Nice video. Useless but nice. A bit entertaining cheap shot. Maybe appropriate for SHO, I don't know.
But the fact is that something has to break us out of our present paradigm of video game development. Now it works something like this. You are an executive for a large, faceless and inhuman game company called Ubi. You get a wild hair somewhere we'd rather not talk about and it's time to make a subsim. So you get a team of programmers together who aren't particularly interested in submarines, simulation, realism or whatever (they worked on Borderlands last week) and give them a fixed budget and a certain but certainly inadequate length of time. Whatever they turn out in that not-long-enough time will hit the market. So they work for several months, the code is frozen the DVDs are stamped and the game hits the street. Then the developers are let go, fired, cashed in the project is over. Simultaneously the game company gushes about how they have a breakthrough simulation, promise bug fixes and upgraded content that will never happen. For two or three months people buy the product and then the well runs dry and the money stops flowing in.
At this point, what's in it for the game company to fix bugs? That's an expense and they're in business to obtain income. It just isn't going to happen. You want additional content? They have to hire a new dev team who know nothing about the product they are "enhancing." The old team didn't document their code because they knew they were producing.......wait for it.......a drink coaster. It doesn't matter what stuff is stamped in it, the real product is a drink coaster that looks kinda like a DVD.
It's a year later and the game company says it's time for a new version. Do we get continuity, a building on the knowledge of the past to produce a better quality product? That's impossible. The first dev team is toast, they didn't document anyway and they're all working on Farmville 2. These new guys are gonna have to reinvent the wheel. Inevitably they steal what they think they can work with from the first game even though they don't understand how it works at all. So they inherit many of the old game's bugs. Then they invent a whole new bundle of bugs of their own. Does it take Stephen Hawking to tell you that the second game, produced with lower budget in a shorter time by lesser programmers will be worse? Do we really expect progress? Or do we sadly laugh?
The drink coaster paradigm of game production is okay for casual games, but for games of depth that deign to call themselves simulation, we're at the end of the road. We can get a different simulator every year. We cannot get a better simulator every year. That need synergy. It needs continuity with the same people working together on the same project over a period of years. If they're going to do that they are going to have to be paid. If they're going to be paid, we are going to have to provide the money.
You can see where I'm going. Subscription games are absolutely necessary and unavoidable if simulation, not just submarine simulation, is going to show any progress over the present state.
I hate the pay to win strategy of "free" on-line games. That's playing your customers for patsies. We deserve better than that. Everyone should have access to the entire game. No selling submarines, torpedoes, virtual toilet paper or other smarmy practices that tell the customer he isn't respected at all. That leaves us with a monthly subscription price.
And the OP has it perfectly. How much are we paying now? If SH has a game a year for $60 that's $60 per year that we already pay. In effect, we already subscribe for a guarantee of the same old thing. What if you were offered a $5.00 per month subscription to Silent Hunter (no more versions!) that would continue to evolve for years. What if this game were a download content game, you'd download the game but play it locally on your computer. What if you got real, meaningful monthly upgrades that vaporized bugs, brought in new content that you cared about, a great on-line community where game developers would actively sound out the players for their input and actually follow up on it? What if there were optional on-line server-based multiplayer scenarios like there are for countless first person shooters today. Individual players have their own local copies of the games. They can interact with others or play the game single player.
Now $5.00 a month is $60 per year, the same as you pay now to be insulted. Wouldn't you pay that to be valued? Wouldn't you pay that for your game to actually improve over time instead of just be abandoned and all the programmers fired? Is that worthy of this cheap shot video?
SH3 and SH4 are great. But they are full of problems and unfulfilled possibilities. They've done little more than whet my appetite for what could be. I'm not willing to pay for more of the same old drink coaster dance, especially pay in advance. SHO isn't what I'm looking for--I'm not looking for a strictly casual game--but it is a move outside the drink coaster mindset. I'll watch with interest!
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