Who Killed The Sim Market? - By Mark "Frugal" Bush
I don’t think that there’s any doubt that the sim market is in it’s death throes, the question is “Who killed the sim market?”. Personally I think there are a number of factors. One of the overriding factors being that the publishers are in this business for 1 reason … and that is to make money. This fact seems to upset a lot of people but a part of being grown up is accepting that the world doesn’t revolve around our wants or needs. Let’s face it, why do you drag yourself out of bed at 7am in the morning and put in 8 + hours in a job that you may not even like? Pure and simply to put food on the table and a roof over your families head. Some of us are lucky to have jobs we really enjoy but we still need them to pay enough to keep the wolves from the door.
Why should game company employees be any different? Yet as a community we seem to expect them to work tirelessly to produce the games exactly the way we want them regardless of the implications to their business. So B17 2 is a year over schedule and now they want to drop multiplayer so that they can get paid ……. Damn those capitalist bastards you’d at least expect them to sell off a few assets and go hungry for a few weeks in order to make the game we want. Ok so that’s taking it to extremes but you get my point.
As a community we tend to be very demanding, probably more demanding than any other section of the gaming community. Look at Falcon 4, ignoring the bugs this was the most ambitious and most accurate sim ever when it was released but many weren’t happy. There were complaints about the flight model, the avionics and the campaign. The avionics were probably the most in depth ever in a flight sim, they were far advanced compared to Falcon 3 and yet some were not happy. The campaign was the most ambitious ever attempted in a flight sim and again many weren’t happy. The flight model was fairly good although not as good as Flankers but again many weren’t happy. Don’t get me wrong Falcon 4 was released half finished and much of the criticism was deserved and I will speak more on this later.
I don’t remember a sim in recent years that hasn’t come under heavy flak from the flight sim community. Janes F15 sucked because the FM was poor and you could land upside down, Flankers 1.5’s graphics sucked, Falcon 4 sucked in lots of departments, Mig Alley’s terrain sucked, Flanker 2 sucked cos it had a dead world, B17 2 sucks because there’s no multiplay etc etc etc. These are not my thoughts but they were all real complaints in the newsgroups and forums. With these kind of comments coming from your target customer base its small wonder that few companies want to produce sims. So did we as a community kill sims by being too demanding? Well I don’t think we helped the situation, neither do I think we killed the market.
One of the factors that led us to where we are is the amount of companies that jumped onto the sim gravy train flooding the market. A few years ago we had so many sims released at once that something was gonna have to give. In one short period WWII Fighters, Fighter Squadron, EAW, Combat Flight Sim were released for WW2 fans. There were several F/A-sims, too many F22 sims to count and a batch of F16 sims all fighting for a slice of an already small pie. I’m sure that sales of all of those titles suffered as a result. This likely sowed the seeds for the current situation.
This may shock you but I think Falcon 4 was the fertiliser that was spread on those seeds to enable them to sprout and grow. The original Falcon 4 development team was made up of mainly inexperienced programmers. This led to Falcon 4 being poorly coded in many areas and very overdue. Gilman Louie was bought in to save the project (which was very nearly scrapped). Gilman was able to get Falcon 4 back on track but there were a lot of problems and it was still under threat of being cancelled. Add to that a community that was putting a lot of pressure on Gilman to release the damn thing. I’m not sure who made the decision to release Falcon 4 but the moment they did they unwittingly set a chain of events in motion that may have led us to where we are today.
Falcon 4 was quite simply not ready to be released. This led to an outcry from the Flight Sim community and sales of Falcon 4 suffered as a result. The Falcon series has always been the king of the sim crop and Falcon 4 was expected to be a best seller. So when it didn’t sell well alarm bells started to ring for all the publishers creating flight sims. Game publishers, like a lot of other businesses, have a remarkable knack of blaming their errors on the market rather than on their own mistakes. The conclusion was formed that the market for hard core flight sims has diminished.
In response to the apparently diminishing “hard core” market publishers came to the conclusion that Sims need to be more accessible and so started to dumb down flight models and avionics, look at Gunship and Team Alligator for examples of this. As a result of these games being more “accessible” they sold less (hands up all you simmers that want dumbed down accessible sims ……………… hmm I don’t see many hands). As a result of these lower sales many publishers decided to pull out of the sim market altogether.
Another big factor is that despite loads of market research, game publishers don’t really understand what we want in a sim. Not surprising really considering we don’t really know what we want ourselves. Look at Falcon 4, we wanted to be “just a cog in the wheel”. We didn’t want to have any control over the campaign strategy or any effect on the outcome of the war. What does that give you? It gives you a seemingly random list of missions that you can select with little motivation to continue a campaign in the long term. After all, why do most of us play games? We play to win and if you take away our ability to affect whether we win or lose you chip away at our motivation for playing. Far more fun can be had from a well-designed TE where you definitely can have an effect on the overall objectives. Also hands up all those people that hijack flights and reassign them to more strategically worthwhile targets ……………. Hmm I see a lot more hands went up that time ……. So perhaps we did want control over the campaign strategy after all.
Another example is the multiplay in B17 2 (or rather the lack of it). There was a huge outcry when this was dropped, but the more I think about it the more unsure I am of just how worthwhile this was going to be in the first place. One of the things that make B17 2 such a good game is the ability to switch between stations. Spend an entire mission in the rear gunner’s position from start to finish and you may have different ideas about the merits of 10 real guys flying a mission together in the same B17.
The last factor as far as I can tell is lack of marketing. Many sims have had little in the way of marketing in recent times. Anyone that saw B17 2’s positioning at last years E3 can attest to that. Only Microsoft really put on a big show of their flight sims and funny enough both Combat Flight Sim 2 and Crimson Skies have done well in sales. Also EA/Janes didn’t bother to show any flight sims at ECTS in the lead up to F/A-18’s release. Falcon 4 was heavily marketed but unfortunately the shoddy state of its release was equally well publicised.
So what about the future? Is it all doom and gloom for us simmers? To be quite honest I doubt it, as many have said before these things are cyclic. The same thing was happening several years ago in the role playing game market and now we are tripping over rpg’s. Once the last few sims currently in development are released I suspect that we will go for about 2 years without any hard core sims. Then someone will see this gap in the market and will create a serious flight simulation. Having been starved of a new sim for a couple of years we’ll all rush out and buy it. Those sales will start cash registers ringing in the eyes of many a publisher and before we know it there will be several sims in development again.
In the meanwhile there are many talented and dedicated people enhancing the sims that we already have. These tweaks will keep us going for some time to come. Falcon 4 is a completely different sim to the one that was released 2 years ago, and with the upcoming Mig 29 addon from F4 Alliance you could call it 2 whole new sims :o). Many people are creating new campaigns and theatres for Falcon 4 too. There is a new campaign for Janes F/A-18 out there, and European Air War is constantly being updated and enhanced.
The bottom line is that now more than ever we need to be a community united in our resolve to keep this hobby alive. We need to put behind us all the talk of my sim is better than your sim and all the other petty squabbles. In the words of President Whitmore from Independence Day,
“We can’t be consumed by our petty differences any more. We will be united in our common interest. We will not go quietly into the night, we will not vanish without a fight, we’re going to live on, we’re going to survive.”
Lets face it, we have F-16s, F/A-18’s, Flankers, Spitfires, Comanche’s, Longbows and more at our disposal. More than these though we have a dedicated and talented community that loves this hobby too much to let it slip away. Like the proverbial Phoenix we will arise from the ashes.
