[Snowman999]

True, its also about the people who seem to think that making a game is the same as making a car.

I think most folks with beefs have compared this game to the making of other games. Numerous examples have been cited of games that have not shipped in the unfinished state SH4 did. It can be done.

The other poster is also correct to point out the difference between a patch (corrects faults) and a file that attempts to finish functionality left out due to schedules.

And then blaming the makers of the game for their every woe, when it's realy the stiff suits at the corporate officers of the publisher who's only worried about "the bottom line" so they can keep their fat salaries ,that they should be angry at.

I don't care whose fault it is. My $50 is my $50. It's a consumer product competing with lots of others for my available cash. I simply don't buy the argument that we should buy unfinished, broken software in order to get a chance for more of the same in three years. Markets don't work like that.

I

would be surpised if we see another submarine simulator for a very long time to come. Niche market, "the bottom line" is marginal by comparision to other game genre's, and the audience of said market is impossible to satisfy. So why bother?

Yeah, lots of those former sim devs ran to MMOs because "everybody knew" that was where the gold was. Guess what? There's room for a couple at most.

Some ran to consoles. Guess what? Three competing platforms eating each other alive and restrictive licenses to get in the game.

The truth is we don't know what the returns on SH3 were. What we do know is they were sufficient to trigger SH4. Three years from now, who knows?

I also wish people would stop pulling out the niche flag. SH4 is not a niche product. In today's PC game universe no game that attains big-box distribution is a niche product--the economics themselves refute that claim. Want niche? Go look at Matrix games. SH3 had six-figure sales. Niche games are more on the order of 10,000.

I see a macro problem with Ubi's SH4 design decisions. They want "simmers" like us, but they don't want to make an actual sim. They want volumes available at big box brick&mortar, so they go for eye candy (but really don't as the FSAA etc. threads show.) They want to stay at $50 retail, so they compromise dev budgets, when an $80 retail and on-line download is a possible option that changes the business model, allows break-even at lower volumes (no MDF funds), and allows budget to go toward code rather than printed manuals and fancy tin boxes.

Overall I'm unsympathetic. They made their bed by trying to make a game, calling it a sim, insisting on casual gamers then not delivering wow graphics. Pick a target audience and design for it. But don't call it a sim if it's a game.