Commentary: IL-2 Sturmovik: Reflections on the Past and Questions for the Future

While we wait for Dart to complete his review, here is Tom "WLINK" Cofield's opinion piece on the roll-out of IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover.

http://www.simhq.com/_air13/air_499a.html

Can't disagree with your 7 points one iota.


Wheels

Good article, sums up my toughts almost exactly.

A well organised and structured piece. Hard to accuse this article of soft-pedalling.

'Fiasco' is exactly the right word i.e. the serious-comic-serious nature of it all.

Ben

WTF were they thinking. Failure to prepare is preparing to fail. The project leads, or those responsible for development, QA, and PR, deserve to be out of a job.

Good summary to this point IMO. Small shop with people whose strong suit is with coding and graphic development. Good business management is conspicuously missing.

Pretty straightforward. No sugar coated BS.

Tom has another piece up today, which is a review of what we have as newly-published "alternative offering" to CoD:

Rising Sun - Phase 2 (built on the Strike fighters engine)
http://www.simhq.com/_air13/air_478a.html

- It is a good read that puts things into perspective.

Well done Tom. Honest, straight forward and no BS as all SimHQ articles.

Level headed and 100% spot on. Agree completely Tom.

Right on the money. Can't argue with it. This speaks for the community.

Glo

Well done, but by this time certainly not news. Like Tom, my hope is based on ten years of great IL-2 experiences. No guarantees, but the hope is there. 1C, I know you can do it.

Good job Tom, sums it up rather nicely.

But the real question is why did the release happen this way?

Jason (of 777) talked about his meet with Ilya in the RoF forum when he visited the RoF devs.
This occurred just before the Euro release of CLoD. Could you imagine that meet? One guy riding
high on a successful product, the other...must have been forced to do something he didn't want.

The article imo is realistic and fair, it is just about 2 weeks too early!, so that the first patch, that isnt a shot from the hip, isn't reflected by it.

Someone send Tom "WKLINK" Cofield some cheese.

IF the patch is all that they say it is then I will be more than happy to put out another article. I don't have anything against the game or 1C, Lord knows I have been one of their biggest fans since I first saw the preview of IL2 10 years ago.

As for the other post, I don't drink.....whine......

I agree completely. Good articel. You hit the point Tom!

I agree 100%

sadly something went very very wrong some time ago with the Ciffs project management

From the article:



Do you really want to say that 1C, Ilya and Oled wanted to release a buggy game? As I'm no native speaker, I'm not quite sure about this.

Hi All

I have to agree with this article. Balanced and makes many valid points which I think most (apart from the swivel-eyed apologistas) would agree with.

It's a real shame that an article like this could be written on a subject that we are all so pationate about. The concept of this sim was brilliant. The implementaion - less so.

Anyway - well done Tom and many thanks for this.

Regards

MTB

Nice article. I agree with Tom's analysis 100%.

It's trend I suspect Ubisoft is trying to bomb a release on purpose;
To get out of PC gaming all together. Or kill PC gaming, because of
The monies they lost to piracy. Ubisoft has been making alot of bonehead
Decisions as of late.

Fair article. It really does read as a comedy of errors. Every mis-step resulted in the exact opposite of what a proper release should do.

Instead of stoking anticipation and interest the pre-US release events fostered negativity, doubt and speculation about what was and could be wrong with the simulation.

I quite agree with the observation that Eagle Dynamics took the right approach by making the beta available upon pre-order.

I still have a measure of confidence that CloD will be rescued à la Rise of Flight; but so far it's hard not to feel disappointed.

I am a fan of the cock-up before conspiracy theory. Or to put it another way, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". The world is full of conspiracy theories that just don't make sense, yours is one of them

You need to understand that Ubisoft and 1C both are both profit driven organisations. Why would they deliberately sabotage their own profit potential? It would be far simpler to just not get involved in the first place.

Agreed, which makes the mistakes and cock ups even more hard to understand. I mean they should know what they are doing right?

Eh...no

Balanced article and in hindsight pretty unbelievable if you see it displayed like Tom did.

We got flimflammed and bamboozled! Well, at least the Russians did. After the game was released in Russia
we all knew if was unfinished and full of bugs. I got the Russian version anyway just to see how porked it was.
Unplayable, as expected. From then on I saw the whole thing as a paid Beta. Bought the US version two weeks
ago and I can play the game for about 15 minutes before it crashes. I'm still happy with it. It looks better
than anything I've ever seen before in a WWII simulation. Il2 has now become a bit dated. They're working
on fixing the problems and I keep my fingers crossed. If it all goes to hell I would be more dissapointed in
the loss of the potential of a new game series than the loss of the $43 I have vested in the game so far.

The Russians got fooled,they pretty much bought the game unseen. The rest of the world knew what it was getting
into. So, lets all hang in there and give them a chance to fix it before we put anyone on a train to the Gulag
or in front of a firing squad. It worked with Rise of Flight. That game went from unplayable, on my 4 year old
computer, to a whole lot of fun even though I'm not a rabbid WWI fan.

Only thing that still fathoms me, in light of the IL2 name continiuation. Why did they change the qmb so drastically?
Il2's qmb was almost perfect. What they have now is not intuitive at all. Hope they change that. If the series expands
and get's more theaters and aircraft, the current qmb will just not do.

I purchased the boxed version a week ago, but holding off on installing until the next update is
released. I want my first impression to be as favorable as possible, and I've already waited this long.

Hi Tom,

all in all, I can agree with your article. However, some critics:

1. The Il-2 Demo was great. I loved the spinning P-39 (which we all know, was as for other A/C later ironed out due to whiney protests). However, at the known state od CoD and the obvious pressure to create cash-flow, a demo would have been suicide. I write this as the boss of the accounting system of a company, not as as a gamer. A demo wouldn`t have made ANY sense.

2. Being here on simhq for more than 10 years (combatsim refugee) and "knowing" many of the members here since Il-2 days, I never understood why many folks thought, the US release would be any different from the rest of the world. We had, at least in the West, always the same game. That said, I didn`t understand the delay either. Only explanation I have, they didn`t want to release the completely borked Euro version in the US and had to produce new DVDs with the patched version.

3. It seems that the EURO version was available all the time short time after EURO release via one US based flight sim shop. You could have joined our struggle, if you really wanted

4. We all know, the past is always better. Being a calm guy, I don`t recall the flaws the original Il-2 had. If we`d search simhqs archives, we for sure will find heated flamewars abbout what Oleg did wrong or right

5. I think, when Il-2 came out, sims, and especially WWII sims, were already niche products. IIRC we had Rowans BoB ( which brought me to simhq) and CFS3. I liked BoB, but when I got the Il-2 demo, I joined immediatly one online-squad and never looked back. So, IMO, Il-2 was part of a economically down niche, and was the revival of this niche. Microprose, Dynamix and Lucasarts, all the old heros, already had left the building at that time.

I can't disagree with anything Tom has said but frankly its old news. And just as frankly, repeating the old news doesn't help the future of a venture that 1C are trying to put right.

Over at the 1C forums we are looking forward to the next patches and yes, it may take several more months to get it right, but I hope Tom and the other reviewers that have understandably given this game a rough ride, will give it a fair, positive and loud review if 1C manage to get the game properly on track. It isn't the first game to start out badly and recover. IL-2 Sturmovik was reputedly like this originally although apparently not as bad. Having said that I am able to fly Cliffs of Dover without any problems. There are all the faults that Tom has pointed out but it does actually work within its current limitations and even with them its on-line popularity has grown since the USA release.

So, watch that 1C space.

klem

@Kilosierra: WW2 sims were at peak when IL2 came out -Fighter Squadron, CFS, CFS2, EAW, Nations, BoB, Jane's WW2F, Janes's Attack Squadron all were released in less than 3-3,5 years prior to demo IIRC, the market was flooded with them

One major dislike i had to this review was the <stereo-type button on> typical "look at me, i am american didn't you know" flavour thrown in.

Yep, you may be american. You may have gotten release a long time after the europeans.... But if anything, that should have been a bloody big thank you.

You heard the whining, you saw the posts.... At least you were warned of the state it was in. We europeans weren't.

But the reviewer missed out something VERY VERY VERY IMPORTANT.


I agree with the majority of the post and as a seasoned IL2 follower from the initial boxed version of IL2 through all its incarnations until 1946 - i was eagerly awaiting CoD.

But me, unlike the reviewer saw the pit falls and didn't purchase it.

So the reviewer blames UBI 1c for a buggy release....

Who is really at fault.???
I will tell you who is at the baseline of such rubbish being released...

Its us... the public. For ages now we have been purchasing buggy games, not kicking up a storm about it. The reviewer himself said that he knew of all the bad reports but still told the publishers that its ok to release such crap by purchashing a foreign version of the game.

Until we the public stop buying crap, we will still be fed crap at our table....



So to surmise.... The reviewer should have pointed one nasty finger at himself as well as at others as depicted in his review.

Ah, the old "point a finger at me and you're pointing 3 at yourself" deal?

After what they've done to the Clancy series of games, I don't really have much faith in Ubi anymore. Their problem has never been recognizing a good game, it's how they act with the follow-ons to those successful games that is their weakness...they seem to never know the right way.



The Jedi Master

Not sure what you mean by the reply.

But we are to blame for the way publishers release games. We are so keen to have the latest on day one of release before everyone else that people pre-order, queue up for hours to get a game not knowing what its like.

Ubi is synonomous with rushed and unfinished releases.

Lets take the silent hunter series.

Silent hunter 2 was a great game.
Silent hunter 3 was a visual masterpiece at its time. But had many many bugs, and loads of missing features. Even after the patches, it took 3rd party modders and years of time to get something better and more stable.

I stopped bying silent hunter there as i felt i was burnt by version 3.

But what happens next, silent hunter 4, Yeah looks great but buggy and missing loads of features. Ohhh guess what, silent hunter 5, loads of bugs and missing features.

Where is the problem. A load of die hard sub sim fans keep buying the product pre-release or on day one even though they #%&*$# about the state the previous version was released in.

Where is the logic in that. All that tells the production company (in this case ubi) is that its ok to release crap becuase us the stupid public will buy it anyway and then bend over and cop it hard.

So... if we can show some adult behaviour and not impulse buy .... then production houses will start to learn very quickly...


Simple really.... But my faith in people falls short in this department.

So again i re-itterate.. I have no idea why the reviewer purchased the product without a demo knowing all the bad publicity that was around. He only fueled the pockets of the company and wore a hole in his trousers were they repayed in kind whilst bent over a desk.

Some comments about comments.

I bought the North America version [sic] an hour after it was released at Best Buy so I could run back to the house and report what version, DRM, install methodology, and other information that had not been communicated. Even though it was believed that Steam was required for all versions, it was not confirmed, AFAIK, until I started-up the install and it could actually be confirmed. Again, it said TAGES on the package, but not any reference of it requiring Steam. That lack of communication -- and other basic information expected from the publisher were sorely lacking. Hopefully by advising what is included in the NA release, and what version it is, since it was absent for pre-purchase, allowed the buyer to know what to expect, and what not to expect. We were supposed to get some review copies of the NA release, but when that didn't happen, we purchased it.

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3345521/In_hand_Cliffs_of_Dover_North_.html
http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3347993/1.html

What TC did was not a review, but a commentary. Old news? Probably so, for a couple of different reasons, but I would still argue compiling the events leading up to the NA release has value for those who haven't followed the story blow-by-blow.

Same as SimHQ has done with Rise of Flight, DCS, and other titles, we will report on CloD's evolution.

I was in Frys Electronics yesterday and I saw Cliffs of Dover on the Shelf. There is still no mention of Steam being required but the Tages DRM warning is still on the box. I didn't see a version number either.


Wheels

its good to see simhq reviewers being a bit more critical again, and not just talking up anything that has a commercial benefit or gain (which never had been the case in simhq's early years, but since their mishandling of the RoF storm of negative feedback it seemed to have become the new "management style")

regarding the CoD recent points, most are well balanced and (regretfully) accurate. it does overlook 2 important points however:

1) in recent months it has become clear that Oleg for the last few years has not been involved in hands-on managing the project himself anymore, and had handed most of the project management to luthier who clearly wasnt up to the task (/me puts on flame proof suit in anticipation of luthiers usual tirade of insults directed at anybody who raises something negative about him/il2). its maybe not "nice" to put it that bluntly, but what else can be said about it ? luthier might have many good qualities in some of the other work he did in/for il2, and might be a close personal friend of oleg, but in managing a project like this he was clearly wayout of his depth. if oleg had stayed hands on and managed it himself on an ongoing basis this bungled disastrous release NEVER would have happened.

some blame does have to be directed at oleg himself however, and mostly in the procrastination department. it was initially a good decision to not just release CoD as an advance version of the il2 game engine, but from that decision point onwards many years of procrastination went by with the new gfx engine. their modular game design is innovative and has its good sides, but if the gfx engine itself is seriously flawed the whole project falls over.

2) aside from those glaring issues (which not many here seem to articulate), ultimately the blame lies with ubi for forcing a fixed release date on a project they must have understood was unfinished and buggy (or information might have been deliberately been withheld from them by luthier/oleg so they didnt know exactly how bad things were). oleg himself referred to his frustration with ubi's uncompromising forced release date in some of the youtube discussions shortly after the russian release, and voiced his frustration and disgust on ubi's stance. sadly there is further blame for luthier in this again, because as the project manager he would (or should) have know in what terrible state the end product was when ubi put its foot down on a release date (with the risk of ubi cutting off the money flow, and issues of contractual obligations)

the main issue they need to fix IMMEDIATELY in order for some hope of salvation of its long term survival:
- a major gfx engine overhaul/replacement
- fully working multi core cpu use
- online multiplayer fix
- a working truely dynamic campaign engine
- flightmodel bug fixing and plane performance tuning

personally the only hope i see is for oleg to come back and manage this project himself, there really isnt another solution

I'm sorry, but I need to say something because your comments are not correct.

1.) Luthier is a long-time friend of mine and you are smearing him with no proof or knowledge of what really happened that caused the less than stellar release of CLOD. Oleg didn't hand Luthier anything. Luthier was asked by 1C to try to finish the project after Oleg was, depending who you talk to, relieved of duty by 1C or he quit 1C. You make the call. Luthier is making the best of a bad situation and he is a good guy and from what I can tell a good manager. My point is you can't blame him for the release or bad decisions that were forced upon him by others. He was given 12 months to correct 6 years of bad decisions made by others. A good analogy is blaming me for every decision made regarding ROF before my company took over. Coming from someone who had to take over a not so great situation I know what he is going through.

2.) Again, you see to blame Ubi for all this. Why don't you ask 1C if $8 million and 7 years was enough time and money for a team to eventually be held accountable for their work and produce a product? Ubi is not quite the monster they are being portrayed as. Again, see my comments about Oleg's departure. Only Duke Nukem' can have a never ending dev cycle and hell even that got released eventually. Bringing Oleg back isn't going to solve anything. 1C loves when you blame Ubi. 1C was the day to day manager and owners of IL-2 franchise, not to the mention the primary funding source so why aren't they held accountable? Some of you hold Oleg and 1C up like some sort of gods and people who can do no wrong which is foolish.

I'm not going to say anymore, but what you've said about Luthier isn't fair to him. There is no need to be an Oleg or 1C apologist.

Jason

There is obviously a lot that went FUBAR during CloD development and not much is to blame on Ilya - so far I agree with Jason. But:

When Oleg was still there external input was valued and communication - even the tiniest bit of it - was ensured. I, personally, spent over two years researching and creating the german unit list and their emblems and markings and I was told the Maddox Games coding gurs were both pleased at the load of information and dismayed (since it meant more work for them ). But since Oleg departed there is a silence far more complete than in space, in fact there's more light coming out of a black hole than info coming from Maddox Games. I don't know what the issue is - I was given an internal document by Ilya shortly after release to fix a number of minor issues with the german unit list and the emblems and markings, but despite me sending the docs and links five times from my mail account and trying to get it across via three different people there has not been the slightest indication Maddox Games has received them. And after so much time (I sent it in April) I have trouble believing that it never arrived - I am actually beginning to think Ilya does not care about external input. Other people have reported the same, some even complained about a new somewhat contemptous attitude towards externals. Jason - I know you're good friends with Ilya, but I have to say that during the last 3 months he has managed to alienate a number of people who spent considerable time (and in cases considerable money) to produce content for CloD and who are now suddenly in the dark whether all that effort was wasted or not.

Jason, if you really have a solid friendship with Ilya I really ask you to tell him what is brewing in the community. A lot of people who were quite prepared to cut MG a lot of slack are pretty fed up and angry right now. And I am one of them.

Thanks for the insight Jason.

@csThor: I'm sure everyone will agree that your contributions are a huge benefit to the whole community. I appreciate them very much. I don't want to defend luthier, but one can surmise that he is in dire straits now with trying to repair some fundamental flaws in the game engine. It's like he was in charge of designing and building a ship, and after the ship was launched with a design flaw in the hull, it is leaking badly. Now he has the unenviable task of redesigning the hull and rebuilding it while the ship is underway. Under these circumstances it's quite understandable that we don't hear much from luthier.

Thx for your comment Jason, interesting read.

Points 1-5 in the list of errors are the same stuff I have been saying since the very beginning. No information, no media (i.e. screenshots and game videos), no press, no promotion, Ubisoft 11th hour publisher, 11th and a half hour announcement of release date. All that sums to an unfunded, unfinished POS, which is what I have been saying from the very start.

These are the things you don't do if your game is ready to go and well-funded. Like I said, most of you don't know jack about the video game industry whereas the commentator obviously knows his from a hole in the ground.

Thor, it seems your main compliant against CoD has always been lack of ability for TD to influence the game. It should never have been released with the IL-2 title, and I hope its years before MG abandon it to TD.

I love having historically correct in the game, but right now, the flaws are much greater than unit logo's and correct planes.

I work in the QA field and the only times I have seen stuff like this happen is NOT when QA fails at their job, but rather when QA is ignored in favor of 'time-to-market". Do you honestly think QA would be so blind to miss all this stuff?

No, you're reading this totally wrong. I started researching for what was then SoW-BoB and what is now CloD well before Daidalos was even created, in fact years before I had even heard of them. My work for TD is totally unrelated to what I was talking about in my previous post. TD is strictly Il-2:1946 and will remain so.

And as to flaws ... I agree, the engine has more serious issues than the unit errors, but I can provide the necessary information and graphic files to fix them whereas I cannot help with fixing fundamental coding issues. And the unit situation was already one of my main peeves with Il-2:1946 since I value a decidedly historical style of playing ... to me the right units with the right planes wearing the right livery are very important to my personal immersion.

csThor, I agree that it would be nice - as a contributor - to hear a word from Luthier, or someone delegated to reply, about one's contributions. I sent them photo documentation they had requested on the Tiger Moth and Gloster Meteor (!) and never heard from them...

I would tend to agree. I am also one of those guys (I delivered to MG some documentation about the French/German airfields, hangars, towns, harbors and railways), and I am not angry, but a bit disappointed, as maybe 5% of what I sent has really be used so far, and with errors, due to lack of feedback from developers toward myself). I understand very well that more pressing issues need to be solved, and I am still willing to help when the time is right, even to do some stuff myself for Luthier's sake. I suspect I will have to wait a good while, but if in the end it can work out, there will not be only the insignia which will be historical :-) )

given your commercial link with luthier and your stated personal friendship, i can only interpret what you say as being aimed at minimizing blame for luthier, while shifting all the blame to oleg ( who isnt present to defend himself). the only new fact you are bringing is the 8 million figure, all the rest is speculation

you say that luthier was handed the unfinished project 1 yr before release, which takes us to the point in mid 2009 when oleg was posting at 1C that he had a fixed release date of november 2010. the project then slipped pasted this nov/dec 2010 date and was then eventually released early in 2011

so when ubi (and/or 1c) put their foot down and gave the the uncompromising ultimatum of a fixed release date 1yr ahead, how did oleg react ? [admin edit] likely some years will go by before we find out, but that is much more likely then your spin of putting the sole blame on oleg.

another piece of the puzzle we are missing is what exactly happened mid development that caused the lost 2 or 3 critical years which became the Achilles heel in this whole CoD project ? time wise this is the period we know oleg fired some people, or some left on their own (taking part of the code ?), oleg restarted the whole gfx/game engine from scratch (and coincidently the RoF project made a miraculous giant leap forward, which is unexplained to this day). are all those facts linked, its all speculation at this stage, but those missing years caused the whole delay mess that landed us where we are now.

additionally, with luthier being oleg's trusted sidekick during earlier years of il2 development and with the 2 being close friends, AND with luthier being asked by oleg to help finish CoD a couple of years ago (when luthier paused his own korea project), when oleg then suddenly left when ubi/1c wouldnt give him more time, luthier would have been about the only logical person the project could have been transferred to (inside their existing team). now the question that arises is, knowing the various good skills and contributions luthier has made to the il2 series, did/does luthier have the project management skills to pull of what oleg knew could not be done to oleg's exacting levels of quality ?

luthier took on an unthankful task to try and finish it, and tried to do so under very difficult circumstances no doubt, but he didn not success, its a giant mess. to try and blame oleg for those failures while he wasnt managing it anymore is not very rational


Admin Edit - Don't go there rootango.

Let's keep the comments on topic folks. Please move the other discussion(s) here: http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3376372/1.html

I couldn't have said that better myself.. (The article...)



This I did not know....Explains a lot though..

Whatever rootango. I tried to give some insight into what happened so some people would stop dumping all their dissappointment on Luthier. My point is that he is not solely responsible for everything that went wrong and you guys should cut him some slack and give him time, like they did for us and ROF. There are a lot of Oleg fans out there and rightly so he brought you IL-2 which is great, but he is not a god. Something went wrong and I know a lot of the inside story, but what I said is as much as I want to divildge. The sim development community in Russia is quite small and a lot of what I have posted here is widely known in the Russian sim community. 99.9% of us westerners don't speak Russian so we don't pick up on it.

As for you insuating that the ROF team stole the IL-2 code to make ROF that is a serious charge and is way off base. Over 40 people were hired to make the ROF engine fromscratch and the original investor spent millions of dollars trying to make a sim. Hence, the teething problems some of you refer to. Our engine has nothing to do with IL-2. Originally a small group wanted to make a game using the IL-2 engine, but they didn't like the treatment they received by MG so they went and found a new investor and started everything from scratch. They even dumped the models they had made to make sure they had nothing to do with IL-2. Our engine has made a drastic leap forward in the past 2 years because of the hard #%&*$# work of a small and talented team and a supportive community and nothing else.

Believe me I wanted CLOD to be a huge success and help, along with ROF, WOP and DCS to show the retailers, publishers and potential investors that sims were a resurgent genre, but it's troubles have made that a little more difficult for all of us.

Anyways, I'm done with this topic. Take my words however you want. I have a new update and airplane for ROF to release. :-)

Jason

I'm sure we all would like to know what happened to the early years of development post-46 release that seem to have been totally wasted, but I doubt we'll ever get the real story. As Jason said, it's a small community of coders over there, and if someone talks it won't be hard to figure out who it was and that person risks being booted out. Probably not worth it to them unless they don't care about burning bridges.

There's no way they can convince anyone CloD is 5 years of work. Maybe there was that much research that went into it, but I've seen alphas of games that have had less than 2 years of development in better shape than CloD's Russian release. Aside from things like 3d models, textures, and the info people like csThor and others here have provided them, it really seems like the main code running the game was started no later than 2008, maybe even early 2009, with heavy previous code re-use. By comparison, the video on the 46 DVD (which came out years earlier) shows SoW:BoB looking, frankly, better than CloD does in some ways now. That is the part that is hard to take. If it looked like THAT back THEN, why do we have what we do NOW? Where's THAT code gone?

I think the new Il-2: CloD name is actually very apt, because instead of this seeming like the first title in a new series, it seems like the last title for an old engine that was pushed too far. Look at the last major release using the Quake 3 engine, MOH: Pacific Assault. Sure it looked better than any previous Q3-engined game, but it didn't work well. By that time the Unreal 2/2.5 engine had taken over and Doom 3 was already out IIRC. You can only take an engine so far before it breaks, and that's what CloD feels like. It needs a major overhaul, not tweaks, to make it what it looked like it was going to be back all those years ago.



The Jedi Master

How does Tom really feel?

A good fair (not)review.

It might have been good to include that Eagle Dynamics went through the same sort of trouble with LOMAC and learnt from their mistakes.

True but 1C should have learned from some of their errors as well. Whirlwind of Vietnam and Theatre of War should have taught them something.

DCS is a small company and not tied to a large publisher like Ubisoft. Their pressures are different.

Yes, well ... but you obviously do not realize that 1C (the mother corporation of Maddox Games) is a juggernaut that rivals EA in size. Which means big company, many beancounters, little "tactical freedom" for MG ... so to speak.

Thor - I agree 1C Company aren't small but I don't think they are in EA's league in terms of size. Last I read was 1C was about 800 people (with majority in non-entertainment software, so like EA then ). All of EA is about 7500 people now. MG seemed to have a bit of tactical freedom in not releasing CloD for six years too?

EA owns a big chunk of Softclub (I don't remember if if was a majority stake) and 1C merged with Softclub. So they are indeed part of the EA universe. Hows that grab ya?

Jason

Ah, so that clears up a misunderstanding. I was only told (via grapevine) that 1C was a very large corporation. Anyway, the big change came about 1.5 to 2 years ago ... a timeframe we all recognize, don't we?

Heh, if we wanted to put facts to one side (it's late/early for me here) then we could say this is a joint EA/Ubisoft baby. Anyone else remember the movie The Omen?

By Russian game publisher standards it is the only game in town now in Russia. It's a virtual monopoly and they have not been kind to my company or team unfortunately.

Jason

Wow, so it's JUST like EA!



The Jedi Master

Nice review