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Originally Posted by CCIP
Yeah. I get the impression that on the development side, the problem could basically be summed up as feature creep at the expense of core focus and quality. Underlying that is the conflicting demands for both new in-depth 'die hard' features and features that appealed to a broader market. The development got too ambitious and started going in too many directions at once, losing focus and sacrificing quality when deadlines started pushing. It's a trap that many game projects, and not just in simulations, have fallen victim to, and I guess for SH5 that's most unfortunate...
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Yes, I recall Elenaiba hinted in a post towards that direction.
But it is probably a very difficult balance to strike between ambitiousness, novelty, and focus on old core game concepts. If you focus too much on getting the "old core" right, and update basically only a very few features like the outward appearance, then you basically only recreated an old game, and will likely not sell a lot (unless the predecessor is 20 years old).
If you become too ambitious and try to go well beyond the previous technological stage, you run the risks mentioned above. You'll need a lot of standing power and investment to pull ambitious projects off, and a lot of time (I get the impression Oleg just pulls that off with the new BoB).
If I compare games in the past 3-5 years to most typical games in the 90s, like TF1942, Silent Hunter 2, Gunship 2000, Pacific War, etc., then I find that many games roughly starting with the generation Falcon 4.0/Flashpoint/Silent Hunter II have evolved into such complex simulations, that topping that is hard. Especially if companies like Ubi decide on a strategy with more frequent releases of a franchise.
If less frequent, you could sell a new "Silent Hunter" (III) just with updated new flashy graphics maybe every 7 years. And even that will be hard since I find graphics sort of have converged, I can hardly see the tiny different between SHIV and SHV, nor would I care in a simulation about minuscule eye-candy differences. But coming up with new features and functionality at a higher frequency in such complex games like the SH series, War in the Pacific (AE) or anything close to that level, is going to be more and more investment and time intensive. I suppose we are up for some stagnation with hard-core simulations and "superdetailed" games in particular, since there seems to be a discrepancy: obviously it will be hard to get a pay back with a small customer ship but high release frequency for high investment costs.
I think SHV was one of victims of Ubi's new strategy. High release frequency, and limiting time and investment with such an ambitious project cannot go along very well -- and being less ambitious doesn't move it very far either, and will with the 5th title in a series (yawn...) not gain you too many new sales.