The Future of Simulations - 2010 (SimHQ)

[stormridersp]

http://www.simhq.com/_commentary/all_106a.html


Rampant piracy has killed the PC as the premier platform for game development. Whether it can live on as a niche market remains to be seen."

[TRexian]

w00t!

Falcon 4 mentioned in the 4th paragraph! :D

Granted, it does focus on flightsims, but there are some interesting points in there. Good find!

[DMarkwick]

Interesting read. I like the following quote:

Building MODELS of reality means to simplify things. It isn't our job as simulation developers to make our products more or exactly as complicated as reality is. Our job is to REDUCE the complexity of real life to the truly relevant tasks and decisions that the player must make while relegating tasks of secondary importance to the computer.

[MoS]

There are indeed some very interesting opinions stated in this article.

Personally I totally agree with this statement from Dante:

Very interesting and at the same time simple to answer question. Through a survey we ran on our web site, and knowing our customers base in a daily basis through forum input, we know pretty well that "realism" equals "fun" in this niche. The more realistic it is, the bigger is the "fun" for this customer base. It is a very different type of fun, it is a very different type of public. Having fun on realistic real-life aviation procedures could be compared to having fun reading a technical book (i.e. fun in learning, sense of achievement and challenge of mastering a very complex machine).

Doesn´t this express the feelings within all of us simmers?

[Macadam Cow]

Nice find !


Ssnake: (...) The more important task would be to create standards to make different simulations interoperable. But getting different teams to cooperate and to agree on good, useful standards is a task that money alone can't solve.

Hmmm, so it's also popping out in their minds :)
Federate the simmers all together, each parts of the sim working like a module/expansion, damn, that's my dream for the future of simulation.
My country "slogan" (don't know the proper word) is : L'union fait la force : unity is strength.

If it works for my country which is about to explode (lol) it can work for you, sim's devs !

[Richey79]

"Rampant piracy has killed the PC as the premier platform for game development. Whether it can live on as a niche market remains to be seen."

Sadly, something like a Battlefield or COD game has low value in its single-player component: if you want any longevity, you have to buy for the MP. Simulators have the twin problems that they offer hour-upon-hour of single player content and that they are competing for a limited amount of the players' free time. As an example, I really love the IL2 series, but have only been on-line with it once.

I suppose this is one of the reasons the makers of sims tend to make a much greater effort to engage with their user-communities: they are more likely to develop the games in a way their audience like, and the 'customers' will be reminded that devs exist (the game doesn't just drop out of the ether) and deserve some financial support.

For most genres, I'd say that the PC=piracy argument is complete rubbish, but for the sim genre, it's a real threat to the continued development of the games. Particularly because it's such a niche market populated by smaller publishers - every sale matters to them.

[Baff1]

How do you think Microsofts flight sim is doing for cash?
They release on the same model BiS now uses.

Lots of micro addons.

As far as I can see this game still makes money. It simply must do because they are still releasing new titles for it every month.

[Richey79]

Microsoft closed their Flight Simulator team in early 2009, sacking all but 6 devs, so I don't think it can have been massively profitable, at least on a scale that Microsoft understood as being so.

I don't think MS got any cut at all of the payware addons created by small indie teams that you could buy for Flight Sim.

MS have since restarted a new internal studio to develop 'MS flight.' They claim this has key personnel from the Aces studio (responsible for FSX etc.), but most of these had already started their own independent studio, so this seems to be stretching the truth a bit. Their stated aim with Flight is to keep the simulator aspects of Flight Sim, whilst making the series accessible to noobies. This would seem to indicate that it is tough for a larger company to make profit on the scale it wants by selling a 'pure sim.'

Some in the flight sim community suspect that MS want to create an addon market for the game that pays MS directly, or else a subscription-based online model for the game with a very limited off-line mode.