Is Firaxis Just Like Microsoft?

[Chemical Ollie]

Originally posted by vmxa1
I suspect that in the days of civ2 coming out the number of people connected to the internet and downloading things was much smaller. Now it is presumed that most have access and can get scenarios from the web with little difficulty. Still many games do provide maps on their site, Hoeros IV, Disciples II and others.

I am still waiting for a working WWII scenario for CIV3, if made by Firaxis or a common user doesn't matter. In CIV2, I got it out of the box, it worked, and it was highly challenging and well balanced. Have you seen any?

[vmxa1]

Nope, but the future will be bring less with new games, not more. They gotta cut cost and it cost time and money to make a scenario, so sad. It is just like food in the store, most items have less for more money now.

[CapTVK]

Originally posted by cyclotron7


Hmm, could you point these scenarios out to me? I am only aware of CiC and FW... I thought CiC was pretty ridiculous at the time (I have to pay for just 20 scenarios?), I never saw any free scenarios. Where did you find these?

That's because they were also included on CiC. If you had checked out the Microprose ftp site at the time (1996) you would have noticed they would release a free scenario every two months or so. Age of Discovery, Alexander the Great were released this way. Later they decided to release a data disk with an improved macro language and they dropped the free scenarios (which ended up on CiC though).

[Chemical Ollie]

Originally posted by vmxa1
Nope, but the future will be bring less with new games, not more. They gotta cut cost and it cost time and money to make a scenario, so sad. It is just like food in the store, most items have less for more money now.

This is a basic question in all product development (I'm an R&D guy myself, so this is my home turf): Should we make a product that's so cheap that people will buy it even if the quality is only average, or should we make a product that is perfect but expensive? The question is not so easy to answer, but I think the latter will be better for long-term business. I think Blizzard is an outstanding example.

The optimal would of course be to make a product both technically perfect and cost-effective, but that rarely happens. On the other hand, you quite often see gaming software that is both crappy and expensive. These titles rarely reach the top10 sales of course, so the companies are automatically punished for their ignorance.

I think a game where you have spent some money to make it technically perfect will live much longer than an average game produced at low cost. A boring or buggy game will not be played, even if was cheap, and the rumours of it's low value will make it sell less.


If Firaxis didn't have the money to ship some scenarios with the box, couldn't they at least make an editor that allows scenarios so we could design them ourselfs?

[WarpStorm]

Originally posted by Olaf HÃ¥rfagre
If Firaxis didn't have the money to ship some scenarios with the box, couldn't they at least make an editor that allows scenarios so we could design them ourselfs?

Maybe because coding that editor would cost even more time and money (programmers are more expensive than scenraio builders) than the scenarios that they didn't have the money to make.