Dev wrote on Jan 19, 2014, 04:50:I guess it depends on if the wider casual audience that's potentially drawn in from those things being emphasized in the marketing, outnumbers the classic thief fans that are turned off by it. If they do, then they chose the right marketing strategy, from a purely business perspective.

On the other hand, if they drive away a lot of classic thief players, and fail to appeal to the more casual audience as well, then they've actually shot themselves in BOTH feet.

A thoughtful post. Agreed.

Thanks I was responding to YOUR thoughtful post, just taking what you said a bit different angle, something that popped into my mind when reading it and considering some of the things said in this thread.

Side note: I've not looked into much about this new thief game. So I have no idea if its faithful or not, or they've screwed the pooch. But given the reactions on both sides here, they aren't doing a good job with appealing to classic thief fans (regardless of if its justified or not).

Cram wrote on Jan 19, 2014, 02:32:fwiw, I agree with everything you've written here Jerykk. I'd have liked to have done the same, but I figured any defense of this game would have fallen on deaf ears here on this site. But I can't say I blame them the naysayers, the demo's Eidos decided to show us have been poor. Eidos shot themselves in the foot. They decided to focus on the new, and completely OPTIONAL, features die hard Thief fans couldn't possibly give a crap about. I believe that was a mistake, and since then everyone has drawn their own conclusions on what's happening with this game despite it not having been released and despite everything you just mentioned in your post Jerykk.

Before I get myself pulled into some post war, disclaimer. I am not happy with a couple, albeit small, changes they've made that aren't related to the optional features. But I don't think this is anywhere near the "not a real Thief game" people are making it out to be here.

I guess it depends on if the wider casual audience that's potentially drawn in from those things being emphasized in the marketing, outnumbers the classic thief fans that are turned off by it. If they do, then they chose the right marketing strategy, from a purely business perspective.

On the other hand, if they drive away a lot of classic thief players, and fail to appeal to the more casual audience as well, then they've actually shot themselves in BOTH feet.

Even though I got one myself, it hasn't been worth it The third memory channel vs two memory channels when I got mine. Benchmarks show it added like 2% to overall computer performance. Would have been much better to just get a better CPU

Even the headline is wrong. They didn't ban spying on leaders, just made them get permission first. The article even quotes part of that there's exceptions:"unless there is a compelling national security purpose." And by scaling back, yeah I suppose... if you count that he reduced degrees of separation searching from three to two. Yeah that's so HUGE!

The speech was all about appeasing the public and not really doing much else.

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Jan 11, 2014, 16:32:If the game isn't popular, the MMO model fails for most games. How popular does it have to be, hopefully their accountant knows.

That depends on how its designed to be. Like the star wars one wasn't scaled by EA to be profitable with less than a couple million subscribers, and thus failed when it didn't hit that goal. On the other hand, EVE does quite well with hundreds of thousands, and has continued to grow.

If an MMO is properly designed and scaled, its possible to do it on a good budget. Problem is, most companies think something like:"ZOMG look at WoW with millions of subs! if we build it, they will pay us through the nose too! So lets bankrupt the company making this and scale it so it can't make us money unless its millions of subscribers, and don't worry we will get tons of money from it"

Panickd wrote on Jan 11, 2014, 10:14:Steam is the money maker at the company so that's where they focus a lot of their time and energy.

That would be the logical thing to do, yes, in a traditionally managed company. But that's not what's happening.They are focusing time, energy, and money, on custom hardware, custom controllers, biofeedback stuff, optical stuff, customOS, and others. Meanwhile they are letting steam languish a bit, not bothering to to hire (or contract!) UI specialists to improve some of the very obvious crap. They used to run some very cool events in the steam sales, now its kinda boring. And they continue to have inexcusable front end problems.

SpectralMeat wrote on Jan 9, 2014, 10:20:I don't think any developer would be stupid enough to develop a game based on an engine that only runs on 30% of the computers out there.

MS has done it before when a new windows comes out. Even though it was proven later that the games they did it on actually didn't need the new windows version to run, they just pretended they did with an installer requirement.

Overon wrote on Jan 9, 2014, 17:26:Hold on are we getting excited over a tech demo that we haven't seen but only heard described by a 3rd party?

I'm getting excited over the game (star control) itself, I care more about the gameplay, not any specific rumored graphical achievements.

Suppa7 wrote on Jan 7, 2014, 19:53:What we're really seeing is a resurgance of games developers have always wanted to make but were denied by the suits. I personally wouldn't mind something well made by a dev team who understand the aspects of older games that got a bit played out due to lack of imaginative new things. But finding such game design geniuses and having them pull it off is extremely hard, it's trying to hit a target that few people can see.

I agree, and we are in a very exciting time for PC games, what with the indie resurgence steam has greatly helped bring on, and now crowdfunding like kickstarter to bring to life lifelong dreams of developers (such as wasteland 2, or many others). Thats part of why I've backed so many KS projects. Someday I dream of creating my own KS project, just need a good idea. Then again, even a average idea might work I mean come on, a creativity measuring device that got like 1000% funding and was just a glass jar with pencil sharpener in lid?

Beamer wrote on Jan 7, 2014, 23:41:It's just that PC games aren't a huge slice of the market anymore.

I disagree. Generally speaking PC games match any other single platform, just take a look at EA's financials.

They may be a minority compared to all consoles together, that's true though.

And finally, we will hopefully get some good graphical advances with the new consoles coming out. Too long have obsolete consoles held back game development. Its gotten so I haven't had to upgrade for years, not even my graphics card.

Domgrief wrote on Jan 5, 2014, 11:54:Almost 20% of surveyed machines are Russian? That surprised me.

Why? Gabe has talked before about how they've been able to capitalize on the russian market when many other publishers didn't want to bother as much with it. If you use the enhanced steam plugin for chrome, you can see the lowest worldwide prices on things in addition to your country, and it always tends to be lower in russia (even after exchange rate). Previously, many companies would saddle a russian release with tons of DRM. Steam makes it much more convenient, and valve has proven there's a market there.

Oh holy crap! I didn't think about the VAC thing when sharing your games. Man you basically have to trust someone 100% that they won't totally screw you over if you are VAC responsible for all their decisions.

I think I'd just rather buy the game for the other person than risk my 1000+ games.