Having bought SB Pro PE four years ago in 2006 I can't help but feel a bit sad about what could have developed into a popular state of the art tank sim game with large community and thriving multiplayer activity. Instead things seem to have stagnated with no remarkable growth in sales, community and popularity at least in my view.

Back then I made some suggestions on how to increase popularity and sales but to no avail.
It almost seems eSimgames want's to keep things small and unpopular deliberately.
Here are some issues that in my view are sapping ,and have sapped, the growth of this basically fantastic game which still deserves more attention than it gets:

1) The price. Back then I stated that some people who are still serious tank fans refuse to pay $100-$120 just for their principle. A discounted price for limited time would have surged vast amount of sales. Selling 1000 copies for $120 isn't as good as selling 10000 for $60 I would reason. Result would have been surge in size of the community. Personally I know (and knew) at least half a dozen potential buyers at this price. Current $100 sale still isn't enticing enough.

2) 8-player limitation. This is like people paying $120 and then treated like some Trial/Demo version downloaders. I can't really figure out why in the Lord's Year of 2010 we are still stuck with 8 and how can any sane person make a case against larger player count. Many online teams that would/have adopted can't even fit in the same game session!

3) Lack of ANY playable OPFOR tanks. This is also really serious handicap. I really can't figure out how this can be that hard to do as not even the vehicle interiors are necessary. T-72 info for example is largely public domain. They could have even hired somebody to do it for free. Sadly the only reason I can figure out that the military customers aren't interested in OPFOR so therefore no PE customers deserve such indulgence.
And in 2010 there's still no playable OPFOR in sight, only vague promises or not even that.

4) The $30 upgrade. This dropped out many customers including me. Why pay more in addition to $120 when the 8 player MP limitation is still there as well as no OPFOR vehicles of any kind whatsoever and the community getting even more split by the upgrade which didn't concentrate on key issues PE customers were really hoping for.

5) The SB 2 hassle that proved to be hot air. I'm not pretending to be smart but I stated back then that SB 2 should be forgotten as eSim Games is small company and making another 'commercial' sideshow would just waste resources as SB Pro PE already was "the real thing". The result of this dance was that many people decided to wait SB 2 instead of buying SB Pro PE despite obvious signs it would never come out. Glad that the devs now finally faced reality.

6) The dongle. OK protection in 2006 is a bit outdated in 2010. Online actiovation is much more convenient and also effective method of protection as demonstrated by DCS:Black Shark and FC2. This should be developed for next updgrade/version.

7) The initial attitude towards SB Pro PE. At first thigns seemed so serious and PE customers would just receive stuff stricly meant military customers and nothing would come out for PE audience itself. SB 2 would have been the "fun game" and PE only "serious business". But with 2.5 I see positive signs that eSim is also taking direction to more fun with providing training-wise useless old tanks.

You may take all mentioned above as a rant but honestly I'm just trying to look at the past mistakes and figure out how to make this awesome tank game come out of the niche bog and appear into sim gamer's monitors all over the world.

In short, how to attract more people towards SB Pro PE:

- Remove 8 player limitation
- Add OPFOR tank
- Reduce price at least temporarily well below $100
- Embed best comminty scenarios to the release
- Include single scenarios with some background story in briefing and meant to be played in order as some sort of "campaing"

And eSim want's to do someting even more radical:

- Release stripped-down version of SB Pro PE without some vehicles & maybe some advanced features as SB 2 with typical PC game retail price, eg. only playable Leo 2, M1A1 and T-72.
- Provide compatibility with SB Pro PE
- Add things mentioned above (Remove 8 player limit, OPFOR tank...etc)

All good points... but I play the game/sim for what it is...not what it isn't.


Just like with any other game... IE: The Battlefield Series, if you expect to see that as a true tactical shooter you will be disappointed... but it's a great game for what it is, a run and gun shooter.

If you expected GRAW 1/2 to be like the original GR, you were sadly disappointed, but if you looked past the name, the game itself is a fantastic tactical shooter, just not GR.

If you look at SB Pro PE as a video game for the public, you expect those things you mentioned, along with shadows, built in game browser, and a campaign,,, but if you look at SB Pro PE for what it is, a homework, take home simulation for tankers... that eSim Games was nice enough to allow gamers to buy, with that understanding... then it delivers.

JMO of course... I see your points... but now, do I mark you down as the first and only person I know NOT to like SB Pro PE and regret the purchase, or just sharing an opinion.

Gerhard's observations can hardly be disputed from the end-user's perspective. Unfortunately we have to balance it with our business model. 95% of eSim's annual turnover is made with work for our Army customers. We don't want to give up at least an OPTION for consumers to have a look at modern tanks though, otherwise the rational decision would be to drop SB Pro PE entirely. So this is an element of passion for the subject matter that we allow to cloud our decision-making.

The eight player limit makes sense from a technical point of view when you look at the peet-to-peer network architecture. Only a small minority of people actually have the upstream bandwidth that is necessary to keep the connections to more than seven other computers alive and with reasonably low lag. For those communities that grew beyond the eight player limit, we provided a special server version, just as regularly games for more than 15 or 20 players are being hosted at SteelBeasts.com - so the opportunity to play bigger games is there if you care to look for them. Groups in Spain and Germany have received this server license, and if there are more, we will eventually hand out this option at no extra cost.
Aside from this technical point and the fact that remedy is available, we also have to protect the version with which we make most of our money, the classroom version (which doesn't have a player limit, among other things).

The price point, well, I guess we could lift the fraction of PE related annual turnover from 5% to 8%, at the price of diverting a lot more energy to the mail order business which however would eat into the time business of the programmer (since you all get your copy straight from the hands of Al Delaney himself). So the rational decision here is to assign a price that covers the opportunity costs of him not programming while packing parcels.
Besides, discussing the price is moot without discussing the value. My impression is that SB Pro PE is played by our customers at least three to five times longer than a normal game, so why shouldn't it cost three times more - you still get better value out of it per hour. Buying SB Pro PE is cheaper than seven months of World of Warcraft subscription (together with a WoW purchase). It's the equivalent of five visits to the cinema, softdrinks and popcorn included.

A playable Opfor tank - yeah, everybody wants that (including us, believe it or not). But we need to find the time for it. In retrospect, this is what happened: In 2003 we started to sell SB Pro to a few army customers. Things progressed nicely, and we realized that we couldn't finish SB2 anytime soon as we had originally planned ("let armies pay for the engine development, we add the content and release that as a consumer version"). So in 2005 a decision was made to release SB Pro PE so that those who were really eager to continue playing SB with modernized looks would have an alternative to the old SB Gold, and 2006 we finished and released it as 2.251.
At the same time I did what a good salesman is supposed to do - I toured armies of a number of different countries and apparently made our case well that a cheap simulation tool could still deliver high quality, so in 2006 and 2007 we had record sales of licenses which - and that's something that we underestimated - resulted in numerous contracts for modification of SB Pro. All the things that were added between 2.251 and 2.460 were a result of that. These contracts totally ate up our development time. There was literally no hour left in the schedule to work on anything else. If we had not done this, our army customers would have abandoned us as a serious supplier because, above all, you need to be reliable and deliver on time and on budget. Without the military market however SB Pro couldn't exist.
So in 2007 I started to seriously reduce our sales activity towards the military, but that's like an oil tanker, it took two more years to come to a point where we actually found a bit of time for our internal development. The result was this vehicle import tool that has yielded this plethora of new vehicles. We always wanted to do this, we just never found the time for it because we were drowning in other work. In fact, we were too busy to even accept help, we couldn't afford hiring additional programmers because it would have ruined the tight development schedules that we just managed to whip.
Now that we have worked ous out if this, we can actually change things, and with that we may increase our developmnt capacity to a point that would allow us to work on maybe two small projects simultaneously. One of them could be an opfor tank. Mind you, I#m writing "might" and "could" because you never know what the future will bring, but at least I can say without a guilty conscience that we have consistently worked since 2007 to remedy the situation and do something about it. I'm pretty confident that you will see things coming to fruition in the next two years. We have a pretty clear idea about what we want and also how to get there. It's just that you can't always control external factors that may have an impact.

For me this has been a long time coming but I think my recent excursion into the WORLD of Tanks and the unquantifiable fluster pluck that ensues in each 10 min battle, is what finally swung myself and my comrades to bite the proverbial 88 mm.

Fact is there are no realistic tank combat simulation available and the ones that attempt to be simply fall short on the realism or are simply about as close to tank warfare as Mechwarrior (In fact World of Tanks is a pretty good remake of Mechwarrior).

Its pricey, agreed.

Its not always pretty agreed.

but after playing every thing else that is available this really is the best thing out there and it is for me the Black Shark/silent hunter/RTS of Tanking, and if your into tank warfare and not just pretty models that look like tanks then I would say this is probably for you. If you like random teams with little or no game plan and minimal attention span then I would say not.

The fact there are only 8 slots in the default version suits me fine also as I can choose who I play with and I can at least guarantee that my unit will not vanish off cross country with that time honored battle cry of "Rush em". If I choose to form a squad then we have the option to club our resources together and buy the server. What better community builder is there than working together toward a definable objective where there is a role for every one against the common enemy.

I am converted it took me a while but I am in and I am loving it.

My take here is that the price also offer a kind of buffer from the people that would otherwise buy the game and then freak out over the lack of the "uber tiger"# not being there, and having a serious following, it would also limit the immature audience.

# Not saying anything bad about german armour tech but a lot of people, at least in my experience, a lot of younger people have this idea that all german AFV's are still called Tiger and are completely immune to anything but ship artillery and the A-10.

I can't see anything wrong with the price... it is still cheaper than a trip to the local beer oasis, I require a lot more than $125 woth of good Guinnes to get "woosy", at least with the pricing here in Denmark.
Also I'm a huge fan of paying for what you get, I have nu qualm with forking over cash for updates, especially when these updates also improves the basic game aswell as brings new stuff to the party.

As Nils have also stated 95% of their revenue is from Army clients, most clients of that kind have some very clear ideas about what they want and what they need... those two don't always coincide. and it does take some skill from the consultant (Salesman IE. Nils here) to get the stuff bundled or grouped in a matter the client can accept. I also believe that

Staffan

Thanks for the answers, especially you Ssnake. Maybe situation would be different if the original Steel Beasts would have been a smash hit, like Operation Flashpoint which in turn turned to VBS1 & VBS2. In such situation consumer market would already provide enough basis for continued simulatanous developement for both and extra workforce for consumer version that is ArmA 2 series today. They probably make the 20% from military and 80% from consumers so the situation is probably reversed in their case.
Situation is also different as VBS series is externalized from consumer-oriented mother company. Who knows could it be possible to do the same with SB Pro PE with two different companies or dev teams aiming for different markets. But as you said money is coming from military in such ratio and workforce is limited so it's understandable to concentrate mostly on that sector even though it would be great to see bigger push on consumer sim market even without fancy graphics upgrades or more "entertaining" playable content.

Concerning the price, sure it's cheap even for average gamer. But sadly that's just not what people are used to pay for sim games and has nothing to do with comparisons to pub crawls, nights at the movies or World of Warcraft. It's useless trying to tell how great it is they still would not pay if it's the best thing ever. I don't think we'd suddenly get surge of Call of Duty players on SB Pro if price drops, sim gamers are a different species.

I just can't warrent paying 120 dollars for a game, even if its a sim. I can't even bring myself to pay 60 dollars for MW2 or SC2.

I thought about it, and then the old fact that I just can't spend that much on a game.. Sorry.

I was a huge fan of the Orginal SB too played that for ever.

I fully understand that reasoning, but I think you aren't weighing things correctly. You have to weigh the cost over the expected life cyle. With leisure consumer goods, that means you have to ask yourself "how long will I be playing this", i.e how long until it gets replaced by something that provides me with the same thing but better?

With MW2, there's already like four or five competing, similar or same 'experiences' currently on the market. A year from now there will be that many more, at least. So $60 on MW2 today gives you about 6-10 months max. of non-unique gameplay. Once you're done with the campaign (1 month? A week?) it's just another online shooter.

Steel Beasts has been out 10 years and the only competition is from itself. If you want an armor sim, what other choice do you have? If you don't want one(or want to go with, say, ArmA2's lever of detail for other benefits) that's fine, but if you do, the high entry price of SB Pro PE provided and provides tremendous, long-lived and unique entertainment value. Relative to this product's life cycle, the price is a steal. It's just up-front, which is unusual, and knocks your usual puchase decision mechanism out of whack.

But again, if you're 'just not that into armor', as in, you wouldn't spend, say, $40 a year for the latest and greatest armor sim (which SB was and will be for years), by all means pass.

And thus the price point serves another purpose - sparking discussions that reveal better than anything else what people consider the value that they get out of the package. I'm happy to see what I expected from the start, that those who have it usually love it, and are willing to explain why for them it was worth it. This gives a prospective buyer a good impression of what he can expect from the package, and hence there will be only very few cases of disappointed expectations whxt SB Pro is and what it isn't trying to be.