Fair enough to move on past hobbies and obsessions, I hope the current ones are as satisfying as the old ones.
Well, I think the WEGO mechanics add a bit of that extra oomph to this game. I am happy to reward anybody who dares do something outside of the IGO UGO orthodoxy.
Asymmetry in command loops is not modelled explicitly as in Flashpoint, but rather like in Command Ops, implicitly via orders delay. In the video the Ariete division armour has a hard time waking up to meet the oncoming 7th Armoured Division.
The main reason, in my opinion, for that state of things is that the genre is trapped in a bit of perverse loop. On the one hand, the number of people in the hobby has gone down as the main demographic has become older and less numerous. On the other hand, the survivors are doing what they know to work with that base.
Atomic Games was well funded, and there was the possibility of employ talent working full time. @vyshka and @TheWombat may have a clear memory of what killed Avalon Hill, but certainly it wasn’t like they died of commercial success. If one has the skills, and you have a family or need to pay education debt, you want the job that pays for it. Otherwise, it can only be something you do on the side or as a hobby. You work on fits and starts, and rely on volunteers/partners to furnish art and research.
Shenandoah Studios was a good shot at breathing new life into the genre… only to be snuffed by the stifling Hobbesian market dynamics of Apple app store.
The increasingly aging demographic also tends for conservatism, giving way to something like a Founder effect. That is, the companies, designers and developers that stayed on the business have pretty much consolidated certain designs as The Right Way. Also, the fans that stayed on, which probably had a less broad worldview than @TheWombat in some respects, reinforced this rejecting new things that, as with any novelty, is always a bit rough around the edges at the beginning.
How can this loop be broken in a sustainable way? Maybe we need to get Elon Musk into war gaming…
There were a few things that probably helped AH along to its demise, but the lawsuit over the Civilization computer games really stands out as the final nail in the coffin. I wasn’t actively playing paper wargames in the 90s, so I don’t know if there was general downturn due to the end of the cold war that contributed or not. I think it could have also depended on how Monarch’s other businesses were doing, since I think the AH products were basically printed during idle time for Monarch’s presses. @Brooski might have a better recollection on this than I do.
I think GMT Games has done a great job stepping up to the plate. They seem to be as prolific as AH ever was in getting titles out, so the hobby has managed to survive. I would have loved it if they would have been the ones to get the AH product line instead of Hasbro.
Atomic Games might have been well funded, but AH didn’t have the funds to support major development especially with the lawsuit going on. I imagine the development cost of each of the games they put out was greater than the entire development cost of all the paper boardgame titles. Were they well funded in general, or just funded by Microsoft to publish Close Combat? It seemed like it didn’t take much for them to fold in 2000.
Very well said, and that pretty much is the exact impression I’ve gotten when I’ve discussed these issues with longtime grogs. Part of me has always gotten a distinct feeling that some of the vets who are still around - Gary Grigsby, John Tiller, Battlefront, etc. - simply never forgot the death of a lot of the big players and general consolidation that happened in the late '90s/early 2000s, which in turn manifests itself in a generally conservative approach to their games. If even devs who had noticeable crossover success closed, why not take the safer route?
As you said, though, this view of “we are a niche that can never truly expand” will ultimately doom the genre to death by attrition or an even more niche status that it already has. While not without their own set of issues, I personally think a lot of grog devs would do well to study Paradox’s success and their growth from small niche developer to what they are today. I know Game of Thrones becoming a cultural phenomenon helped quite a bit and many may never even touch the game (bundles, random sales, etc.), but last I checked over a million copies of Crusader Kings 2 were sold; and if we live in a world where a reasonably complex medieval political simulation can sell that many copies, I’d like to think that the right grog games would be able to sell at least ~5% of that.
Honestly, the biggest single thing I think grog devs can do is to give accessibility-related things a little more TLC. I know resources can be very limited (and rivet counters will care far more about other things), but even relatively small things like tooltips or a proper in-game tutorial (as opposed to a play-along with the manual) go a long way to improve accessibility. For example, I got up and running on Command Ops 2 within 20 minutes or so after reading a couple of Steam guides. Did I understand every little nuance? Of course not, but the fact that some random user guides were far more succinct and accessible - and, most importantly, got me playing and making decisions - than any of the documentation Panther or Lock’n’Load provided I think illustrates how little focus there is on improving accessibility.
That all sounds very logical, and may well be true, but so far, it has not panned out that way. There simply hasn’t been a market to expand into for wargaming, no matter how hard companies have tried to move beyond the hard core. Any game that is designed to appeal to the masses loses the grogs it seems, and the number of people actually buying such a crossover game seems to always be, well, minimal. The few exceptions we see are just that, exceptions, at least to the extent that they provide precious little incentive or encouragement for anyone to take a financial risk, and most game developers in this niche have nearly zero capital anyhow.
I’ve never thought that there was a big market for wargames as we know them, and anything that would have a big market would no longer be the type of game wargamers generally want. And the number of copies you have to sell, in a terribly crowded market, in order to just break even is pretty high from what I underestand, so it’s no wonder folks go through Matrix/Slitherine with traditional products. It’s their best shot at making a buck or two.
I agree though that TLC is always good. The idea that grogs are somehow unmoved by things like workable UIs, attractive graphics, and efficient programming is ludicrous. But again, you can kickstart a game like BattleTech (one that I’m eagerly awaiting and which I backed) and get plenty of money, but doing the same for, say, a novel take on a historically sound and sufficiently groggy wargame is unlikely to get that sort of backing–and most studios interested in doing such a wargame would undoubtedly piss away the money with nothing to show for it. Sadly, the history of wargame development is replete with inefficient, poorly managed, and unrealistically scoped companies.
I assume so/either, the V4VWAW games weren’t cheap to make at least their first instalments. But that’s a guess.
To reply to the last few threads: groggy wargames, like rock n’ roll, will never die.
There is always going to be some nerdy kid weirdly drawn to chits, CRTs, and hexes, in much the same way there is going to be some sullen kid weirdly drawn to making loud, abrasive noises with a guitar.
The audience go down, but the draw is primal.
It is from the exceptions that one learns the most, in my opinion, both in their success and in their failure.
Regarding TLC, or UI/UX, the problem from my point of view stems mainly from the difficulties inherent to upgrade legacy code bases and the opportunity cost into it, and the priorities set by the community around the games.
Until you don’t hit a major issue for that player base, such as high dpi font rendering, the pressure isn’t just there because of the I am alright Jack types will be always naysaying issues that don’t affect them.
And then you come across stuff like Microsoft cutting away ancient API s with inefficient transitional support via software rendering, to make things even harder for what is already a precarious and rickety situation when it comes to the availability of resources.
Is that something exceptional or applies to the whole industry? :)
I answered to you a bit in my reply to @TheWombat. Re: accessibility you said it best already, mate.
Actually, your mentioning of Matrix/Slitherine made me think of another thing: grog devs need to embrace the various digital storefronts out there. It made me really happy to see them on the front page of Steam when they ran their midweek sale a few weeks back, especially given their previous stance on Steam and other stores.
Granted, most devs and publishers have gotten better about things like that, but you also have the weird holdouts like Shrapnel and Battlefront that practically seem frozen in stasis. Hell, Battlefront might as well not exist outside of their website that looks straight out of the '90s: their last update on their Facebook page was from December 2016, and it includes some nice tussling in comments with their customers over the usual issues (DRM, pricing, etc.). I know they once partnered with some tiny streamer, but I’m fairly sure they stopped that years ago, as well.
Also, I’m going to make a super left-field suggestion here, in that I don’t think it’s at all something that would make a significant difference given the cost, but I’d still love to see it explored all the same: co-op multiplayer. Nothing wrong with a good old 1v1 PBEM-type game, but I definitely think there’s untapped potential in taking cues from games like Steel Division: Normandy 44 (specifically, the recent co-op focused DLC), Decisive Campaigns: Warsaw to Paris, or the Scourge of War titles, where players can divide their forces and play together. Hell, I’d love for such an option in Combat Mission, as it would make the larger scenarios far more playable.
It can’t be a coincidence that the guy who made Afghanistan '11 is also South African.
That should have been me. But I couldn’t keep up much of an interest. If wargames are going to survive into the next generation, they need to be about the history of the battles they’re simulating, not the nostalgia their designers have for pushing pieces of cardboard around a map before I was born. When I see a CRT, I just think, why is this necessary when I’ve got a computer that can do any kind of math you want? When I see hexes, I ask, is that really the best way to model terrain in this scenario, or is it just hexes for the sake of hexes?
Actually, I think very much that Steve Grammont’s view on the status of the genre isn’t different in substance to your view. But I think his hands are tied and perhaps, just perhaps, they’re moving onto the next stage of their lifes. So they take a more chill approach to “business”.
He doesn’t have time for fools, real or apparent, either :)
Not out of the left field at all. Actually, that’s #1 priority for serious war games.
Didn’t know that, lol
ROCKIN IN THE FREE WORLD
PS GEDDY LEE RULEZ
Just received this on my inbox… I think this is of interest to the punters here and pretty much every paragraph is eerily relevant to what we are discussing.
Yes, the whole gaming industry is replete with inefficiency and poor management. Wargame companies are just a subset of this, albeit one with even less in the way of resources.
As far as legacy stuff, screw it. You can’t build for the future while desperately trying to support people still running XP. It’s a non-starter. If your business model is build on ancient OS’s and antediluvian hardware, you’re toast anyhow.One big reason for zero growth is, well, hobbling games to be compatible with archaic standards. It won’t work in the long run.
And, sure, you can learn from exceptions, but I stand by my point–one I’ve been making for decades now, and a point that nothing that has happened in wargaming has seemed to contradict–that there is nearly zero room to expand traditional wargaming. By traditional, I mean heavy emphasis on history, technical accuracy, and simulation rather than shooter or RTS games with vaguely historical skins. It is a niche, it has always been a niche, it will always be a niche. I’m ok with that. I think chasing a chimerical “mass market historical wargame that will make us big bucks” is a recipe for financial ruin.
I know I simply will not play a game that isn’t at the very least up to Windows 10/2018 standards of UI and graphics and usability, not unless it’s very, very, very good in some essential and otherwise unavailable way.
It’s not like you can wake up one morning, look at the computer screen, take a deep breath, say loudly “Fck this sht, I’m done”, and then go to the forums to announce to whomever is still following you “Screw your clunky Windows 8 boxes, I’m done with you lot. See you in three or four years, which is the time it’s going to take me realistically to redo the UI working part time”.
But other than that, indeed, you’re totally right.
Big bucks lol, I don’t think anybody is playing the game with that outcome in mind. I would say that the aims of most is like make enough to work full time on something they love. Yet, at the same time, that inherently conservative attitude is going always to put a lid on it: it you don’t aim high, the only way for sure is down.
That’s why I said that someone with a reckless disdain for what conventional wisdom prescribes, deep pockets and a knack for self promotion could have a shot at producing the next big war game hit.
What I can’t take for granted, as I read you’re, is that there’s no point on keeping the dream alive or discouraging any dreamers out there. You say you have already moved on… I will still be rooting for Quixote, thank you.
I don’t think you’re alone, in that, on the contrary.
I’m quoting this because I want to address it but am at work and can’t get into a discussion right now. All I can say is that I have some things to say!
Here is a summary that someone wrote about the demise of Avalon Hill:
http://home.earthlink.net/~pdr4455/fah.html
So the lawsuit seemed costly, but they were also losing money.