Chris Taylor's opinions on PA

Running a modern videogame company is, in my opinion, far far more difficult than most people give credit for. As Sorian pointed out mass number of canceled projects are just the norm. In fact most projects that get talked about never get past initial contract and of those that do most get killed. Supreme Commander itself got cancelled by EA before THQ picked it up for example.

The worst thing is that you can't talk about most of this stuff because a lot of it is either under NDA or will blow back on you in some other way because of how small the industry is.

Capitalism ho!................aww now I just feel sad having said it.

Still, keep on trucking on Uber!

Did Uber also make a few other projects that just vanished?
I didn't knew that canceling so many projects is "just the norm". That's totally counterproductive for the whole scene of game developers, isn't it? It is just wasting money to start something and cancel it.
The fact that EA dropped Supreme Commander just dropped my sympathy-points-level for EA from 0 to -9001.

I guess Kickstarter really can be a great thing for the whole industry, but only for smaller companies. GPG seemed to have to many employees that a Kickstarter cannot fund development over a full year or two.

Yes. Although less of them since we are a small company.

Yep, but it happens regularly.

THQ wasn't any better, it's not like they funded SupCom2 or anything.

I think most people are naive about how much these projects cost. Even for us the kickstarter money is pretty small. And no I'm not going to go into financial details.

Well without THQ jumping in for EA SupCom 1 might not have been funded, so I am grateful for at least that. SupCom1 shaped the way I think about RTS

Well ~2 million $ isn't exactly nothing. But considering SupCom 1 was like 12 million the KS money indeed looks small. But you do seem to have a pretty good idea of how to reduce the costs, so I'll trust you that PA will be awesome

On the other hand: TA was like 1 Million, wasn't it? It is kinda scary how the amount of money needed to make a fully blown AAA title is increasing. TA was awesome fun, so it is quite possible to make a good RTS for a "small" sum.

This all definitely does discourage me to ever dive into commercial game development myself. I guess just programming "boring" business-stuff really is the better idea to make a living ~.-

Keep in mind that $1 million in 1997 dollars is about $1.35 million now.

Without going into exact numbers would you say the games industry is less lucrative now than it was in the 90's? You used to hear stories of id people buying Ferraris or Richard Garriot making enough money that he could blow $30 million going to space. It seems like the only crazy stories you hear now are from people like the Infinity Ward or Bioware founders who sold their baby to a publisher.

The most lucrative industry has always been the art of using money to create more money. It's infinitely effective because no real world connection ever has to be reckoned with.

depends on the genre I would say. Look at CoD-Series, I think they make enough money out of it...

I really do think that the industry is taking a new positive direction, especially with crowdfunding. My prime example is Star Citizen-- we'll never know how much they got on top of the 7.5$ mil, only that they had private investors as well. They could have easily gotten 20$ or 30$ mil for it. The pitch to the public changes everything. I am envisioning in the future that we "pc gaming, crowdfunding" can reach the budget of AAA console CoD games. Never in my life have I paid 530$ (PA) or other hundreds of dollars for a video game.

Should cover health care for a month or two =P

you are right that it was not a game designed for console only and afterwards ported to the PC.
However a lot of things were changed just to make it able to run on a console that does not even come close to the performance of a semi up to date gaming rig.
(Also a console is usually not equipped with mouse/keyboard.)

- UI interface made for lower resolution, complicated UI not realistic for use with controller.
- Less faction diversity, easier to manage/smaller UI, needed for the console as it does not have enough ram/cpu/vid/mouse/keyboard
- Plastic paint colors, needed for the console, how on earth you gonna see which unit is yours on your TV.
- Smaller maps, make stuff easier to manage on the console, console does not have enough ram to load large maps.
- Less units .. console does not have the computing power/ram.
- Flow economy got dropped, for the console as it is not managable with a controller.

This list goes on and on.
All changes made to the game were necesarry to make it run on a console.
PC gamers were not happy with a simplified version of the game made to run on antique hardware.

/edit
I can understand though it might be better to make a game then no game if a studio wants to survive.
What I wrote is purely from the customer perspective and I do not intend to bash GPG for making Supcom 2, I am merely saying why I did not like it that much.

well about the video update, i am glad he got more open.. and i am looking more forward to this.. and well.. as I had much emotional rollercoaster at godus, they should prepare too, but still think of 60% -> good chance to get funded and I am sure they get funded.

Never seen this side of CT hes normally super happy/energetic, sad. Wish it was Kings and Castles in this same situation instead of Wildman...Not really into games like Wildman. But if getting wildman funded helps get K&S resurrected then hopefully it happens.

Not sure what the problem is with SC2 UI, it wasn't missing much of anything that I remember.

It wasn't "less faction diversity" so much as "less unit bloat" -- FA had a ton of unit repetition across factions.

I feel like the visual style was a general choice they made, and a good one. I doubt it was influenced much by the XBox version, but that's just me.

Less units because, let's be honest, who could ever run 1000 unit cap games with more than 2 people? The Supcom engine in general really sucked at this, bogging down after a long time simulating, period.

Flow economy was dropped because it basically took over the game and made it the world's greatest military themed resource management simulator. Not that that's an invalid style of RTS, but it had a verrry narrow range of appeal the way SC1 did it.

I wish more people would make this explicit :<

Sup2's UI worked, but it wasn't the work of art that FA's had.

Diversity is a mixed bag. All three factions wound up (in Sup2 at is) with a mobility upgrade for all their troops. UEF had afterburners, Cybran had JJ, and the Aeon teleported. You couldn't argue that "Cybran was the mobile faction" because everyone had mobility.

Diversity only came through how each faction implemented the same concept - and FA did this too.


And you're looking at the symptom of the economic problem, not the problem itself.

I backed both Projects (PA + Wildman), because i think this whole RTS/MOBA Genre needs fresh Wind.
Chris Taylor is a nice guy, and so are the People at Uber.
There really is no reason to bash each other.

May be better concept win
One thing is certain though, both games gonna keep me longer entertained as the expensive AAA Titels this days.

You guys rock!

Here's a message from Matt Kehm, Associate Producer/Writer at GPG. Looks like the AMA is going to happen after all.

Chris Taylor will be on Reddit today at 5PM EST. He will be conducting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session where he will be taking questions from you. Hope you join us!

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/

Thx for the link.

About SC2, I think it is a great game, I loved TA/SC1 and SC2. I still play it. I think the game got so many bad reviews because of hardcore FA players, which was a bit unfair.
At the same time, SC2 is still one of the best RTS games out there, although not being FA 2.0... but to be honest, they maybe should have used a different name for SC2... or they should have done a FA 2.0, since most people were expecting something like that... going the Blizzard way... which we also could start arguing about if that would have been the right decision.

K&C is on (indefinite) hold because it is simply too expensive to develop right now. First, the estimated costs were $6.000 000 for the full scope game we saw during the concept stages. $4.000 000 if the game would be a bit smaller, still too much for Gas Powered Games...
I do understand these things now a lot better since many employees and CT came out into the open and talked a bit about the past.
For example, all patches for Supreme Commander 2 (and there were many to make it such a great game it is today) were done by GPG in their spare time without seeing a single cent from Square Enix... so much for that. How can Square Enix provide such a bad post launch support?!

If SupCom2 had slightly different lore, and a different name it would have been one of the better RTS games that have recently come out.

Just like CNC4, it changed too much to keep the name.

From Wildman AMA