It’s pretty simple.
Lock it right the fuck down for three months. Always online, dongles, whatever. But be explicit that, after three months is over, DRM will be removed.
This makes the grumpies happy (they can buy it when DRM is gone) takes the moral high ground, protects the first period of high sales, lowers crackers’ incentive to crack difficult DRM.
The peak sales time of all games is clearly the Steam summer and winter sales. There’s a lesson in that.
I just finished CS and CoP and am now doing SoC again since I originally played it a while back. SoC is really the best of the series. I think it has the best overall graphics/art/design, gun play and story. What I really wanted from Stalker 2 is a fixed power curve over Call of Pripyat (you could have an IL86 in like 30 seconds, and then pay Nimble for top stuff shortly after), more underground (SoC is still best here but CoP did a good job), and a solid release like CoP. Hopefully they include some surprises as well. Quite lame this is the only news we have so far.
That doesn’t make it the peak profit period.
Right - in the talks Gabe Newell has given, they show that their peak overall revenue is still within the launch window. Sales drive a huge amount of revenue despite drastically reduced prices, and doubtlessly drive multiple times higher volume than at launch, but in terms of overall revenue, it still doesn’t match the launch window
Didn’t a recent L4D2 weekend promotion make more money than launch week? I read that somewhere in the past fortnight but can’t find the source.
Highest revenue period for a Valve game is probably not the same as the highest revenue period for a GSC game.
It sounds like the proposed DRM for Stalker 2 would make modding much more difficult. That would be a shame if so, because I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of some of the mods for the Stalker series.
:(
Awww :(
I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the first Stalker and always hoped they’d manage to recapture that in a more polished product down the line.
Aww, crap. I’m a big fan of the series and this is a huge bummer.
I’m currently in the rationalization stage.
I’m not really sure where they were going to take STALKER 2 so I can’t say it would’ve been another all-time favorite. But I would’ve liked to see it.
I think GSC has given us three “platforms” to play in the Zone for years to come, thanks to modders. We’ve got the semi-linear awesome original, the manshooter, and the open world shooter. Hopefully we’ll continue to see major content projects (not merely graphical enhancements).
Speculation in the RPS comments:
6th paragraph says: employees are speculating that the closure is due to either Grigorovich being unhappy with the way the development of STALKER 2 is going, or due to an interest being shown towards the company by a certain (doesn’t say which) law enforcement agency for the past 2 months.
Sounds like par for the course corruption stuff…
It won’t be the FSB, who are Russian, as GSC are based in Kiev. But in either country, you can’t be successful without having to pay a whole bunch of bribes.
Oh no, now I’m getting my hopes up that this is all some big trick to get away from corrupt Ukranian officials, and they’ll all move and reopen somewhere else.
Even if they don’t, think of all those little Stalker-creating minds percolating out into the industry. Not sure that isn’t more of a gain than Stalker 4.
Unless they get to be project directors, I doubt it will help much.
Sad news - I’d love a new stalker game - especially if its because of bullshit like corruption, which is unfortunately rampant in some countries yes.
It isn’t. We need more open world first person shooters in unique settings. That’s much greater than whatever minor influence a few individuals can have at each developer they end up at, building more of the usual.
Yes, more open world games with decent shooting mechanics, please.
Get out of here stalker!
sob
Worst news since looking glass closing down as far as I am concerned…CoP is in my top 10 games of all time…
I wish CDProjekt would relocate them to Poland, hire them all and continued work on Stalker 2…one can dream.
Well, it sucks for them, and I did admire their open-world FPS design, but since this was the game that was going to hold most of its data server-side I was never going to buy it anyway. Hope they all get better positions at new companies.