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#103 THE ESSENTIAL CTP2: BEYOND THE PR STUFF (PART 2) MarkG takes one more day to say his peace on the attitude Activision should take towards CTP2. #104 MICRO FOCUS IN CIVILIZATION KILLING CIVILIZATION III Jason Beaudion surfaces to share his thoughts on micromanaging in Civilization. #105 PORTRAIT OF A WEBMASTER DanQ responds to eight of the most sought-after answers from the Apolyton administration. #106 A LITTLE ADVICE FOR CIVIII AND CTPII Sirotnikov dispenses his advice on how to make CivIII and CTPII better than their predecessors. #107 STRATEGY OR SIMULATION? Alert from Glak: why he believes that the style of Civ games is not strategy at all. COLUMN ARCHIVE

Gaming companies for the most part follow a tried and true economic model of trying to produce a hit game. This model has various stages.

Stage one is the announcement of the game. Since most game companies solicit very little feedback from their fans, that makes this just a simple marketing ploy. Stage two is the preview of the game. This first look is usually around the time when the game is entering into a late alpha stage of the game. The preview is usually carried by one or two of the gaming magazines and several of the on-line gaming news sites. Since people cannot buy the game yet and it could still be year from hitting the store shelves then this too is just another slick marketing ploy. Stage three is almost invariably a visit to a well publicized industry trade show to show off a beta of the game. This is just pure hype and corporate machismo. Once again, more reviews of the game pop up. At this point, the game is drawing closer to becoming a reality.

So far, the game has been hyped for over six months by the time it makes it to the trade show. Stage five is the media blitz. The official website is up and running, gaming sites have had interviews with the game’s designers, advertisements have popped up everywhere, news has been leaking out from the beta-test. The game is close and marketing is reaching a furious pitch. Then one day the game goes gold and it will hit store shelves in around a week. The game has now been hyped and marketed for over a year (a decade in daikatana’s case hehe). Then the game hits store shelves. All of the marketing will pay off in the next three weeks. A new game will almost invariably debut on the sales charts high and then rapidly fall off the charts. If it is a special game of great excellence then it will defy the trend and stick around. If not, after over a year of hype, the company puts the game to pasture to die in the back corners of store shelves.

Games are invariably hyped, this is the trend and each game has a marketing budget. Once a game comes out though, if it is not a best seller then it any further work done on the game is a waste of money. I for one like the hype more than the games, in the past year and a half I have only bought two games (Starcraft and SMAC) but I check out at least five online gaming news sites a week. However, after all of this hype most game companies do not put much more effort in a game, unless it is going to have an expansion. If a game isn’t going to have an expansion then support for the game quickly wanes. The simple fact is that vaporware is much easier to hype, once the imagination hits reality then it becomes difficult to re-hype a game. So what this means is that games do not get adequate patches or new scenarios or anything, because it doesn’t make that much more money for the company. Many will say that the quality of the last game will effect their purchase of a new game, and they are correct. However, for most of those who have vowed not to buy a game because the last one wasn’t patched, the new marketing campaign will sucker them in and they will buy the sequel.

So what we have is a large number of games that because of market pressures do not get the support they need to survive for very long. Very few games stay around for very long, and even fewer games stay around for very long when they are not supported. Two games that have stayed strong for years are Civ2 and Starcraft. Two games that have not gotten the supported they needed to stay around are SMAC and CtP. Civ2 is a special game. No games as old as Civ2 (that I know of) has such a strong following, and support for Civ2 has been as much about cashing in on the game as it has been about keeping the game alive. The thing about the expansions to Civ2, besides MPG is that for what they add they are not worth the price.

The completely free scenarios available for Civ2 are great and the Civ2 expansion packs usually just cashed in on the Civ2 gravy train. This is not the kind of support a game needs. Civ2 survived in spite of its support from Microprose. Starcraft on the other hand has received excellent support. There have been numerous and timely patches for Starcraft. Each week there is a new map to keep interest in Starcraft. Then most important of all, Starcraft has battle.net built into the game. Having battle.net built into Starcraft has given it unprecedented longevity. Here is a simple example of that fact, for the month of January 2000, Starcraft was the seventh on the list for top selling games. Seeing as Starcraft was released in 1998, this is amazing! Battle.net has also spawned ladder seasons. Because of ladder there are now professional gamers in Starcraft, most Starcraft players know of the famous ladder player Xd`S~Grrr…, Agent911, Maynard, and many others. Everything Starcraft has done in terms of game support has been the right thing to do. It is a model that has worked. Nearly two years after Starcraft has came out there is going to be a new patch for it, one that is only a balance related patch.

SMAC on the other hand has had its up and its downs in terms of support. Many of the things that happened early on were true missteps by Firaxis, but they seem to gotten their act together now. I even have hopes that a Firaxis will release a SMACX 3.0/SMAC 5.0 patch, but I am not holding my breath. It seems like SMAC has joined the ranks of dead games. The biggest misstep for SMAC was having the AlphaHQ.net not be included in the built in multiplayer options. They didn’t even include hotseat in the release version of SMAC, for a TBS game that is unacceptable. In addition, the PBEM option needs to be more polished and simpler to use. SMAC is a great game and with the proper support, it could still be fighting for chart dominance.

Using the Starcraft model since it works, here are a few things firaxis could have done differently. One is of course build AlphaHQ into the game. You click on AlphaHQ and it takes you into a site hosted by EA or the Zone or Heat.net or whoever but still, one click from the game menu to be in a room with others wanting to play multi-player is essential. That would have increased non-PBEM tenfold maybe more. The other is, if they had of done a faction of the month. This would have increased traffic and interest in the game. SMAC is easily modified and this would have been an excellent support service for SMAC. Maybe with Civ3 firaxis will do some of these things.

As for CtP, in terms of support it looks like it mostly had downs after a patch or two. Apparently Activision moved from CtP to CtP:2 development quite rapidly and CtP suffered because of that. For CtP:2 Activision needs to adopt a completely different support model; they need to make sure they don’t leave CtP:2 out to die.

In conclusion I would just like to say that with all of the time spent hyping a game that companies should spend more time keeping those games alive. Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, said in a CNN interview that by the end of the year only 20% of the code for the Sims is going to be what was on the original disk. Firaxis and Activision needs to buck the trend and give excellent game support to their next games. The bar has been raised on gaming excellence, besides hyping the game for years, to have an A+ quality game you need to support it for as long as the game remains alive. Just because a gaming company kills support for a game doesn’t mean that people don’t still love to play it. Look at Civ2 it is a perfect example of that. Too many games are left to die, and that is tragic.
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