Quote:
Originally Posted by Hawk66
Perhaps you could elaborate what you think about the proposal, which is raised here from time to time that the price tag for a DW successor would be considerable higher and to have a similar 'business model' like other sims (Steel Beasts Pro/Harpoon as an example). That is the commercial version is just a spin-off the current government version minus classified stuff and missing some features like connectors to other simulations etc.
I think such and similar questions regularly pop up here in the forum, hence it would be nice if you/Sonalysts could just give your comments/thinking on this from time to time. So just more a bit of a dialog between you and the lurking guys here  .
What do you think? |
The non-commercial versions of DW are mostly one-offs, customized for a particular purpose. There's relatively little of value for a commercial customer in most of these, and a sizable percentage of these versions are proprietary, i.e. the customer paid to create it so they don't want Sonalysts re-purposing any of it for other customers. So they can't really form a logical upgrade path for a commercial sim.
If you're going to charge a premium price for a sim, you have to have a roadmap to follow so the customer gets some value for their purchase. This requires production resources to be dedicated to the roadmap tasks. That costs money! So you have to estimate how much revenue you'll get vs. how much time the programmers/artists can spend working on upgrades and improvements. If you miss, you lose money, or the updates don't come as frequently as promised, and you get annoyed customers. (well, more annoyed than usual customers...) (grin)
Because of DW's poor retail showing, it's an uphill battle to convince the partnership to spend more money on it or anything like it. Plus it's so old now it needs a major overhaul. At this point a new game looks more cost-effective.
All that said, what you mention is one of the possible ways we could make a business case for a new version/new game. This is why we haven't given up completely.
Hope that helped some. I have to be circumspect because I can't promise anything. I'm personally very interested in new sims, but I'm not high enough on the food chain to do much about it!