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Originally Posted by jerm138
This whole thing is very reminiscent of Microsoft FSX, and the end of many years of flight simulation.
"Casual Gamers" will never be interested in niche games like this. They want to load the game, and be killing within seconds. Look at CODMW2. That game was a nonstop barrage of killing and action. THAT'S what the casual gamer wants, and there is no feasible way for a submarine game to provide that. Most people who like that barrage of cannon fodder will never understand the thrill of tracking a contact for hours in REAL TIME, and feel the excitement of waiting to see if your torpedoes hit... so why pander to them?
Microsoft went down the exact same path with their Flight Simulator series... they focused all of their efforts on "eye candy" for the new generation. They weren't interested, and the loyal following they had built over so many years just got angry, and the series died.
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Again with the 'casual gamer' blame game. The thing is the 'casual gamer' is not responsible for the death of sims or strategy per se. In the 80's and 90's until the advent of the 3d video cards, most PC games were much more complicated and sold in comparative quantities as the few sims around these days, and many sold less. So it's not that sims all of a sudden stopped being bought!
The problem is that 3D video cards really pushed the action First/Third person shooter from the late 90's and for developers and publishers the ability to relatively easily create immersive, realistic worlds with lots of eye candy enabled the rise of the 'casual gamer', a demographic that was easy to satisfy and potentially far larger than the already existing hard-core PC gamer.
It was quicker to make an action game, and also had other benefits of lower costs of manufacture, without fancy manuals etc. Publishers only think about maximising revenue and not maintaining a customer base that as a percentage was fast getting smaller and smaller.
The sad thing is that the market for sims or even the harder core FPS games like Deus Ex, System Shock hasn't dried up, as all those gamers are still around and in fact have been joined by new generations.
There's money lying on the pavement just waiting to be scooped up. The problem is that UBI, EA, Vivendi and the like think it's too little for them to bother bending and picking it up!