Bad news: Next patch on hold

[Jon Shafer]

Agree with everything WS said.

I'll just start typing that from now on and avoid wasting typing.

 

[Sandman2003]

I agree with you Longasc. Why would we be interested in buying Civ 4, if the history of the support cycle is that it ends before the product is fully developed -
ie, fix
1) Armies
2) Subs
3) Bombers
4) Barbarians
in Civ 3 and then we might have the confidence that Civ 4 will be patched to completeness as well.

I fear that with the amount of modding that is supposed to be available on Civ 4, that actually it will be up to the community to sort out bugs!

 

[SirPleb]

The same way most copies of most games are sold. Impulse buys when people see it on the shelf. 90% of all games are bought with no research whatsoever.

Impulse buys are often based on reputation, what others have said, and what gets the shelf space. The other 10% of buys are by people who have a disproportionate effect on reputation, what is said in future, and future shelf space.

Let's be serious, since Complete will be the last stop before bargain-bin status, at this point bug fixing is low priority. Most anybody who would be aware of the bugs in 1.22f either already bought C3C or will never buy it. In either case, Firaxis loses little money on Complete sales by not fixing the bugs on it.

No but they do lose something in reputation. How much is debatable of course. And debating it serves little purpose since Firaxis get to make the final call on whether it is worthwhile. I have no doubt that there is some cost though. Shoddy merchandise always has that effect in the long run. In the past decade I've seen a couple of PC manufacturers drop from having unblemished reputations for quality to becoming brand Xs along with the other brand Xs on the shelf. They chopped quality and it caught up with them, their names aren't what they used to be. (OTOH, their bottom lines may have improved, selling cheaper stuff at lower prices. I don't know and don't care. I also don't buy their stuff and don't recommend it to anyone.)

I'd also think it would be a matter of pride at Firaxis to leave the final version of any of their games in better shape than Conquests 1.22. Why should cold logic regarding sales in the next year or two be allowed to outweigh the pride of leaving it in good shape and the long term value of a name which becomes synonymous with quality? I sure wouldn't leave something in this condition. Admittedly that may be one reason I'm not rich

 

[warpstorm]

You bring up good points, SirPleb. The damage would not be in sales of this title or probably even the next. But it would catch up eventually.

 

[Sandman2003]

Very succinctly put, SirPleb.

Though I very much doubt that your fear re bottom lines is well founded. A low quality product will not get wide community support - providing on going sales, and will not lead to a market for add ons, which of course substantially boost the product lifecycle and total sales. So if making a product more cheaply helps the bottom line, I am pretty sure that that is a very shortlived advantage.

 

[player1 fanatic]

If only just few on more important bugs got fixed I would really have no problem with this.


Well, at least FP isn't bugged.
That would've been a real showstopper.
Although it did drained out most of patch team time&money.

 

[CyberChrist]

The damage would not be in sales of this title or probably even the next. But it would catch up eventually.

You are way to optimistic - people was already shying away from investing in PTW due broken promises about the multiplayer part and even more have held back on getting Conquests due to missing patches. I don't see that this recent 'brilliant' move by Firaxis (or whoever made the decission) is going to do anything but continue this downward trend for their products - including the products they reassigned the patch-workforce to work on.

Shooting yourself in the foot may be an accident the first time, but it can certainly only be attributed to stupidity if you keep shooting.

 

[kokoras]

Warpstorm i don't know if Atari-Firaxis is a small company,and if they realy can't afford on paying more programmers to do what they sould do.If i knew what their profits were from CIV3-PTW-C3C in the last four years then i could express an opinion but for now i believe that they gained more than enough for not beeing able to work on a defected product that they have released.And who says that CIV4 will be a game without the problems that PTW and C3C had.They had the time to release 2 expansion packs in two years but they didn't have the time to make them perfect so they released them anyway,well what i am thinking is that every one wants to make money but Atari-Firaxis have changed their policy for good,and i can't accept this for several reasons.We bought a product from this company which isn't ''good''.The first thing that they sould try to do is to ''replace'' it with a good one,or fix it,and not having their mind on when they are going to release the next one, (i want to ''play'' CIV4 too when it will be released) but i can't say ok,it is not important that i bought C3C the day it was released,i managed to play it three moths later because it was practically anplayble without the first patches,and even now i am still waiting for a patch which sould solve all the problems (not talking for the lack of art work) which at the end will not be released because they intend on releasing another game!

 

[rodrigo_braz]

... but not fixing it means they promised a product without (major) bugs and delivered another (with them). In the long-term this hurts their credibility and sales. So I don't think not fixing it is reasonable, not even from their own point of view.

 

[warpstorm]

You are way to optimistic - people was already shying away from investing in PTW...

This will come as a shock to you, but PTW met sales expectations. By enough of a margin that Atari sprung for a second expansion.

 

[warpstorm]

Warpstorm i don't know if Atari-Firaxis is a small company!

Two separate companies. Atari is a large company that isn't doing gangbusters financially. Last I heard they owned the rights to Civ.

Firaxis is a small company of ~50 employees. Trying to do two AAA projects has to have them stretched very thin.

I don't know why you couldn't play Conquests for the first three months. I could and did. Were there bugs? Yes. Even a major one that wasn't in the beta. But it was still fuun.

 

[Jon Shafer]

I think the thing people don't realize is that things are basically done for Civ 3.

There are no more expansions coming.

There are no more game site reviews coming.

The major publicity from releasing a new patch would be... you guessed it, right here. And the amount of people here who care is a miniscule amount compared to the potential sales from Civ 4 and Civ 3 Complete.

Think about it this way, which would damage Firaxis' reputation the most, not releasing another patch for a (from a release standpoint) dead product that has a few problems, or having Civ 4, the flagship product for the company, be riddled with bugs and release late? Which is likely to have the most impact upon sales, profit, and ultimately, future products? Which is more likely to prevent the release of future products, e.g. Civ V?

 

[CyberChrist]

This will come as a shock to you, but PTW met sales expectations. By enough of a margin that Atari sprung for a second expansion.

My point is that what you said about poor consumer support and hurting their reputation didn't start with this broken promise about a Conquest patch, but already at the release of Civ3 without a multiplayer part. Which is also what I meant by shooting yourself in the foot - people will probably accept one bad move but not several. Once you are able to actually measure the disgruntled customers on the sales curve it is already to late (or at least very costly) to do anything about it as bad-reputation-inertia will set in.

 

[CyberChrist]

The major publicity from releasing a new patch would be... you guessed it, right here. And the amount of people here who care is a miniscule amount compared to the potential sales from Civ 4 and Civ 3 Complete.

Who do you imagine will be buying Civ4 then, if you don't think that a major part of the cutsomers for Civ4 are regular visitors here or on Apolyton?

Think about it this way, which would damage Firaxis' reputation the most, not releasing another patch for a (from a release standpoint) dead product that has a few problems, or having Civ 4, the flagship product for the company, be riddled with bugs and release late? Which is likely to have the most impact upon sales, profit, and ultimately, future products? Which is more likely to prevent the release of future products, e.g. Civ V?

Setting yourself up as a company that don't live up to the promises made and are known to release flawed products is guaranteed to hurt more than releasing a new product a few months later (not sure why the promised patch should take that long to make anyway).

I know that I personally couldn't care less about Civ4 - let alone Civ 5 - as long the record shows that they don't live up to completing the releases to work as advertised/promised. I think we - the customers - are already showing extreme goodwill by accepting a promise of a final patch which may or may not finally make the program working fully as intended/promised - nearly 1 year after release.

 

[Jon Shafer]

Who do you imagine will be buying Civ4 then, if you don't think that a major part of the cutsomers for Civ4 are regular visitors here or on Apolyton?

Civ 3 sold over 2 million copies. The total membership of both CFC and Apolyton is about 100,000 - people who have registered. Assume 80,000 are actually real players and actually have posted. Assume 2/3 of that bought Civ 3 (an inflated number, most likely). That's about 50,000 people (still inflated). Out of the total, that's about 2.5%. Now assume that half of those people have Conquests and still are around to see what happens... inflated yet again - I highly doubt 25,000 people still post and care about Civ 3... do you see 25,000 people? It's more like 2,500. But I'll go with 25,000 anyways, just for fun. That's 1.25% of total sales. You really think Firaxis has to care about 1.25% of the people who buy their products and follow up on them?

Setting yourself up as a company that don't live up to the promises made and are known to release flawed products is guaranteed to hurt more than releasing a new product a few months later (not sure why the promised patch should take that long to make anyway).

I know that I personally couldn't care less about Civ4 - let alone Civ 5 - as long the record shows that they don't live up to completing the releases to work as advertised/promised. I think we - the customers - are already showing extreme goodwill by accepting a promise of a final patch which may or may not finally make the program working fully as intended/promised - nearly 1 year after release.

Wrong.

Far more people watch the status of a product that's coming soon than one that has already been released. Delaying releasing a product by a couple months has a very bad impact on a company's reputation. Much more than a single patch would ever have.

 

[Jon Shafer]

My point is that what you said about poor consumer support and hurting their reputation didn't start with this broken promise about a Conquest patch, but already at the release of Civ3 without a multiplayer part. Which is also what I meant by shooting yourself in the foot - people will probably accept one bad move but not several. Once you are able to actually measure the disgruntled customers on the sales curve it is already to late (or at least very costly) to do anything about it as bad-reputation-inertia will set in.

I never heard anything about vanilla Civ 3 having MP.

If you did, I'd love to hear where.

 

[Antrine]

Oh, and add artillery use by the AI to the 'short list' with more efficient use of the computer.

Anyway, I have not sold two million of anything yet. (I am writer and am now working in that direction) and find from that perspective this thread very interesting. I note this as well, an easy to use program or one that is fast fun and additive will beat everything else. To this add only more flexiblity or easy modding and wahla you have 'DOS' turned Windows, both lousy, easy to use programs that be modded ad infintum, with DOS simply being the best whore on the block easily beating out better OS's still... Of course never mind the crocadile marketing that followed the successes.

Maybe, after CIV complete, they will again consider opening the Code to more tinkerers.

 

[Jon Shafer]

Well, considering the fact that not even Civ 1 nor Civ 2's source code was released, I think the liklihood of the Civ 3 code being released is slim to none, with emphasis on the none side.

 

[warpstorm]

I think they won't. The code of legends should remain a mystery (even if it is buggy)

 

[Antrine]

Gosh guys, I just hate it when the chorus is right!!!