[Julhelm]

Originally Posted by Hinrich Schwab

Do not sales reflect the consumers' response to industry moves? I think you are confusing initiative with influence. In that case, the producers of goods most certainly do have initiative. However, it is the consumer who makes the final judgment.

Sales in themselves offer no qualitiative feedback at all. Did SH5 flop because the game was flawed or did SH5 flop because of UBI DRM. In the end, sales will only show it flopped, so it is commercially unviable and won't be done again. No industry ever has direct input by consumers. Rather, they have designers who do their best to try and work out what the consumers actually want, not what they say they want.

How does this apply to the subsim community? After 10 years of Silent Hunter iterations by Ubi, the community here is rather certain what it wants. Blanket statements like this won't work because semantics will pick them apart. Had you stated, "...the mainstream gamer...", I might have agreed with you.

So what does the community want? Is the community a monolithic block of diehard U-Boat fans or what? Are all these requirements compiled into a charter that can be found somewhere here? See, the problem with gamers in general and simmers in particular is that they all know exactly how to design the perfect game but they can never actually pin down what they want into a feature-by-feature list or any other usable format (And which wouldn't take on unrealistic proportions).

Realism settings and autocrew options can balance this out. It isn't necessarily perfect, but it is better than absolute focus.

I beg to differ. I have never played a hardcore procedural sim where realism settings or autocrew managed to transform the game into casual lite sim. Never. DCS has never turned into SF2 and DW has never turned into RSR by the flick of a few settings in a menu. Because they were designed to focus on different aspects. Realism settings the way they are implemented in DCS and DW only serve to dumb down the procedural simulation to a point which defeats it's purpose. The strength of lite sims has always been that they are designed around really good tactical combat.

While AOD was the best subsim ever, it has its share of flaws, too. Specifically, manual control of the deck gun had to be patched in. Manual control of the deck gun trumps AI auto crew any day of the week, regardless of sim.

See, this is the gist of the problem. You concur AOD is the best subsim ever, yet the first thing you bring up is that it lacked certain features. What about all the features that made AOD the best? What are those? That's a hell of a lot more useful to any dev than the neverending negativity and bitching about lack of features.

Community input is only useful if it has some constructive value to it. You say the internet has given the sim and wargaming community a voice. Then I have to say that voice tends to be mostly negative and confrontative towards developers. I remember the big patch wars on the SimHQ SF boards that not only split the community into two warring camps, but also resulted in the main developer (who had always had an open and communicative presence on the boards) to leave all sim boards completely and now can only be found on his own boards. More recently, how about the huge flamewars between Il-2 and Il-2 CoD communities, the amazing vitriol being spewed towards Luthier on multiple forums. Or how about the ridiculous bitching and trolling in the MS Flight forum on AVSIM, so bad they had to close it down.

Or if we look on this very board, the biggest thread on SHO is a 10+ page rant-fest. Read through that thread. It's literally a bunch of angry reactionaries with an axe to grind because they bought SH5 and found out it sucked even though every review portal on the planet said the game was going to be a lemon.

Actually, go to any place really on the internet where people can have their say, and you'll find they usually have negative things to say. As a designer, I'm much more interested in what you like and why than what you hate.

I am more than aware of that. Pointing that out to me like I just fell of the turnip truck accomplishes nothing.

In an increasingly digital world polluted with DRM, these options are dying out. The new standard is that if one has a computer product one is dissatisfied with, you out the money you spent with no recourse.[/quote]
To be fair, that has always been in the EULAs ever since they started putting EULAs in the installers. You never legally owned those games, you licensed them. DRM is just a way to enforce the EULA. I find the idea ridiculous tbh but that's what we get for voting all these pro-corporate neoliberals into power. It's really a tangent to the discussion and not confined to PC gaming at all like some would imply.

You are stating the obvious. This is Economics 101. Likewise, this is also how consumers can dictate market response; by forcing a product flop.

All that happens by forcing a product flop is that a studio gets shut down and the devs find job elsewhere making farmville clones. Is this really the outcome you want? I doubt it.

However, the only trump to that is if the consumers generate such a vociferous and negative response that the producer in question has no alternative but to listen. That is the whole point of the complaints in the subsim community; to generate this level of response. To date, it has simply been unsuccessful. That doesn't mean there won't be a time where it will succeed.

You don't get it. If a product flops that simply means it is commercially unviable and guarantees it will not be done again. Publishers are publicly traded companies and they only care about turning a profit. If you won't part with your money, they will instead focus on easier consumers who do and who don't start a lot of trouble.

The only way you can hope to have any kind of input or change things is by contributing positive feedback and make sure your pet genre is seen as commercially successful. A massive negative response with calls for boycott etc at this point will only make sure the genre gets buried again, permanently.