So, you could have charged from $2.47 to $10 extra instead of having an always online requirement.

I would have paid more for SH5 than you currently charged to avoid the always online requirement. I'd have grumbled a bit, and maybe been a bit more vocal about the bugs, but I'd have paid it and would still be willing to buy your next product. And it just seems to make more sense to charge a bit more than to commit to the financial liability of running servers 24/7.



EULA: MyIdea is trademarked by me. If you use MyIdea, any products sold using MyIdea becomes my intellectual property rights and all profits must be handed over to me. Too late, you've already read MyIdea, you can't return it, you have to agree to this now or uninstall MyIdea from your brain. You may purchase the uninstaller program for MyIdea for $100, and yes, it does look quite similar to a hammer....


Nerd




Just kidding:rotfl2:

[Adriatico]

After AC2... the Settlers are also "DRM liberated" these days...
maybe it's time for Ubi to stop this mockery and apologize to it's real clients base... while black market is having fun and enjoying AC2 and Settlers.
:o

[Lord Justice]

Nerd




Just kidding:rotfl2::hmmm: As you very justly thought!!

[Fire_Spy]

Sooo Ubisoft is doing away with manuals to provide us with more robust manuals??:damn:

I miss the days of buying a game and getting a Manual to rival the size of "The lord of the Rings" novels. I still have old manuals that I like to read just for the extra content they have in them.. :salute:

[SilentOtto]

I think time is of the essence in this issues which you comment and in which I agree. And Ubi (again?) seems to have missed completely the point that us, their sub-gaming hardcore community are PATIENT, god, we have waited years for their releases, bought their games when we knew they were mostly unfinished, but we want them to go on developing this stuff we love, don't we?

WHY don't they understand, that some more time for developing, some more time (and care!!!) for good printed manuals, and maps, even if it has to be with a higher retail price (most of us have paid 40-60€ or $ or whatever for other releases, they come every two years so they are affordable for most of us) well, all that would make us buy their games. Kids who play shoot'em ups are NOT their public for this series. But they don't get the idea. Offer us all that stuff, offer us an amazing online league (of course there you can set all your anti-piracy controls on and whatnot, as for updates, etc), offer us things that make us want to pay, as you fellows have said.

I own every SH release (except SH5!), I got the collector's edition for SH4, I did all I could to enjoy the series, and also to help the company. But for me this is too much. I don't play SH4 much, since sadly (for me) it has never had the &quot;edge&quot; interest or fun I had with SH3, or even with SH2 and all its early problems...

I feel a sim-orphan now. It's time to take a look again at SH4 mods, and also at some the free projects that are around, slowly growing... Of course those will take long to complete, and are a big work, but there is no EVILNESS behind them.

So for me, SH series end here. What a pity companies are only lead by the ideal of making money (and lately, sucking all the information they can from their users!)

NOTE: This was my rant, and I feel I have the right to express it! :P

[kylania]

NOTE: This was my rant, and I feel I have the right to express it! :P

But... but.. your name is SilentOtto! :O::har:

[SilentOtto]

¬¬ it is!

[trotter]

Sigh...the old Falcon 4 manual.

http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/23/0,1425,i=237874,00.jpg


Remember the days when you would spend almost a week reading the manual before playing the game?

I understand this is not cost-feasible any longer, all I ask is that developers stop claiming that pdf manuals and materials will be robust or immersive. Stop it, it's insulting.

[kylania]

I understand this is not cost-feasible any longer, all I ask is that developers stop claiming that pdf manuals and materials will be robust or immersive. Stop it, it's insulting.

I agree (http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/1121062387/m/4531095458). :DL

[daft]

IIRC it took about 48 hours before the cracked version appeared, which is pretty well by today's standards(normally the cracked versions are out before the game itself), but not quite enough to warrant calling the protection system succesful.

That is in fact much, much better than I thought. Whaddayaknow, the DRM actually did its job then (technically at least). :)

[mikeydredd]

I remember buying the original Gunship by MicroProse for my Atari ST in, I think, 1989 for 20 quid.

I began to read the manual in the car as my girlfriend had to go off and do girlie stuff. When she came back after about an hour she asked me what my new "game" was like.

I said the manual alone was worth the asking price, let alone the game!

Imagine being able to say the same about SH5 . . .

Dredd :arrgh!:

[Powerthighs]

I remember buying the original Gunship by MicroProse for my Atari ST in, I think, 1989 for 20 quid.

That's awesome, I got it for Commodore 64 and the manual was beautiful. I would spend hours reading it from cover to cover (including the tech specs of all the enemy equipment) before popping it in to play. The anticipation of playing it was almost better than the game itself.

[janh]

Sigh...the old Falcon 4 manual.

http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/23/0,1425,i=237874,00.jpg



So beautiful...Gorgeous, what great memories. I still own pretty much all the manuals of the older games I have bought since the 90s. The disks are already gone (and backed up on my HD -- yeah you could do that before DRM!:D That was before the "greedy companies age"...). And some of them really do look like very solid books, like the manual to "Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe", or many others. That alone was a big point for me to keep buying games.

But Ubisoft really gets it right with the annouced move away from paper... :damn: Someone in their marketing department really knows customer wishes! Next they declare that since people don't really like reading online manuals, and since baloon tips in the games need to be concise, also the features and functionality of games must be simplified. And in two year they realise, that they can save a lot of energy and help the environment if they only sell licenses to "imaginary games"... How far has this strayed from the right path already??? I have the impression that the days of Ubisoft in the PC market targeting a grown up, educated customership may be over within the next two years... After that it will be dumbed down console type games, and baby toys...

[daft]

Am I the only one that remembers that Falcon 4 was rushed to market full of bugs (and was a bit poo to begin with), got a few patches before the dev team were laid off and then had to rely on modders to really shine. That was back in -98 or -99. :|\\

[mikeydredd]

You're dead right - it was Christmas '98.

I bought Falcon 4.0 on the way to hospital knowing that it had a huge manual that I would be able to read there while recovering. (Did the same thing with Falcon 3.0 as well!)

When I got out I installed and it was a load of bollux.

Deleted it and didn't re - install untill patch 1.08.

Still playing FreeFalcon 5.3 - and reading that manual!

Dredd:arrgh!:

[The General]

Why not... just charge a bit more?Um, I paid the full asking price on the day of release, which was the equivalent to roughly 50.00 US Dollars. Two or three weeks later, Amazon was practically paying us to take a copy! This does not bode well for the Silent Hunter franchise or any other PC title. Even though there are more PC's in the world than all the Consoles combined, there seems to be a lull in production and support of PC games lately. I guess the Console market is just killing it.

[speedbird]

Guys, chill...

I was the one moaning about SH5 this and SH5 that earlier on, but now I have seen the light...

This game is been developed as we speak by you modders!
If the patch doesn't arrive for another year the game is already 500 per cent better than it was last week because of... yes, YOU!

My only hope is that somebody rings devs and says: "Hey boys! Look
what this crowd have done with our game!! What are we gonna do about patch #3? It's already done!?!?

[Fincuan]

Am I the only one that remembers that Falcon 4 was rushed to market full of bugs (and was a bit poo to begin with), got a few patches before the dev team were laid off and then had to rely on modders to really shine. That was back in -98 or -99. :|\\

That is entirely true, but it still had a kick-ass manual :yeah:

In the case of F4 the dev-team was by the way disbanded pretty soon after release and before patch 1.08 was out, but as a parting gift they pushed out the patch working on their own time. Coincidentally the source-code for the game was also leaked pretty soon afterwards, allowing modding to levels we can only dream of in the SH, and pretty much any other, series of games. The F4 modding scene would be very different today without that "leak".

[janh]

In the case of F4 the dev-team was by the way disbanded pretty soon after release and before patch 1.08 was out, but as a parting gift they pushed out the patch working on their own time. Coincidentally the source-code for the game was also leaked pretty soon afterwards, allowing modding to levels we can only dream of in the SH, and pretty much any other, series of games. The F4 modding scene would be very different today without that "leak".

Yeah, without that parting gift I would have learned my first lesson not to buy games anymore before the last patch is announced, but luckily at that time it went by well. It is actually the only time that I can recall having bought a product that was that buggy as they are typically nowadays. But I honestly have changed my buying habits since the the rise of internet and "customer-side beta-testing" a lot and keep watching the forums of new games for months before I decide to buy.

But one thought I had here is: If it obviously takes modders to convert the SHV into a submarine simulation, then Ubi could be consequent in that they release the sources, too, and have the modders be able to do their worked properly and not patch it together...
Is the Falcon 4 source code then public by now? I'd be too curious to check how they did it...

[Faamecanic]

The crazy thing is that I bet at least 10-20% of the pirated downloads of SH5 are actually for people who have bought and paid for the game.........someone like myself who is considering it who has no internet connection during the working week because I work away from home.....thats when things start to get crazy.

Or from people getting tired of getting screwed by the game companies releasing crap products riddled with bugs.

I have ALWAYS been against Piracy, and ALWAYS pay for my games....

But I did download a....umm...Trial copy of a rather famous football coach game to see if it was as screwed up as the forum posters were saying before plunking down $50 on it. And it was.... (example: for no reason at all the QB would turn around and throw the football the wrong way) so I didnt buy it.

I have ALWAYS bought SH series (even after getting burned with SH3).... then burned with SH4...you think I would have learned. But I bought SH5 to support the franchise... Im regretting that now.

[Kptlt_Lynch]

My copy of SH5 is legit, but due to DRM dropout issues (and I have cable for crying out loud) my game is DRM free. Only happened at peak hours, but annoying as hell when ya get a friggin notice every 5min and the game freezes up.

DRM has got to be killing sales for UBI.

[Fincuan]

Is the Falcon 4 source code then public by now? I'd be too curious to check how they did it...

No, at least not legally. As far as I know all legal rights to the title and the code are owned by Lead Pursuit, the makers of Allied Force and the eternal work-in-progress Falcon 5.

[Bilge_Rat]

Its a long story, the source code to falcon 1.07 was leaked and worked on semi-legally for many years. Microprose tried to shut them down, never successfully.

Another group of modders were working on the outside on the 1.08 game.

eventually both group of modders worked out a deal with the legal owner of the software which lead to the creation of Lead Pursuit. LP cleaned up the code and released F4AF in 2005.

F4 when it was a released in 1999 was a buggy mess with near-constant CTDs. By comparaison, SH5 looks like a 100% complete game...:ping:

I also have the F4 binder pictured above in my bookcase. It came with the special edition.

[daft]

This thread made me dig out the Falcon 4.0 manual again. I've sort of given up on flight sims though. Might get back into it once we get a proper house with a real gaming room. :) The manual really is awesome.

[IanC]

This thread made me dig out the Falcon 4.0 manual again. I've sort of given up on flight sims though. Might get back into it once we get a proper house with a real gaming room. :) The manual really is awesome.

OT: You know what got me back into flight sims, those Third Wire "lite" flight sims. Wings over Europe, Wings over Vietnam, First Eagles, they're a blast to play. Hundreds of mods for them too, just mentioning it in case somebody doesn't know about them.

[Commie]

Sigh...the old Falcon 4 manual.

http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/23/0,1425,i=237874,00.jpg


Remember the days when you would spend almost a week reading the manual before playing the game?

I understand this is not cost-feasible any longer, all I ask is that developers stop claiming that pdf manuals and materials will be robust or immersive. Stop it, it's insulting.


Hehe. I have this too!

I disagree that it wouldn't be cost effective. Companies make collectors' editions of games with more fancy and costlier (but more useless) trinkets included for not much more than a basic version of the game so why couldn't they make a decent manual instead which would be cheaper anyway? The squadron commander's edition of Falcon with the binder was just 10 dollars more than the normal one which had a huge manual anyway, so it seems that costs of production weren't excessive.

Relatively it was just as expensive, even more so to make a big game in 1991 than now. Just read about Origin and their problems with packing a game box with a dozen diskettes which led to them losing their independence as their ambitions overtook the technology(cost effective cd-roms weren't available).

Greed killed off the simulation companies more than a lack of income. All those mergers in the 90's where one company would pay excessively for a brand name and then decide to trim staff and quality in order to get a quick return on their investment are the reason sims died and not because people weren't buying them! If UBI still made enough from SH3 and SH4 in this day and age with smaller sales than Microprose and the rest then it shows that the market isn't dead for sims(and sub sims are arguably more niche than flight sims).

[jason210]

This thread made me dig out the Falcon 4.0 manual again. I've sort of given up on flight sims though. Might get back into it once we get a proper house with a real gaming room. :) The manual really is awesome.

If you do, take a look at x-plane. I've been keeping my eye on this sim for years and it looks like it will be the sim of the future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cWQoFqxNa4&playnext_from=TL&videos=FPnse-SJhvQ