What will become of the Silent Hunter Series?

[hocking]

I fear we are nearing the end here as far as Silent Hunter is concerned. At this point, I believe that UBI has locked the series between a rock and a hard place. Here is my predictions:

1) The game will not interest casual or FPS gamers like they are wanting it to. Those people will not buy this game no matter how you dumb it down. Furthermore, by providing one sub to use for the entire game goes completely against this strategy. It is laughable. Imagine a FPS with one weapon to use through the entire game. Just laughable is all I can say here.

2) UBI has completely turned away the hard-core Silent Hunter fans by their stupic DRM decision, and there desire to dumb the game down in an effort to attract the people mentioned in number 1. Most of us will wait for the greatest mods to come out, but these mods will be very very very slow in coming since so many of us are not into the series. This could be upwards of 1 1/2 to 2 years after release at the earliest.

3) The game will end up being the most highly pirated game from the series due to the DRM decision. I am not condoning this at all, but this is the way it works. The more you try to prevent pirates from pirating your software, the more your software gets pirated. SH5 will be the most pirated version of the Silent Hunter series without a doubt. You maximize your revenue by just pricing your game at $40 to $50 and deal with it. When you load your game up with DRM junk, people don't buy it, pirates pirate it just for the challenge, and then the people who wouldn't buy it before get a pirated copy just because they are mad at you. They rationalize their stealing very quickly and easily because they feel like they were being wronged by the publisher who was inflicting them with DRM junk even though they paid for the game. You turn non-pirates into pirates very quickly when you do stuff like this. Again, I am not condoning this at all, but this is how it works. Why don't publishers get this.

Put all those three points together, and you have a game that takes in less revenue than any of the other four games in the series before it. This usually spells "DOOM" for the series. Just like my other simulator, "Flight Simulator", I feel like I am about to lose another one of my favorite simulations on the PC.