Quote:
Originally Posted by Wiz33
Wow, you must consider yourself one of the elite. The genre is dead because even someone with more than a passing interest won't get in without reading a 100 page manual and there's not enough bridge sim (sim lite) to get causal player interested. How many games like CMANO have you seen in the last decade? How many time have you seen so call hardcore player calling CW arcade? Did you see how bad Naval War AC got slammed by hardcore gamers on the forum?
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I don't consider myself to be part of the elite in anything. But that's not the point. The point is, you can play any Silent Hunter game with the right settings without reading the manual at all. And still they didn't sell well enough to justify a successor (at least in Ubisoft's eyes).
The cost of developing a game (especially by a big studio) has risen substantially. At the same time, the target audience hasn't while the number of casual (I do not mean that as a negative) gamers increased. Making a sim more accessible does not guarantee more sales but simplifying it can guarantee alienating some of the existing audience. There is a room for them though and it is on an indie market and that where games like CW and Uboot come in. The only problem is, those lite-sims are still harder to develop that typical games.
Let's look at the Naval War: AC. If you look at it's Steam reviews (
http://store.steampowered.com/app/20...p_reviews_hash) most negative ones are not about realism, but poor performance/bugs/crashes/bad interface etc. Poor realism seem to be only one of the reasons it failed.
Let's also take a look at another lite-sim on Steam: Combat Air Patrol 2 (
http://store.steampowered.com/app/34...p_reviews_hash)
Again, most of it's negative reviews aren't about poor realism, but poor gameplay/lack of progress.
If you compare them to CW (which is also a lite-sim) you can see the difference.
My point is, complains about "not being realistic enough" might turn off some players, but on the whole have very little effect on sales.