Hey Ubi, consider this...

[Commie]

Originally Posted by trotter

Sigh...the old Falcon 4 manual.




Remember the days when you would spend almost a week reading the manual before playing the game?

I understand this is not cost-feasible any longer, all I ask is that developers stop claiming that pdf manuals and materials will be robust or immersive. Stop it, it's insulting.

Hehe. I have this too!

I disagree that it wouldn't be cost effective. Companies make collectors' editions of games with more fancy and costlier (but more useless) trinkets included for not much more than a basic version of the game so why couldn't they make a decent manual instead which would be cheaper anyway? The squadron commander's edition of Falcon with the binder was just 10 dollars more than the normal one which had a huge manual anyway, so it seems that costs of production weren't excessive.

Relatively it was just as expensive, even more so to make a big game in 1991 than now. Just read about Origin and their problems with packing a game box with a dozen diskettes which led to them losing their independence as their ambitions overtook the technology(cost effective cd-roms weren't available).

Greed killed off the simulation companies more than a lack of income. All those mergers in the 90's where one company would pay excessively for a brand name and then decide to trim staff and quality in order to get a quick return on their investment are the reason sims died and not because people weren't buying them! If UBI still made enough from SH3 and SH4 in this day and age with smaller sales than Microprose and the rest then it shows that the market isn't dead for sims(and sub sims are arguably more niche than flight sims).