Quote:
Originally Posted by Coldcall
Guys,
The best thing that could happen is that SH5 sales are such a huge nightmare that Ubisoft decide not to continue with the franchise.
My view is that Ubisoft has had too many chances to get it right, and that they keep getting it so wrong is an indication that they could not really care less about SH franchise.
I hope and pray that they have a tantrum over sales and say they wont produce another.
There are plenty of excellent smaller developers who could produce as good or better as any SH title ever released.
Ubisoft are not the only game in town, and a decent sub simulator has a guaranteed 200,000 sales plus worldwide which is more than enough for a strong 2 year dev process, and still a large profit margin thereafter.
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There are excellent smaller developers out there, but I doubt very much any of them can make an AAA title like Silent Hunter that will match our expectations. Even before Ubisoft took over the SH series, there has only been one game that rose to the level of SH: Aces of the Deep. And Sierra, even with the crack Dynamix dev team ready to make a sequel, decided it was not profitable. They decided it was
not profitable.
Anything is possible, I suppose. But there is a lot more evidence that a game as good as SH3/SH4 can only be created by a large publisher like Ubisoft. And with a weak SH5, if anyone was going to try to take that market over, now would be the time. I haven't heard anything at all that remotely sounds like this will happen. EA is making a major sub game, but it will be like Battlestations: Midway, and it's X-box all the way, baby.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wurschtie
I am quite certain that the major problem is the lack of business competition. I believe Ubisoft was able to get a bit lazy about SH, because players do not have any games to go to as an alternative.
From a marketing point of view, this leads to the conclusion that SH5 is not more than a second class cash cow, in a dying genre.
As a long time flight simulator enthusiast, I would even say that simulations themselves are a dying genre. Even Microsoft closed the aces studios, which were responsible for nearly every MSFS of the last two decades (which is not really the end of the world, because the MSFS series has a product life cycle of about 5-10 years). That is mainly because playing habits of the masses change from enthusiasts (as known from the early amiga and commodore days) to casual console gamers. In order to persist, it is crucial for a studio to have mega-selling titles like Assassin's Creed for the kiddie gaming generation, which likes to play GTA and stuff like that. Sims like SH5 are not an obligation, but more like an accessory and a question of image. And sure as hell Ubisoft is not coming out of this mess near zero, but with a big fat red minus at the end of the day. And this estimation does not even consider the negative effects on Ubisoft's image as a publisher in whole.
Silent Hunter was, unfortunately, one big fail. It was a communication fail in the first place. It is simply impossible to create a product which has such a high-involvement character as SH5 without asking or talking to the community. And chances are, that this will be the end of a whole genre, unless some studio (or even Ubisoft) is brave enough to do better (which is easy), or the community continues to maintain and mod the sh* out of this game and keep it alive, to prove that there still IS a market for sub sims. Without wanting to meet the trouble halfway, I am not really confident about the will of Ubisoft to keep trying to ride a dead horse.
IF (!) this game is dying in the arms of ubisoft, we can only hope that it will be given away at some point in time to a studio that dares to pay a license and continue the beloved stuff in the means of the community.
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I agree 100% with your assessment. Our biggest hope remains that if Ubisoft refuses to support SH5 and fund SH6, that the serious sim guys in Bucharest can work out a deal with another publisher. Oleg, everyone's favorite messiah, someone... The next subsim will probably be Russian, like T-34 vs Tiger.