Pretty much echoes my sentements here gents.

Vicious I partially agree with you that the hard core gamers didn't kill the market. We didn't kill it but our demanding nature didn't help in some instances. Let me explain and this isn't a slam on anyone, well maybe on some of our more arrogent members but not on the general numbers here.

By nature these games are expensive. Even games like Railroad Tycoon are not cheap to make. Coding takes time. What makes it so expensive for us is the need to code reality. Guys that make Quake III or Doom III have a distinct advantage over the developers of EAW or LOMAC. They don't have to worry about someone complaining about the unrealistic rate of fire of the Mk1 Plasma cannon or the porked damage model of zombie 1zulu. Guys like Oleg Maddox, on the other hand, get handed loads of crap because supposedly the turn radius of his Spit V is 4.3 meters off based upon the notes some guy found on the internet. Coding reality is pretty hard and a lot of guys have given up on it.

I also think we eat our own here. We have a small group of people in our genre that feel that if it isn't full realism then it is crap and that people who fly without stalls, spins, red/blackouts/ with icons, etc. are weenies. I once got crap from a review I wrote because some of my screenies had icon's in them. Literally someone blasted me for pointing out a feature in a game. These people tend to drive away new gamers interested in playing these things.

When we all started the big games were (depending on when you joined) Red Baron, Aces over Europe/Pacific, F-22 or USNF. Compare any of those to today's sims and they could be called arcadish. Many of us lose track of the fact that these games can get very hard to get into by the newbies unless they are 'dumbed down'. Many don't even know that there are easier modes.

I am guilty of this myself. My reviews rarely talk about the ease that a new person can get into simulations with a particular piece of software. I harp on the hardness of something and it probably turns off a new person interested in playing. Most folks want to play a game, not spend four hours trying to get off the ground. For most of us taking off in a P-47 in full realism is fairly easy. We have HOTAS setups and have flown enough sims with P-47s that we know the torque effects and expect to compensate. Someone who has never flown a P-47 in a simulation probably planted himself 18 times in IL2:FB and gave up. Now if he played it a while he would get the hang of it, maybe pick up an X45 setup and a new hardcore simmer is born.

Just some observations. We tend to eat our own here.


The artist formerly known as SimHq Tom Cofield