From tiny to huge, the future of gaming and potential.

[Heliocon]

I wanted to post this because I think its a good story about what a small band of devs can acheive. I played EVE-Online for four or so years, but havent been active for coming up to two years now. If you know about the company, they started out as a bunch of guys (under 15) who had a dream of making a space mmorpg. They worked the last 4 or so months before release without any pay, one of them even mortaged his parents house to get it out the door. Upon release it was a flop, hardly any subscribers. They didnt give up and kept working at it, adding and fixing content, and giving their famous free expansions including a total revamp of the games graphical engine. When I started playing server pop maxed out at 22k or so at peak time. Now they are over 50k online at peak and have I believe over 300k subscribers. They are a huge success, and icelands biggest IT company. They have offices in Iceland, UK, US, and China. This is company went from rags to ruins but what kept the subscribers and players active was the devs close community involvement and bonds, and their commitment to provide a great experience and not nickle and dime the players. They now have a seconnd MMORPG underway, a FPS aswell as eve itself and a new dx10/dx11 only integrated character system for eve players in station and inside their ships. The next step is they are linking their FPS Dust514 to eve, console players on the ground work for eve players as mercenaries. http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/03/26/ev...of-eve-online/

The reason I am posting this is because I believe there is alot in common with the IL2 series and EVE. They are both very much "niche" games, yet eve has expanded its tiny market segment into the second biggest mmorpg community in the world. Both companies have humble beginings but over time built on success and created great followings. Even more then that, if integration between different genres of pc gaming works, it works in WW2! Now I am not saying this should happen now, or even be seriously considerd. I am just trying to make a point in that COD has huge potential if the devs iron it out, promote it properly and attract a wide audience - NOT by dumbing it down, but by getting exposure and showing people who previously had 0 interest in flight sims, that they are actually really fun.

In the long run, who knows - maybe one day we will get a call over the radio requesting close air support?