Are people's objecting to an online subsim per se, or merely Ubi's "effort" here?

[StarTrekMike]

Originally Posted by tsotha

The problem with serving a niche community is it doesn't change the amount of effort you have to put into the game. A really good subsim is going to be just as much work as MW3, and the potential profit is tiny by comparison.

As to the people who are saying "Ubisoft only wants money", well... of course. It's not a charity. Of course the company is going to put its efforts into the most financially promising projects. The guy who wrote Minecraft is a billionaire now (no exaggeration), and nobody is going to make that kind of money serving the tiny community of hard core subsimmers. Personally I'm surprised SH5 got made at all, and it doesn't surprise me they cut corners.

There are only two ways I can see getting a next generation sim - either somebody with a lot of online charisma gets an open-source project going and keeps it alive until the first stable release, or a company like Ubi releases the code for an older game like SH3 or SH4. Come to think of it, it wouldn't hurt them financially to release the SH5 code, and that might be a better starting point.

SHO isn't going to be a hard core sim. It can't be. It might be a fun game of the more casual variety, but the people who haunt this forum aren't going to like it.

Nobody will debate that the subsim market is pretty small compared to something like Assassins creed or the Modern warfare franchise, those properties get millions invested in not only the production of the game but also the advertising and marketing required to compete with others and grab the attention of the target audiences (namely teenagers).

The simulation market is different, we don't value the same things as the teenagers who are the target demographic for most mega-popular franchises, we want quality first and foremost, we are critical and we will not hesitate to say when we feel wronged.

When you say that Ubisoft is a business and it's goal will always be money, that is true, but you must also take into account that the market exists for good simulations, granted they would not get the amazing return that they would get with something like assassins creed but they also would not need to invest millions upon millions into marketing either, we as simmers know what we want and we simply don't value a Mountain dew cross promotion or stuff like that.

In a way, it costs them less money to sell a simulation because the market is already so hungry for more and so savvy when it comes to knowing about upcoming content that it pretty much sells itself.

Is that enough for them to make another actual Silent Hunter game instead of just releasing Farmville the Atlantic edition? probably not but it has always been my belief that the degradation of the sim market is not due to lack of demand but because publishers want the path of least resistance at all times, as a result, we get boring and simple games and it just gets worse and worse the more we excuse it as good business.

So, sure, we can just give them a free pass and say that it is a business and that they are under no obligation to innovate or diversify their projects to meet a variety of different markets but that is simply allowing the current trend to continue, if we don't demand something now, it might be too late later while we are all playing Assassins creed XXII on our integrated targeted marketing devices implanted in our skulls or while we are sipping our Halo/Gears of War/Call of duty XXXXIIII tie in energy drinks.

A good business cares about it's customers and tries to bring them what they want, it does not always work out but the effort can build something that is more valuable than anything to a business, customer loyalty.