Briarroot
Usenet Poster
Briarroot@gmail.com
Posted on:
Jan 15, 2008, 4:45 AM
Post #15 of 27
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tomcervo wrote:
> On Jan 14, 4:41?am, Briarroot <Briarr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is repeated so often that it seems to have become etched in
>> stone, yet nearly every one of those sims with "20 minute engine start
>> up procedure" had an Easy Mode which eliminated realism in favor of
>> simple fun.
>
> I think the old sims started Easy Mode on default, and left it up to
> the simmer to ratchet up the realism. They also had a simple but
> attractive dashboard to draw you in. The IL-2 series has a front end
> designed by an IRS agent.
>
Yeah, not to mention a User Interface that seemingly has *no* design
whatsoever!
IL2 was the last sim I purchased. How many years ago was that? 
>> There is also the Longevity Factor to consider. Yes, I'm still
>> playing most of the flight sims I enjoyed in the 1990s. I don't need
>> a new one every year. Unlike instantly disposable FPS and RTS games,
>> flight sims have a looong life!
>
> Seen "PC Shooter" lately? That's all it is now, a lot of copy trying
> to convince you that this month's model isn't just the same run-shoot-
> boss battle as last month's. They're freaking out about Bioshock
> because it's as good as System Shock, from 1995!
>
My point is shooters are disposable, flight sims generally stay on our
hard drives for *years* not months.
Flight sims haven't been "killed" by anything within the sims
themselves, they've been killed by the tremendously increased costs of
development for *all* games. They always sold to a tiny market, but
10 or 15 years ago when development costs were so much less than they
are now, that market was enough to generate a profit for a successful
flight sim. There might be just as many flight sim fans today as
there were back then, but we've become buried under an avalanche of
millions of new PC gamers whose interest in the genre will never match
our own, no matter how simple the sims get. As far as the major
developers are concerned, PC flight sim fans are simply too few in
number to bother with now. If the cost of developing a realistic
flight sim and a typical shooter are the same, but the sim has a
potential market saturation point of only 100,000 while the shooter's
is 2,000.000, which product do you think they're going to pursue?
--
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the
blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of
misery." - Winston Churchill
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