Ace
VW Alumni
Registered: Jul 2000
Location:
Posts: 1477 |
The answer to why recent sci-fi sim games have sold poorly:
Wing Commander Prophecy-> Origin at the last minute decided to have major budget cuts, the plot was gutted and most of the massive ad campaign was also gutted, however it's a testament that even when gutted so thoroughly a game can still be good...
X-Wing Alliance-> The series is aging, with not much added, and the new features poorly used in the mission design, XWA simply did lackluster since it's fans and genre fans expected more.
FreeSpace-> One word, Interplay, the demos did extremely well, however thanks to our favorite publisher which doesn't have a clue about how to do a marketing campaign, the full version was hidden behind shelves full of buggy bad Warcraft clones... (yes, many people at offices around the world are still wondering why the full FreeSpace 2 has never come out...)
I forgot another one of the franchises left out:
Starfleet/Klingon Academy-> Starfleet academy was lackluster in a poor interface and the ships handling like fighters, this offset many Trekkies which later caused Klingon Academy's sales to dwindle despite it's fixing these errors. Of course halfway in development Interplay gutts the funding for the ad campaign, and right after the game's release and the first patch is out they fire half of the team...
Independence War-> This can be said in a very brief sentance, how many ads have you seen for I-War? None! What-so-ever, and yet it sold more copies than nearly all of the other recent space sims!
The others-> Tachyon, Terminus, and the 'rest' suffer from bad marketing, bad art direction, and they combine to bad covers and game titles. That alone can make or break a game, if FreeSpace had a picture of some weird F that looked like a crooked gear drawn in paintbrush, I wouldn't have bought it until I heard reviews. Many of these others just suffer from good gameplay that has no good plot or art direction to back it up, I mean are we really going to fly blue painted pocka-dot spaceships for ValueRep corporation in the year 30000000000ad? I don't think so...
What's needed is for a series such as FreeSpace, to push it's art and plot beyond the sci-fi genre it self's limits, and have a publisher willing to get as much funding as possible to make it look like "Hey kids, please flip off Lucas because now you can have ships 30 times the size of a Star Destroyer duke it out online, by the way our epic plot has no cheesy Star Wars space alien friends! whee!"
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Ace
Webmaster
GTXD Excalibur -FreeSpace Universe Technical Reference Site
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[This message has been edited by Ace (edited 08-04-2000).]
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08-04-2000 03:23 PM
