Mike Capps On The Game Biz

[Sir_Brizz]

Ironically, Brizz, it appears that you're entirely missing your point. Let's recap.

Your point: "I doubt that Blizzard games previous to WoW had any kind of outrageous numbers of player (by that I mean I'm sure they were fairly standard PC gamer numbers)."

My counter-point: Each Blizzard title since the original Warcraft: Orcs and Humans has been a mega-success.

Your response: My wife doesn't know the names of their games!

Uh...so what? When I asked whether you recognized titles like "Warcraft", "Starcraft", and "Diablo", I was making no statements about mass mindshare for Blizzard; I was honestly questioning your lack of awareness of Blizzard's products, since you made the incredible claim that Blizzard hadn't achieved any significant (i.e., above average) player numbers prior to WoW. I'm not being polemical when I say that claim is shockingly ignorant for someone who claims some awareness of the game industry.

This was never MY point, this is something you brought up. Warcraft isn't a household name. It's not like you could say "kleenex" and "warcraft" in the same sentence anywhere in the US and have everyone recognize both words. The people who know about those games are people that are interested in games like that or follow gaming, not people that watch TV all day or play Halo all day.

You don't think Blizzard, with revenues of over $1 billion, has recouped the cost of their development?

I might see what you're trying to say there, Brizz, but it's fallacious. You're putting each game project into a little box and insisting that it demonstrate a bottom line at the end of the day, but that's not how Blizzard works. The entire dev process for Blizzard is focused not just on individual products, but on the growth of teams and design expertise. Valve stresses similar goals. Both companies are massively more successful than Epic, and it's ludicrous for Mike Capps - or you - to be calling out Blizzard's dev process.

I didn't say they hadn't recouped the cost of development on OTHER ventures. The point is that the time and money they spent ON THAT GAME will not be recouped BY THAT GAME. This would be the equivalent of Intel developing the Pentium D and throwing it in the garbage because it didn't perform quite as well as they thought it would. The reason very few companies do stuff like that is because 1) it can SERIOUSLY effect your bottom line (which looks bad to investors), and 2) it is difficult to explain away why you did it (which can effect your reputation).

Look, all I was saying is that he had a point. Blizzard has done things that would put many companies out of business and yet they have been successful. That is a surprising fact. It's not saying anything about Blizzard or even claiming that they have done anything wrong. It's simply stating that most companies can't use their business model if they want to stay in business.

I'm far from a Blizzard fanboy. I detest WoW, and I've never played any other Blizzard game online. That doesn't mean I don't recognize Blizzard's accomplishment in the PC market, and it dwarfs Epic's in just about every way.

Yet you can spout off about it and it's somehow not an ad hominem... right. This DESPITE the fact that I never claimed Epic was more successful than Blizzard, I was only pointing out that making lofty claims is just that.

That's true, so let's look at it differently: Warcraft 3, after 6 years, still posts hundreds of thousands of unique players online, every single week. Even if you argue that, hey, UT might have posted similar numbers because we can't prove it didn't...there's absolutely no doubt that all of the UT titles rolled together are currently posting only a tiny fraction of the unique player numbers in even the smallest of Blizzard's officially-sanctioned Warcraft 3 tournaments - and that tournament is in turn dwarfed by non-tournament play through Battlenet and play through DotA. And all of those numbers are for a game that's 6 years old.

I agree.

You argued that Blizzard hadn't achieved any above-average (i.e., above "fairly standard PC game numbers") player numbers with any title prior to WoW, and your argument has now been shown to be utterly mistaken with respect to both sales and online player participation.

Which was indeed a silly thing to say, I'm mostly talking about the US market. I'm betting that here they have fairly standard player numbers on their older games. Fairly standard as in CoD4 numbers (which I guess are high on average, but I think those are "fairly typical" for many successful games).

And again, that is not saying anything about their business. They do make polished games and that makes them successful worldwide.

Anyway, I can't make my point any more clear than I have in this post. If you guys miss it yet again, I'll just have to give up.

Edit: Also, just because I'm interested in looking, where did you get the stats for Lordaron on Battle.net? This page seems to suggest it hasn't been tracking any stats since July 30, 2005.

 

[toniglandyl]

The disaster that was Unreal 2.
The disaster that was UT2003.

Great examples there. Fills us with confidence

well the UT2003 fiasco didn't stop EPIC from doing UT2004 which was way more satisfying.
and Unreal2 didn't make Epic forget all projects for a probable unreal 3.

that's how I'm reading it...

 

[Jonathan]

And how exactly would that be Unreal? Unreal is about the Nalis, colorful and atmospheric places on some strange planet, etc. I dont see nano black tentacle growing goths who have a weak for turkish buildings fit into that, but that might just be me

I would love to see another Unreal but but on the other hand, I'd rather not see U3... I dont believe that a true successor can be made, and it will never live up to everyone's expectations...

Nicely put.

 

[Anuban]

Meh ... Unreal 3 would do fine if Epic made it and approached it just like they approached Gears of War ... they should go to MS and get them to do the marketing and then they would have another huge hit. Now I am not suggesting that any of the folks on this thread would like it or be happy with it but who knows ... it could come out pretty amazing. I know that Epic did not expect Gears to be as successful as it has become ... an American cultural iconic game ... so I would like Epic to at least make an effort. You DO NOT need the Nali for an Unreal 3 story to work and unlike some people I think the Necris could work but I would rather see the emergence of a new kind of Alien being that brings the Necris and a Malcolm led group together to fight a common threat. I see U3 being a great opportunity to go into a somewhat different direction and merge with the UT Universe in a more meaningful way. One thing that U3 could do is finally explain the timeline of the games and finally straighten out that issue once and for all.

What is funny is how I am one of the few people who really enjoyed both UT2K3 and Unreal II. As a person who doesn't play online I had no issues with U2's lack of online mp but I can understand how it hurt the game ... I am certain Epic won't make that mistake again. But really for its time U2 was a great looking game and it had lots of variety in terms of locations ... plenty of good level design ... really interesting weapons ... some are better than a few of the weapons in UT3. And the ending was pretty damned exciting ...

As far as UT2K3 there were some really great maps that came with the game, it looked freakin' amazing, it had great modability ( some of the best maps and character models ever came out of UT2K3 ... there was sooo much content for this game it was fantastic ... ), a perfect UI (imo), and it had great sound. Sure UT2K4 improved on the formula but the basic foundation that is UT2K3 is still great and I still have fun playing the game every once in a while.

 

[IronMonkey]

The thing that attracted me to Unreal was that sense of wonderment and exploration.

And that's why a properly done Unreal 3 is probably not economically viable.

The original Unreal SP game ran to nearly 40 (mostly) large and intricate levels with a huge amount of playtime. I don't recall how long it took me to play through the original game but it was weeks of elapsed time (admittedly, there was DM as a distraction [DM was OK on a LAN]). Most modern games (with the exception of some RPGs) seem to aim for 10 (+- a bit) hours of SP playtime. 10 hours isn't enough to generate that "sense of wonderment and exploration".

I think it should be remembered also that for all that it ran like a dog on most hardware then available that Unreal really was a significant step up on previously available visual quality. That improvement in visual quality was a significant element in allowing Unreal to establish a sense of place, to transport the player to that place. Nowadays, visual quality is pretty much a given. Yes, Crysis looks pretty with all the trimmings but it is hard to argue that it does a much better job visually of establishing a sense of place than the competition. Almost all games nowadays are capable of looking "good enough".

Someone might do an Unreal 3 simply because there is still value in the name recognition but if they do then I hope that they strike out on their own and don't try to recreate the original Unreal. They shouldn't ignore the heritage but they do need to have their own vision.

A properly done Unreal 3 would be awesome.

+1

I still love that moment at the start when I realised that I didn't have even a basic weapon. It ran so counter to my expectations.

 

[Grobut]

What is funny is how I am one of the few people who really enjoyed both UT2K3 and Unreal II.

But you never did play Unreal or UT, correct?

UT2k3 was just plain disliked because it lacked known and popular gametypes and options, it felt like a downgrade of UT with better graphics (same can be said of UT3), if you started playing at 2k3, thouse things would obviously not bother you, but it did bother thouse of us who came from 99, just as you and the rest of us are bothered by UT3 not having them.

Unreal 2 on the other hand, was disliked for ofter reasons, first of all it was short, Unreal had so much more playtime, it was an epic journey (no pun intended), U2 was more of a walk in the park.
But more so, to the established fanbase of Unreal, it was such a big departure from the theme, gameplay and feel of that game that, well.. we just coulden't see the "Unreal" in it, it was just a decent if short SP game, Unreal in name only, and it was most definately not what we wanted, we wanted it to be like Unreal.
But again, having never played the first, that would not have bothered you.

And mind you, i'm not even talking about the graphics here, back then i did not have a machine capable of playing Unreal properly, i played it in Software mode at 320x240 rez and low graphic options, the graphics where never what won me over, it was the theme, gameplay and the sence of exploration and freedom Unreal had at that time that made it amazing, U2 never gave me that, it did not wow me in any way, it was just a short, and a rather bland Sci-Fi shooter in my eyes.