<Edit - Gizzmoe>

I buy all my games and got SH3 cause it's good.

DANG !
 

Man!

I paid 40 Bucks for my copy of SH III !

I wanna Shop where you guys go !


Charlie

Yes, gpstore (gameplanet) in New Zealand SH3 is on the Top 10 selling list, no other subsim has ever made it on the Top 10 selling list in NZ, AOTD came close. But alot of gamers that have never played a sub game are buying SH3.

Well I would have bought SH3 on the day of release, as it was I waitied 6 months before I was sure I could play the game Starforce free before buying it. By then it was a third of it's original price, so from my POV Starforce harmed it's sales figures, not helped.

I do not believe that pirates buy the games they cannot crack.

-----------------------
**Good, then they don't play games they cannot crack, either. --NS***

Ok Ok I have to play devils advocate here.......I did have trouble with 2 games that have starforce SH3 and X3. I went to the starforce home page and the forums and posted my problem running the games (both were posted at seperate times (months apart) and on both counts I recieved a reply from the staff that fixed both problems within 2 hours of posting.

So I may not like starforce but I can not jump on the "bashing wagon".

Vonotto, glad you're not having problems. But be careful, S-F can and maybe will bite you in the future when you least expect it. As it did to me after 8 months with my dvd burner.

Search and you'll find more about it.... here in this section and in the General Topics section.

I wouldn't read too much in what Starforce says in it's forums, they're only blowing their own horn to make themselves look good. Believe me, they're not good at all.

Don't get me wrong... I love SHIII. It's just the "malware" that UBI used to protect it that makes most of us mad as all h*ll.

The above link by the thread starter is coming from a company that is obvious biased and trying to take credit for a game just because they provided copy protection for it.

Silent Hunter III although a great game in some peoples minds did not fair that well.
Take a look at this article: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/fun.gam...bargain.games/

As far as the copy protection is concerned, the game was cracked shortly after it's release. Although not many cared about that as we purchased the game.
You may ask yourself if the game would have sold better if not for all the problems people experienced with it.

All this is speculation of course, and I would not be that proud of the units sold if I was the publisher.

LucasArts, for example, says a hit computer game sells between 200,000 and 350,000 units, Silent Hunter III did not sell that many only 26,600. So you be the judge.

U-4053 wrote $40 bucks is the same as £20 UK for once we are paying a price as low as you! Although if you want a bargain I beleve Amazon UK now has it for £10 if you fancy a second copy be sure to use Neal's Amazon UK link in the Subsim Store so he makes a little commission off it.


Soulcommander wrote:
The world is bigger than the USA! I believe that figure only pertains to the USA, in Germany Silent Hunter III was top of the charts for quite some time and also was number 3 in the UK charts, unheard of for a subsim. Now we hear from kiwi_2005 it is a top game in New Zealand and even in Russia. It seems that the Americans are the ones letting the side down go immediately to the Subsim store and buy more copies!!!

I agree with your point but that article is 8 months old. I would like to see an up to date listing that takes into account the profits/units sold after the price drop. A large volume of units, all be it at a lower price, still make profits. As Sonarman pointed out, the CNN figures are likely to be US based but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise!. The overall picture can't be too bad if SH4 has been given the green light...

Wozza wrote
Yes, exactly there is no way Ubi would make SH4 based only on 26600 units sold of SH3 look at the math:

outlay
20 man devteam at £15000 each (conservative estimate)
x 2 years dev time = £405000

income
26600 units sold at an average of £25 each =£650000
- retailers cut about 45% (probably more)= -£292000

That's a loss of £47000 before we even start talking about marketing advertising and thats without giving the project managers and lead designers any extra cash etc.

Hardly an inspiration to start work on SH4 or label the game as one of the brands" which have contributed to our success this year and will continue to do so in years to come" as Ubi said in their 2005 annual report.

Thats what is sad about the June date. The game wasn't out but just a few months and went into the bargan bin that fast.

As you well know games that are emerging are normally bought up straight away and sales sky rocket. Not so with SHIII.

Sad indeed. It hit the bargain bin very quickly.

Yes Soulcommander I'd blame UBi's marketing machine for that, not much advertising anywhere. Also it may have been a better business decison to do a Pacific Theater sim first, then the Atlantic theatre in SH4 as a lot more people in the US purchased the original Pacific set SH rather than it's sequels.

There is also a big opportunity for UBI if they do a Japanese localised version of SH4 or include Japanese playable vessels. - Japan's population is equivalent to 43% of the US population! and to my knowledge there has never been a true subsim released in the Japanese language which could equate to a huge number of sales.

Absolute nonsense.

I didn't get my copy until June and, trust me, I paid the full price.

It is still available, on shelves, at EB and a number of other outlets for full price. The other thing I noted was when I finally got around to purchasing Dangerous Waters the clerk at the store recommended me to Silent hunter 3, and he was very knowledgeable on it.

As well, for the first few months UbiSoft was hard pressed to keep up with the demand. The UbiSoft store sold out of their stock the first week, and there was a three week delay getting new product into the stores and available online. Given the lead time for getting articles published that puts you pretty close to the date this article was written.

This stupid article has been circulating for almost a year now, and is a perfect example on irresponsible and inaccurate reporting.

Several months ago a Ubisoft representative stated that they were very happy with the sales of Silent Hunter, but somehow that never gets repeated. Just that same stupid article over and over and over.

The absolute bottom line is that, if UbiSoft was not happy with the results there would be no SH4.

JCC

After reading some of the problems caused by StarForce to PCs' i am very happy i bought mine through direct2drive. No StarForce and i havent had a single issue with the game, ever.

The D2D version also comes with Starforce.