Is CM dying?

[Steiner14]

Kineas,
I also have the impression, I would almost say the conviction, that the CMx1 community was larger. Much larger.

But if that was the case, what was this whole going realtime good for, if it did NOT result in a larger community? Where was the good business decision, if the old system with only WEGO attracted more players than the new system with both?

Steve claims CMx2 was so successful. But the forum post count does not really support that claim. The Blitz and other community pages do not show more activity than CMx1 but less.
So where is this huge success if more players have stopped playing than new players have been attracted?

Is this a way to prosper if the community shrinks?
And I believe, that the true state of the community, is not seen because of their model of releasing content after content. IMO this camouflages that the development of the engine is very slow. In fact so slow, that hardly new players can be attracted and kept.

I believe, the acceptable sales numbers are not a sign of the fast development, but are a result of a loyal fanbase, so eagerly waiting for every improvement, that they can sell even the modest improvements. But to attract new players, bigger steps would be necessary. What is enough for the ever shrinking hardcore fanbase to buy every title, is by far not enough to attract new customers.

[TimoS.]

I think it will grow now. When you look back at CMBO and than CMBB was a Huge Leap forward! Was the Best Title out there for Cmx1

I agree that they keep the fanboys and the Rest just fade away. Also i think that they made some Decisisions for Balance. They say otherwise. There isnt that Big Diffrence on Weapon Systems i think. But the same goes for Pointwise. A Tiger gets every 3rd Shot a Weapon hit and is useless but the Pointcosts reflect that. Same goes for the MG42. Looks like they nerfed it again.

Playing King Ludwig. Have setup 2-3 MG42 and 34 with Tripod and they have good Moral and all and shoot at running British and should supress them. But there arent as much Kills as someone would suggest. The Brits shoot their Rifle 2 Shots and i got a Casualty.

Sometimes it feels rigged. And i cant get rid of the Feeling that this Game is sometimes a tad UK/US Biased or that the Diffrence in Weaponsystems arent that greatly modelled.

Just my overall thinking.

[kineas]

Around 2007 Steve/BFC just wanted anyone to embrace the new system, the realtime mode and the 1:1 representation was all the rage. Old fans who preferred turn based gameplay and abstractions were simply disregarded by the company and eventually left.

Steve said several times that creating new CMx1 type games just would lead to bankruptcy. So they came up with this modular-model which must be successful because they are still around.

I first believed in the 1:1 representation but now I think it just doesn't work. It's far too costly to develop a product like that. In the meantime practice also showed that the realtime format is... not ideal to everyone, so the WEGO mode is more ore less acceptable now.

I don't really follow CMx2 so others may have more up to date info.

[Panzer Lehr]

I started CMx1 right from the beginning in 2000 and before that I was playing Avalon Hill games starting in the early 80’s. I still have a shelf of maybe 30 Avalon Hill board games all-collecting dust now. All I play now is CMx2, which I play almost daily, as I did with CMx1. I have done all this wargaming pretty much exclusively with my old college roommate and my best friend of over 30 years and soon to be my brother-in-law. The point I want to make, is that with all this wargaming going back over 30 years, I just recently joined this club. The first wargaming club I have ever joined and I talked my friend into joining to.

So for my part the community is growing, not dying! I love the CMx2 games I look forward to it involving, expanding, improving and I will keep supporting Battlefront for many more years to come (I hope). They have given my friend and I so many years of enjoyment and believe me I don’t miss playing Panzer Blitz by postal mail at all!

I think that it is totally awesome that CMx2 is on TWITCH now where I believe a younger generation will discover it and hopefully embrace it as we have ... http://www.twitch.tv/ChrisND

[Steiner14]

kineas,
although I like the 1:1 representation, I agree. I somehow have lost that out of sight. It was not necessary and nobody in the community has asked for it or lamented about the three men representation.
To make 1:1 work, they needed lots of manpower for it. And now they have the problem, that they don't have enough resources to keep the 1:1 anmimations up to date!

If they would have stayed at their roots and kept the symbolic representation, imagine what they could have done graphically to attract new players without destroying the grown traditional fanbase!
This 1:1 thing probably is the reason, why many highly wished features cannot be done: 1:1 seens to be the reason why the filesize was blown up so dramatically. And that has a direct impact, how easy it is, for example to make full battle replay work. Or that online multi-multiplayer takes too much bandwith, while symbolized action would take only a part of it.

If I recapitulate the consequences of 1:1:

No action spot system or much smaller ASs - The AS were a problem for me but I got used to, but from the many comments of CMx1ers, it seems to be an important reason why a decent portion of players was lost only because of that completely undemanded "progress".

Better animation - with today's cheap possibilities to make motion capturing on your own, we would already have hand to hand combat. If they would have been clever, they would have developed a system that allows the community to make the animations. They would have been able to just provide some necessary stuff, while the community would have turned it into eye candy. What huge amount of manhours that would have saved?
But cool animations are so attractive for the broad mass - and we hardcore wargamers also enjoy them, when watching the replays, don't we?

Full battle replays. Imagine the impact on an already much bigger community, if full battles could be shared - and analyzed! Want to see how the winner of tournament or the leader of a ladder plays? It makes me angry, if I think about that destroyed possibility thanks to this unwished and unnessesary 1:1 thing.

No replay for realtime mode.

Turnbased multi-multiplayer in PBEM with 5, 10 or 20 players - and probably even online.

An interactive UI, that takes newbies by the hand and leads them into the complex system. Generation Facebook doesn't read manuals.

Probably higher framerates giving room to

Graphics effects like depth of field, haze, maybe even HDR?



Count the impact for the average customer of all this together, and it's obvious why the community has been shrinking.

Thinking about it brings old memories back, why I was fascinated from CMx1 in the first place: not it's realism! That was experienced later, when I got interested. What made me interested was the - for that time - incredible graphics that made me visit their homepage. I did not come from board gaming. I believe it was a winter landscape screenshot with a tank that blew me away.

So if that was already a big factor in 2000, nice graphics today matter even more.

And all that without any costs of less tactical realism, without worse ballistics! Much more time to focus on developing the game firther instead of making the 1:1 thing even work. Until this day.


That 1:1 design decision was awful and you are probably correct, it broke the camel's back. The more I think about it 1:1 seems to be the a key element, why the community has been shrinking instead of growing. It has been eating so much resources to make it work and now it's like a concrete block to keep the graphics up to date. The graphics of the tank riders are the proove, that they lack the resources to make it look good.
What would impress new potential customers more: the non existent animations for tank riders and the feature "tank riders", or a cool animation of symbolic three men climbing on a tank or jumping down?

If I put myself into the shoes of Charles, the programmer, this must be hard. Really hard. You have a designer who almost all important aspects did get wrong or has made decisions that are a huge burden to develop the game further easily (realtime, 1:1, user interface). But then in the forums he is lamenting, what he wants in the game and has ideas for coming decades, but sadly all that takes so much time or is not possible as "Charles told me".

[DB_Zero]

When CM was first released the dot-com centered around the PC, web and other PC related equipment was in full swing. The 90's was the golden years for PCs and PC based games. You had Spectrum Holobyte, Microprose and a number of other games companies that were doing well.

PC companies were making and selling lots of PCs.

If you were young and ambitious you went into the PC centered tech industry. I was at ground zero for all of this.

That has changed. The generation that was a part of that has grown older and the newer younger generation is more about the social media, mobile phone and app world. To them PCs are quaint reminders of a "older generation". No matter how good or up to date my tech skills are I would never be hired by most if not all of the new dot-com version 2 companies. Too old in their eyes. So I have found a home in a different industry using cutting edge technology-but not in the Silicon Valley area.

Like my time and generation most of these new dot-com 2 companies will eventually die and only a few will survive and the young generation who's skills and talent are so sought out will find themselves out of work and out of vogue.

The financial industry and VC's who dump millions into these companies will suddenly stop doing so. They know that if they pump 100 million into 10 companies only a few will eventually be viable and the rest will die.

It's called the "creative destruction" process and its the way of Silicon Valley and its been that way since the microchip was first developed.

Once thriving PC game makers who were so hot in the 90s are nothing but memories. Janes, Microprose, Spectrum Holobyte all gone.

BF and CM has to survive in that reality. Its a PC based simulator in a world where the ADD, instant gratification, entitlement younger generation believe that the PC is something their parents used and really isn't cool. The iPhone or Android and the apps that run on it is whats cool.

You're barking up the wrong tree if you think you can get the entire younger generation into a PC based simulation that requires deep thought and doesn't provide instant gratification. Not all younger people are like this as I play against many younger player who are very good and enjoy this, but it will never be like 1999.

[s_cm]

Very good post. Most people don't like this kind of games, so it's good that BF is still around and keeps producing games that show some improvement year after year. Even if they don't have resources to make everything possible that some people would like.

I'm quite happy with the game engine in CMRT. Of course the trigger system is just in beginning and there are other features like CoPlay I'd like to see added, but thinking how things were when CMSF first arrived we've come a long way.

[Steiner14]

If that is true, wouldn't it be even more important to make the entry into the game easier? Or offer good graphics/animations? And a fast development of the engine? (multiplayer comes to mind). 1:1 prohibits all of that.

[DB_Zero]

If that is true, wouldn't it be even more important to make the entry into the game easier? Or offer good graphics/animations? And a fast development of the engine? (multiplayer comes to mind). 1:1 prohibits all of that.

The game your describing already exists. Its Company of Hereos. I spent many hours playing it.

Take a look at another game Rome Total War. Many of us expected Rome Total War 2 to build on the classic. What we got was a simplified game that was designed to appeal to more entry level players. That just angered many long time loyal fans, myself included.

Put aside the bugs and the fact sieges are a joke and broken beyond what appears to be repair.

WTF is the magical abilities? That may appeal to the World of Warcraft crown, but really does that belong in a serious simulation? The Barbarians get the same siege equipments as the Romans. What with that?

Real time play with the ability to have replays on demand and multiplayer would be nice, but that isn't going to make or break it for me. Can't speak for others.

At least with WEGO. I can watch, play and do something else as opposed to be tied down to the computer.

The day BF simplifies CM for the masses, starts adding magical abilities and giving instant gratification to appeal to the masses will be the day I stop buying their product.

Its a craft beer in a mass produced market.

[Bradley62]

I frequent BFC forums daily and there are many new members on the forums. I believe it is growing with every BF release as anyone in this niche recognizes the quality of game (bang for the buck) that we're getting. The engine is so far ahead of CMx1 and the old Close Combat I loved when I purchased my first PC. CMx2 has effectively replaced all those old beloved games of the past. Perfection? No, but you can see all the work that has gone into their more recent WWII games as they continue to improve and build upon the base engine. It's a great time for WWII tactical wargaming