@Frogboy: Brad can you PLEASE read & reply to your PM's from me (And Kitty), IT'S VERY IMPORTANT ! 

@Frogboy: Brad can you PLEASE read & reply to your PM's from me (And Kitty), IT'S VERY IMPORTANT ! 

@Frogboy: Brad can you PLEASE read & reply to your PM's from me (And Kitty), IT'S VERY IMPORTANT ! 

Sometimes people need to remember as well that the people that post on message boards are not the core representation of your game buying base.

We are the "hard core" of the buyers, so we tend to value polish very highly.

But Frogboy has the numbers, and likely has contacts around other 4x game makers that indicate what people actually spend their money on.

The problem with polishing Galciv3 is that the games take so looooooooong.    Finding and reproducing problems would be so much quicker if it was one of these games that was over in 2 minutes.  

Not an insurmountable problem, though--if you have good, motivated QA people to do it.   You have to pay them to get that.  And foster a good culture where QA people are respected (as in, not respected any less than the architects).

The reality is that polish takes developers, designers, etc and these people expect to be paid monthly salaries.

If you are too cheap to support the game ($7 is like 2 pints of decent beer a month) and the people who make it, thats fine - but I don't ever want to see you whine about polish, quality, etc. Because without subscription models, the frog is exactly correct - people pay for half finished features, not a polished balanced game.

It's that or allow the community to sell each other ship designs and take a clip - but then you better have a big base of players and artists.

DLC has the same problem as selling the base game. People don't pay for polish.

Yeah, polish (as long as it is not confused with bug-fixing) is a luxury with low returns on overall gameplay feeling for me. Not every item has to be balanced or interesting. Not every mechanic has to be perfectly integrated with the others. I'm ok with making an extra click on a poorly designed UI. 

I want to spit in the face of the Dragon King before I cut his head off. I want to build dyson spheres around the few stars I didn't blow up after crusading across the galaxy. I want to pay the devil's due for stealing Excalibur because the Lady of the Lake deemed me unworthy. I want to stand in my last great city and realize that not a thing can be done with so few men. I want to smile at my companions' growth and lament their passing from the Dread Plague - and I want to punish the traitor that brought it to my empire. 

If I can do that, I'll suffer an extra click or two. 

This is a very interesting post.

I readily admit to being one of those demanding customers who expects a lot from modern strategy games. The points that Frogboy makes regarding how much money these games make is particularly thought provoking for me.

What I still struggle to understand though is how come games like the original MOO, Alpha Centauri and Elite Frontiers were made by just a couple of guys for peanuts and are in many ways deeper and richer than the modern remakes that cost a fortune.

Despite the many good points in this post I still don't understand how it's so difficult to make games as rich as the onces that were being made before, just with better graphics and UI.

Alpha centauri was a masterpiece for its time, and possibly one of the greatest games ever created. It was polished - although not balanced.

That said, did firaxis ever make a profit? Who knows...

I do think that one cheap way to add polish and depth is to hire a dedicated content writer or two. They are not expensive and add loads - just check out all that juicy flavour text in SMAC that really makes the game

For me at least it's about 90% rose-tinted nostalgia glasses. When I go back to those games they aren't anything special, they certainly wouldn't be well received by today's standards even with updated graphics. The games were very well made and stood out at the time, but that's all. 

I never even played MOO or MOO2 when they first came out and played them for the first time a few years ago. Even so, and despite the dated graphics, the gameplay was still as good as any other Space 4X game I've played.

The richness of the systems, and as AdamB says the flavour text, in Alpha Centauri are miles above what was achieved in Beyond Earth. We were discussing the use of voice acting earlier, the voice acting in Alpha Centauri is nothing short of superb and oozes with narrative and pathos. That's a game from 1999.

Elite Dangerous cost millions and a large team to make, but it launched with basically no content whatsoever. You could fly around, shoot other ships for bounties, and take goods from one place to another and that was about it. You couldn't even land on planets. Elite Frontier First Encounters had planetary landings (with actual procedurally generated cities and spaceports), hundreds of different missions, and a superb storyline that ended up with you getting a Thargoid ship of your own. That's a game from 1995.

MOO and MOO2 don't have the reputation they have for nothing. MOOs UI hasn't aged well, and it's weak in some areas, but when you consider that even now full price Sci-fi 4X games launch for full price with no implementation of espionage or any tactical combat whatsoever it's hard to conclude that we've really progressed very far, apart from better graphics of course.

But I fear you're right though, those old games wouldn't be appreciated these days. I'm not sure that mainstream gamers these days would have the attention span required to appreciate them.

A lot of polish is more about temperament than money.  For example, Paradise tiles:  the website says it gives an approval bonus, the (Crusade) game says it gives a Population bonus.  It takes 2 minutes to update the website.  But--do people care?  That's what really keeps it from being updated.  Whatever monetary investment it takes to get people to care, it's probably worth it for more reasons than just polish.  

I can hire a team of two custodians to clean a 3000-square-foot space for $100.  Similar for landscaping. It's hard to quantify the return on that investment, vs. not polishing the floors at all.  Yet no one questions that that is a good one.  

Well, maybe I can only speak for myself on this one, but... I never knowingly buy a 1/2 finished game.  Do half-finished games sell a lot of copies? - sure, but did most people think they were buying a half-finished, or game that's unplayable during the end-game?  I would guess not.

Certainly, I've had my fill of less-than-finished or otherwise gimped products.  I might even go so far as to say that this is why Maxis eventually went under, and some other major studios aren't that far behind - because people like me quit buying anything from them years ago.  My last Maxis game with Spore - I waited years and years for it to be reasonably priced (since I really hadn't heard anything good about it, but still wanted to give it a go) and yea - wasn't even worth the bandwidth to download it.  My last true AAA was probably Diablo 3 - I only bought it because some friends wanted to get together and beat on things and man, what a huge waste of money, and now they think I'm going to play their MOBA instead of LOL... yea, right..

It may take a while, but studios (like any media product) that produce no goodwill ("badwill?") do end up floundering and usually in such a way that the studios themselves have a difficult time nailing down exactly why..

The only true AAA currently on my 'watchlist' is GTA5 - not really my type of game, but possibly great casual fun.  Rockstar has shown that you can still be a huge studio and still care about making quality games..  Most of the other games that really do it for me tend to land firmly in the niche/indy category, even if they are done with larger teams and established studios..

Just a thought..

This might be a game of words and connotations.  "Polish" would seem to imply obsessing over details that don't matter, like a pretty splash screen or better voice acting.  But with this game, I think of it more in terms of finishing the job.  Like doing a first-class job developing the game, but neglecting to sell it.  Or coming up with an intriguing, highly-interlocking game mechanic but failing to balance it.   Or train for a marathon, but sleep in on race day. 

I only finished the tutorial and a couple Altarian Prophecy levels, and the polish issues I'm seeing are about finishing the job.  The documentation is off in a lot of places and is not very trustworthy.  Population, tourism, and money don't matter much.  Does influence, even?  How?  They put all this time into a cool planetary invasion, but in the end, it doesn't work.  

I see this with consumer product development all the time.  When you think you are "done", you are in fact only 40% of the way there.  And that's what this is:  a software consumer product.  

Two things here:

1. In reference to "polish" - one of the biggest things that would make people's (both players and dev's) lives easier is to develop a method/system where your hardcore audience (i.e. those of us who hang out on the forums rabidly) could make updates to the system quickly and easily.  I work in Release Management and Systems Architecture, and what you folks need is some sort of CI toolchain for community "patches".  Make it simple and easy for the community to update a large number of "polish" items, and that makes everyone happy.  The simplest thing here is for textual fixes. Then XML fixes.  Yes, they need reviewed. Yes, you can pay something trivial amounts to do this, and it saves VERY valuable Dev time.  

2.  I think one of the other problems is NOT initial pricing. Without getting into things, $40-50 is a good pricepoint, and a reasonable ask for games where you expect to play them for a long time. Look not at mobile (since that has an audience in the 100s of millions), but at consoles, where $60 is now common, and stuff still sells there like hotcakes.  The audience is the same:  there are FEWER current gen consoles (~18m PS4, for example) in the USA as there are PCs that will run GC3. People have the disposable income (even well down the economic scale) that they're willing to spend on games.  

What the problem is has to do with Steam and how it's run its economics.  The very frequent sales is hurting all developers, and realistically should stop.  Games are a luxury item, and you DON'T discount luxury items until they're well and truly past their prime.  The price at release is what the price should stay at, for as long as the game exists under active development.  Sales should be very infrequent and not 75%, but 25%.  You'd end up with a far better (and more stable) revenue stream, and an audience that knows what games cost, instead of a bunch of entitled whiners who have no idea of the economics of development.  Tell me, really, Brad, since you have the numbers, how much money do you really make when GC3 is knocked down 75%?  If you could sell the game consistently at $25 since launch, doesn't that beat out the revenue for a $50 launch where some (read, just the hardcore folks) people buy it, then 3 months later have 80% of your total audience only purchase it for $10?

Games are luxury goods, but ones well within reach of 50%+ of your typical US households, especially ones that have relatively low HW requirements (let's face it, GC3 runs on a 10-year-old PC that's had a $30 RAM upgrade).  Stable pricing is far better than sales-based ones, unless you've borked your target audience so badly that they only buy on sale.  JCPenny found that out the hard way:  the retail clothes business has so trained the average buyer to only shop at sales times that when they lowered normal prices by 15% but didn't have sales, it screwed them over completely.  Steam has enough of a major marketshare to undo this kind of damage before it's permanent, but it's getting darned close to being irreversible now, and unless Steam changes, it'll screw devs forever.  

Start screaming at Steam NOW, if we want good games to survive.  

My experience:  I waited for a sale, not so much to save the money, but because when I buy, I am risking both money and (more expensively) leisure time on a game that might not work out.  Even the regular Civilization has a history of being buggy and frustrating when it first comes out.  So I wait until that all shakes out, first.  

But it really didn't.  I guess I timed it with the Crusade launch.  Now it's like the game is just enough totally awesome in just enough places to make me both really want to play and be really frustrated at the same time.  Just finished the Altarian campaign on Incredible, and I guess the AI finally sort of put up a fight then.  I beat him with my starting ships and the whole game became about researching planetary invasion so I could end it, so...maybe not....   Just finished the second game of the Terran campaign, where I was able to establish a mining starbase on HIS starting resources in HIS starting system, so can't say that fared any better.   MHO: starting starbases should be defenseless, and you should have to pay 100bc to get the starting defenses.  But you can mod that.  

But the primary issues are really not modable:  they are the economy system and the AI.  That's source code, and the source code are your crown jewels.   There seems to be this push-pull relationship between game developers and customers regarding expectations.  For example, the expectation that your rabid fan base will pay YOU to beta test YOUR game.  And that may be so, but you first have to have that rabid fan base, and that involves your game working.  Then there's this expectation that the best mods out there will do all the balancing, and that they'll be the ones that everyone ends up playing.  Two problems with that:  a) you have to code the AI toward the mod, and b ) the customers expect there to be a main trunk that's good and balanced to mod from.   So if you want to do that, you need some form of Linux.org (like Linux did) and gatekeep what goes into the main trunk.  

Now, do I want to go off and just develop my own game, then?  Nope.  Playing games is my me-time, but developing games is work.  As a full-time job, yes, I'd love to develop, but if I have another job, I don't want to come home and work some more.  Those people (who go off to work, and come home to work some more) are called entrepreneurs.