I don't know how accurate that list is. Considering steam still fails to authenticate, servers get steam error messages almost by the second etc., I doubt it's reporting correctly for cliffs atm.

Nope

Bingo!

I hope your right about those sorts of game making a come back.. But I free the no brainer X-Box generation will allways outnumber them

oh my bad i forgot Novalogic the guys are still selling Comanche 4 on their website btw

@Ace of Aces some brain cells will never be recovered i agree
consoles are here to stay and the success of ModernWarfare3 with a engine older than the gamers is not a good sign.

I wanted to be a little bit optimistic there is some bright spots.
While we have fewer games available, some of them are the best ever made.
RoF is currently the best WWI game ever made, CoD/BoM will be the best WWII game ever etc ...
while the average quality is tumbling we have several jewels arising and CoD is not the only one. ( latest total war : shogun, comes to my mind)

So true.. sad but true

Agreed 100%

Yes.. we have come a long way since Dynamix's 1991 Red Baron! But that game will always have a special place in my hart! ;)

Agreed 100%.. And appears it will NOT be limited to just flying.. It has the potential to be the holy grail of games some of us have been talking about for 20+ years.. A game with it's main focus on flight simming, but includes FPS stuff for the targe.. I mean tankers out there! ;)

So in essence, quality over quality! I can live with that! ;)

.

Its a battle simulator, i say this as the aim was to accurately depict what being in a battle feels and looks like as well as showing its true pace and nature, i feel it nails this 100% for infantry and vehicle warfare making it far from mainstream FPS, its like the difference between Birds of Prey and IL2 Cliffs of Dover.

I'm not saying it's a bad game, I like ArmA 2 and have all the expansions for it - it's not a sim though. ArmA 3 might take it a step further but ArmA 2 felt a little too... virtual.
It did a good job with infrantry, was okay for vehicles. But the Choppers and planes were a joke.

But then again. Think about it like this:
ArmA was 90% of the time an FPS. You had a mouse, a keyboard and you ran around and shot at things. You didn't need, and this is the important difference, ANY additional hardware. You didn't need a joystick, rudder pedals, a seat for simming, steering wheel, shifters etc.


The biggest issue todays sim games have are:

1. hardware requirements (yoke, throttle, sticks, pedals, wheels etc.)
2. little or zero support for multiplayer and community interfacing
3. boring and time wasting campaigns (unemotional, unsatisfying)

Hardware and interfacing should be obvious. Campaigns are a big problem though. Most games have decently written stories and campaigns these days. Sim titles however are just a joke. It's not hard to make a mission where you take off at airport A and a flight of X planes is heading towards you and you need to intercept. For the reality lovers such missions could be done in like a day or so by most skilled people here on the forums. But a decent campaign with voice overs, cut scenes, emotional twists and turns... a vivid living story... that's hard to achieve.

So the consequence is that the genre is unattractive to many players simply because the games are bland and boring. The fidelity of simulation DOES NOT MATTER. See World of Tanks. Totally unrealistic crap but players play it in the thousands and dump LOADS of money into that "game". In that case it wasn't the good story but the not-time-wasting gameplay and the multiplayer interfacing.

There's loads of examples but if the sim genre wants to survive they need to tune more than just their sounds, damage model, flight model or whatever.

There's not an inherent problem with niche markets, as long as you are the only big fish in the pond.

Having said that, there's nothing wrong with venturing into other platforms, to expand the market for your product. And one untapped field is the growing Linux community. Make a port to that system, and the starved Linux base, which uses 'wine' to play regular pc games if it can, will buy the product out of sheer gratitude.

I run linux myself and I highly doubt that linux would be the best platform to pick when playing a game that needs to interface with tons of additional hardware.

Linux is a great market for casual games though.

talking about linux, Gabe Newell was very unhappy of Windows 8 and he's now personally in charge of the forthcoming Steam platform for linux