View Full Version : CMC--Word and Hope!
From the Battlefront blog--already at their new, under construction site:
"There are similar good news from the other projects as well. Combat Mission Campaigns has made a big step forward with the release of a stable Beta version to the testers last month. Unfortunately there are some further delays (again) as Bruce, the head of the project, is called off to duty once again until next year, but as soon as he's back the team can begin tying up loose ends."
Link:
http://www.battlefront-store.com:8080//index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Dusting-the-credenza.html&Itemid=203
Hot damn. And good luck to Bruce on his deployment. Anyone here testing it?
Better honesty & a late game that works than a piece of junk early that doesn't.
Wow! If I didn't know any better that almost sounds like a retraction from their recent attitude that 'cmx1 is junk and always has been and is in the garbage bin forever'.
Are we on the threshold of a miracle?:eek::surprise:
Maybe it was planned:devious:
I wouldnt get too excited here. If this guy is deployed I want to know where and for how long. Some US deployments to the Gulf are for up to 16 months now. If we have to wait for him to come back to return to CMC programming than it may be 2 years yet!
Mind you, Id probably still buy it 2 years from now.
WHAT! You'd wait 2 years for a "dead" game?
Why the CMx1 engine is dead, we'll never see anything more about it ever.
And,
Oops wrong thread... :nuts:
Sounds great- even if it does take 2 years. (must be that CMx1 loyalty or something.)
Mad Russian
14 Dec 07, 23:42
So, let me get this straight...BFC's great white hope now is a game that supports the one they say is dead and wasn't all that good in the first place.
They are pinning the development future of this great and marvelous piece of wargaming history on a single developer who is going into one of the worlds most dangerous areas for possibly as long as 2 years.
Why yes, I can see the logic in that move already. Classic BFC style business planning.
Good Hunting.
MR
I'm telling you guys... it was all planned from the beginning:D
Time tells all tales.:p
Well if these guys are trying to feed their families it would be agood thing.:(
Mad Russian
15 Dec 07, 15:28
Time tells all tales.:p
Well if these guys are trying to feed their families it would be agood thing.:(
If they are trying to feed their families after the CMSF promotion they might want to reconsider their day jobs.
I, for one, wish them luck in pulling this off. I don't see anybody else running up and trying to replace them with any WEGO systems out there at the moment.
Good Hunting.
MR
Don Maddox
15 Dec 07, 19:26
I, for one, wish them luck in pulling this off. I don't see anybody else running up and trying to replace them with any WEGO systems out there at the moment.
You're right. Because the amount of money to be made off these kinds of games is negligible anyway, so this part of the discussion is really a moot point.
You're right. Because the amount of money to be made off these kinds of games is negligible anyway, so this part of the discussion is really a moot point.I keep hearing that view but what is it based on? Does anyone have the real figures on how many cmbo, cmbb and cmak games were sold, and how many cmsf? If the potential profit off cmx1 was negligible then why was it made in the first place? Wouldn't a game company have known this before ever embarking on such a project?
As to RTS there is no doubt that it has a large audience, but at the same time there are an awful lot of those games that are in the bargin bin not long after their release. My son downloads and tries quite a few of them but most are uninstalled as 'junk', to use his words. So while some thrive, many fail. CM on the other hand still has a large and faithful audience that would still be purchasing new modules if they were to produce any. There must be some value to that. Because the company abandoned the system does not have to imply negligible profit; perhaps there was simply a consideration that some other market (military) had much more potential profit.
Mad Russian
16 Dec 07, 00:47
Or that the programming changes required to move CMx1 forward were just as great as starting up from scratch. I was thinking, like most everybody else that CMx2 would look much more like CMx1.
Before the release of CMSF, BFC wasn't telling everybody that it wouldn't be closely related to the CMx1 game system. Only after they released it did everybody see the differences.
Of course, that isn't a bad ploy, on BFC's part, for their competition. Not to announce a change of direction. It wouldn't have even been bad if the change wasn't so radically different than what was advertised...NO FICTIONAL WHAT IFs....Not going to be Modern.....etc...
Are we saying that the CMx1 game engine was good enough to make a game company and give it a good customer base, but not good enough to support that same customer base? The customer base that made it's games popular enough to generate dozens of web sites, and to have thousands of designer made scenarios for the game, that cost them nothing?
Show me an RTS/FPS that has done more than that. I'm not into RTS/FPSers so maybe you can. If that kind of support is out there I'm not aware of it. I am aware of the online gaming for such games as Warcraft. Different kind of gaming altogether. Thats a game category that wargames has competed with since D&D first came out though so that's nothing new either.
I have alot of old board wargames that were in the bargin bin when I bought them. We would bring them home and "house rule" them. Made some of them into some decent wargames. You can't do that with computer games. At least I can't.
It's hard to make a decent computer wargame too. So, why then, when you have one do you kill it off and say bad things about it at the funeral?
Good Hunting.
MR
Don Maddox
16 Dec 07, 01:14
I keep hearing that view but what is it based on? Does anyone have the real figures on how many cmbo, cmbb and cmak games were sold, and how many cmsf? If the potential profit off cmx1 was negligible then why was it made in the first place? Wouldn't a game company have known this before ever embarking on such a project?
It's largely self-evident, Lurker. If there were a serious demand for these types of games (i.e. more money to be made from them), you would rapidly see larger development houses capitalize on the opportunity. In fact, the audience for such games is so small they are almost uniformly ignored by the larger game sites. Just try to find information about Panzer Campaigns, Decisive Action, Uncommon Valor, or Combat Mission on the big sites. You won't. But GameSquad covers them and we will continue to cover them because some are very good games.
I would guess Combat Mission probably sold less than 100,000 copies of each title in the series (probably a lot less). This is quite respectable for a wargame, but barely enough for a small team of developers to live off of. In fact, most wargame developers can't even make enough money to do it full time and still maintain another job as their primary source of income. In contrast, Halo 3 made $750 million dollars on the first day. Even a beer & pretzels RTS like Sudden Strike -- hardly a top tier RTS game -- sold a million copies its first year.
Please note, I cast none of this in a negative light. I have an affinity for wargames, which is why this site does more than most to give them attention and support. But they are very much a niche product and I am realistic about that.
Show me an RTS/FPS that has done more than that. I'm not into RTS/FPSers so maybe you can. If that kind of support is out there I'm not aware of it. I am aware of the online gaming for such games as Warcraft. Different kind of gaming altogether. Thats a game category that wargames has competed with since D&D first came out though so that's nothing new either.
Oh my! You don't get out much, do you? :D
Don't make the mistake of thinking that your chosen genre is the only genre with a serious support base and loyal fans. Far from it. Sing the praises of wargames all day long if you like, and I'll sing them with you. But when you cut down on other genres like you just did, it just shows that you may be a bit misinformed what happens outside the wargame echo chamber.
And wargames "competing" with World of Warcraft and D&D? Oh my . . .
Well, "we" are still playing the game BFC made- the CMx1 versions which were & are GOOD games. Just look at the sites for & about CMx1. (any dedicated to CM:SF?) BFC talked them up & word of mouth kept them expanding with new player sites, mods & scenarios. Not bad for a web-site only sales game.
Then BFC announces a new CM (x2) yea! They never said CMx1 was dead & never to rise again. Then a completely new animal = CMx2 comes out & they say CMx1 IS dead & gone plus it's a horrid game engine to boot. And basically if you still play it (WeGo) you're more or less an idiot. (Great PR that was!) The players of CMx1 play it BECAUSE it is a WeGo system not RT. The switch in engines etc is like telling loyal backyard football players we've made it better, then bringing out a soccer ball...
CMx2 is NOT a good game no matter how you try and explain it away or how many players enjoy all the "cute" flaws it has...
Now they say (a blog...) that CMC is still on the table? Wait, isn't that for a game engine they said was already dead & buried forever? What gives with BFC, just who is in charge over there with the conflicting reports? If CMx1 is no more why CMC?
No matter how small a dev team they have or when they "work" they made CMx1 AND CMx2 so no one can say they can't do this or that because they have already proven they CAN make a good product. Problem was they went against what their core players wanted (and guaranteed future sales) with the X2 version & released it "as is."
CM:SF should have been "another" type CM game that BFC was developing, along with new CMx1 advances and not a be all & end all of the CM series.
Having no programming experience how hard is it to patch those issues of a working GOOD game when compared to creating a completely new engine like CMx2?
BFC is chasing the almighty dollar, like all 'good' capitalistic companies. They probably still wanted the 'idiot' WEGO players:bounce: but what their goal really was....is....RT gunslingers:ar15: and maybe a lucrative military training contract as well:salute:.
That's an ambitious goal but probably achieveable. Given the small staff :argh: and their skills :hmmm: they bit off more than they could chew. :OHNO::kotz::o
Then they really screw up and start bad mouthing :blab: the CMx1 crowd who gave them their start. It's pressure and they are not handling it well:shock:.
Hopefully they will pull out of this nose dive over the next year and at least make CMSF a good present day game of a boring scenario...workable. Some say you learn the most by making mistakes, just think how smart they are now!!;)
I would guess Combat Mission probably sold less than 100,000 copies of each title in the series (probably a lot less). This is quite respectable for a wargame, but barely enough for a small team of developers to live off of. In fact, most wargame developers can't even make enough money to do it full time and still maintain another job as their primary source of income. In contrast, Halo 3 made $750 million dollars on the first day. Even a beer & pretzels RTS like Sudden Strike -- hardly a top tier RTS game -- sold a million copies its first year.
And wargames "competing" with World of Warcraft and D&D? Oh my . . .Some good points Don. There is no arguing with the RTS and FPS money. It's also interesting that while the $ potential is huge, the numbers of highly successful companies in that arena are not. At least that is my impression (and not a hard researched fact, so prove me wrong someone).
The very successful companies make a hit and then follow it up with many others, while still many more efforts come and go without much fanfare. The failure potential is as great as the profit potential with those games. The key is the public for those is much more numerous than for a highly realistic wargame.
That being said, it seems strange to me that BFC would burn their bridges by alienating their current public and then striking out for the mega market, not with some exciting fantasy/scifi/psuedo-historical RTS sim but rather with a wargame based on realism that, as we mentioned, is not the big market. And to top it off it is a boring sim with very boring terrain. This kind of effort will not capture the young audience that tends to look for great eye candy and intense action. So then what market are they going for with this effort? Us, or those like us who love realistic wargames and WEGO? More likely the military.
If a company has already captured a market, and they had with CMers, then why dump it and pin hopes on a radically different approach? This shrinks a company to some degree. More logical is to expand by striking out in a new direction while at the same time keeping the current paying customers happy. So while these paying customers are not making them mega millions at the moment, it's still got to be better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, or a flop cmx2 type game with a sizeable investment sunk into it and a very unclear target market. I know my son and his friends would never give it a second look if they were up for a new RTS game. Am I missing something?
Lurker, the forum crowd has never been the core customer base of BFC, that has been clear at least from CMBB on. Apart from the fact that they are just a small minority of all buyers, they are impossible to please and have all either payed for the game already or are just there to ***** and never will pay. Nothing happening on the forum will lead to a sale or a loss of sale.
I have said from the beginning of CMC that the biggest problem will be the required adjustments to the CMBB codebase. The CMx1 codebase is screwed up and the one programmer ever having worked on it and the only one to have access is kinda busy elsewhere right now, and has been all the time.
Nothing happening on the forum will lead to a sale or a loss of sale. :crosseye: Thats a big truck load of something smelly going by. :paperbag:
Why does BFC even have their own forum then?
I want to know then just who BFC is getting all their "customer" info from that made them say, "WOW thousands of CM players want a RT-CM set in jimmied Syria in boring bland terrain with cute fun quirks thrown in, lets make that!!"
Has ANYONE ever been polled by BFC?
Lurker, the forum crowd has never been the core customer base of BFC
Who is then? By forum crowd, do you mean strictly the one at BF. Do you separate the BF crowd from the core 3-4 website clubs such as WFHQ, Blitz and BoB?
In my experience playing numerous types of games from various genres, the types of people that play CM are those that gravitate towards clubs like those mentioned. These people are generally well read, older, obvious history buffs/enthusiasts. People that play CM are not there for the looks and pulse-ponding key-mashing found in RTS and FPS.
So, if not the types of people that populate the clubs, who comprises the core customer base and what facts support such?
Who is then? ...So, if not the types of people that populate the clubs, who comprises the core customer base and what facts support such?That's one of the points I was trying to make. What is the target market for CMSF, if not strictly the military? It will not/has not appealed to the hardcore RTS or FPS types for the all the reasons previously mentioned and is also far too much of an attempt at a realistic wargame to satisfy much else than wargamers. So if their base of wargamers is told to hit the highway if they don't like it then what are they aiming at? Is this some brilliant master plan, or a colossal cluster F%#@? If they get a big $ military contract then I guess they can claim brilliant master plan.:rolleyes:
Sorry folks, but all wargame developers including MajorH of TacOps fame (who I really don't think would lie about this) say that the overwhelming majority of sales come from people who just get the game, get creamed by the AI a couple times and never, ever, talk to another human about it. No multiplayer, no forums, no recommendations, no reviews, no blog comments.
Why BFC bothers with the forum is a different question. Steve can be a real SoaB and try to discredit people by any means he learned, but it's not that he seems to enjoy it. And as people pointed out, the scale change and RT and all the other major changes from CMx1 to CMx2 were certainly not user-requested. The "all soldiers displayed" graphics, sure. More textures on tanks, sure. But otherwise people wanted bigger, not smaller battles. They wanted more than 2 player multiplay, in WEGO, in PBEM. While I have read some people demanding that the fully autonomous AI in CMx1 takes optional hints, I haven't read anybody demand that a scripted AI is the only one provided (let's leave aside that it's broken right now).
The forums are certainly a place to get beta testers, scenario designers and free (for BFC) tech support, maybe that's it?
Sorry folks, but all wargame developers including MajorH of TacOps fame (who I really don't think would lie about this) say that the overwhelming majority of sales come from people who just get the game, get creamed by the AI a couple times and never, ever, talk to another human about it. No multiplayer, no forums, no recommendations, no reviews, no blog comments. If that's the case then it sounds they are still targeting wargamers and not the frenzied mass RTS market. Perhaps they should listen to their real audience a little more.:cheeky:
I'm also curious how MajorH would know this without periodic surveys. It seems more like a conjecture on his part. Why bank on numerous such individuals buying a CM game as a 'first time try' only to shelve it if he gets clobbered. That certainly doesn't sound like a repeat customer.
...all wargame developers ... say that the overwhelming majority of sales come from people who just get the game, get creamed by the AI a couple times and never, ever, talk to another human about it. No multiplayer, no forums, no recommendations, no reviews, no blog comments. And there you have it, the real reason CM:SF sucks big time: BFC made it & sent it out the door "quickly" to make a quick buck!
They aimed the game at a mass of people who will chuck out $$ for a game they know nothing about & then will toss it after they find out it's a total waste of time. Plus as an added bonus they never have to hear from them again!! (I wonder how BCF knows what "they" want considering they will never-ever hear from them.)
Unlike "forum/core" CM players who actually discuss the game in detail about what they like & don't like about it. BFC clearly doesn't care for that "type" of player because they KNOW the game they are playing and heaven forbid they want improvements....
I'm also curious how MajorH would know this without periodic surveys. It seems more like a conjecture on his part. Why bank on numerous such individuals buying a CM game as a 'first time try' only to shelve it if he gets clobbered. That certainly doesn't sound like a repeat customer.
He does his own tech support and is on all known forums about TacOps. He knows how many games he sells, he knows how many people are on forums, he knows what percentage of people need to contact tech support before they can do PBEM (TacOps has a funky scheme that isn't intuitive to everybody). He knows that to play humans you have to find people on forums. I think that allows to figure what the majority of people are doing.
This was, BTW, the true strength of CMx1. They had everything. They had the single-player people (autonomous AI and not too bogus), the PBEM crowd using historical scenarios, the candied up TCP ladder players with QUickbattles, the rest of the ladder people with PBEM and scenarios or Quickbattles, the people who bought the game just for the OOB, the people who just bought the game for the vehicle data, the people who just used it as a slideshow with a ton of mods, the people who had no idea how to play but did awesome mods, the people who were enthusiastically digging into every bit of account from some obscure firefight in Hinterpforzland to make a scenario, and then everybody could use everybody's mods and scenarios and playability. All gone. No mods, no scenarios, no Quickbattles, no interesting OOB, tiny number of bogus vehicles you can't really select in the first place. Sigh :(:freak::nervous:
Mad Russian
17 Dec 07, 22:39
Has ANYONE ever been polled by BFC?
I was but they told me if I said anything they would have to kill me...and after CMSF came out I thought about killing me myself!!! :eek:
Good Hunting.
MR
Michael Dorosh
01 Jul 08, 19:38
Hot damn. And good luck to Bruce on his deployment. Anyone here testing it?
I was, for a little bit.
I was, for a little bit.
How bad was it at the very beginning and did they take the testers on board, or did you suffer the same, you dont get it attitude? Just curious...
Michael Dorosh
03 Jul 08, 09:47
How bad was it at the very beginning and did they take the testers on board, or did you suffer the same, you dont get it attitude? Just curious...
I expect that my NDA prevents me from saying anything about the state of the game or the internal functions of BFC. You've commented yourself on this forum on the way BFC treats its customers in open forum at battlefront. It sounds to me like you're suggesting that they talk to their own testers in closed forum the same way they talk to their customers. I'm not in a position to confirm that. I'm no longer a beta tester, which I think I mentioned. Actually, beta tester sounds kind of inaccurate, I was also designing campaigns though in my case, the one I was working on had the majority of map work done by a talented and hard-working third party who was also on the CMSF beta team with me. He's actually not posted at BFC in a long time either, at least not in public, so I wonder where he's gone to.
I think I can freely say, though, by way of answering your other question, that I volunteered to be on the beta team and was accepted. It was as simple as that. Why, I'm not sure, but my email mentioned my long involvement on their forum (at the time I had the most posts of anyone registered), the fact I had scenarios published by them (on both the CMAK and CMBB special edition releases), and had the time and interest to devote to the project.
Actually, I don't think Hunter would mind if I said he was very polite and open-minded to the input of the testers. I've said in open forums that I don't like the goofy 3/4 map view and it would be a stretch to think I was alone in that. Whether that got discussed in private, I'm not in a position to say. I can't talk about how often we communicated or how, but I will say that Hunter seemed, to us at any rate, very dedicated to the project and on hearing what we had to say. Hunter works for the third party putting the program together, however. BFC had the ultimate decision on who they retained on the project, and who they felt was being helpful.
All that aside, based solely on what has been released for public consumption on the official forum, I personally don't like the way the game looks. I expect it will have moderate success. I can't predict the backlash if the game is not any good. Some at the BFC forum still talk about preordering blind, where do I send my money, etc. Another bad CM release could kill that for good. They realize that, which is why Moon has started hedging in public, and stated that they are considering releasing the code as open source if they can't get the project together in a final form.
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