BW:RM available for pre-purchase! Released Aug 14 - Page 14

On July 01 2017 14:31 riotjune wrote:
You know what I can buy with $15? Three Big Macs and a large coke.

On July 01 2017 11:04 Dazed. wrote:
Well thats a frankly ridiculous tact to take, and if more people looked at games like that, we would be force fed shit on a regular basis and never get a good game.

No company is owed my support or my gratitude, unless they make something I'm actually grateful for. Which, at this point, is up in air. Blizzard is not my friend, they are not my buddy, I owe them nothing. If their product is shite, or they lied about what they were intending, or whatever, I'm not going to give them any leeway, because why would I?

This mcdonalds burger tastes like ass! But mcdonalds needs my support...what?

You either give me a product I want, or you dont and your irrelevant to me. Thats how the market works. Worse than that however, they could be giving us a product that destroys a pre-existing product! Thats not just a bad tasting burger, thats something far worse.

On July 01 2017 08:15 Excalibur_Z wrote:


Earnings are broken down by product, and the success of a product determines the direction and approach that future products will take. Saying "it's a multibillion dollar company" is a cop-out because resources and funding aren't fungible in that way. They don't just throw a million dollars to this team or that team on a whim. Game development is a very strict process of return on investment. The vision-holder needs his pitch backed up by reliable metrics and evidence or it won't get funded.

I've been in various roles of game development ranging from QA to Production for 15 years, and I've learned there are three universal quality metrics: revenue (how well your game is doing financially), retention (how regular is your playerbase over time), and perception (how well received your game is). You can have high revenue, but with poor retention and perception (it's not fun so the playerbase dwindles, or it feels like a cash grab) that revenue stream won't last. You can have good retention, but with poor revenue and perception (your game is engaging, but buggy or with a poorly-tuned economy) players will eventually get fed up and negative word-of-mouth will stop new players from coming in. You can have good perception, but with poor revenue and retention (your game is maybe visually appealing but lacks depth, or is well-balanced but lacks content) it won't be able to stay afloat.

In order for SC:R to get greenlit, the PM had to make a case that yes, it will be a profitable venture because we have this huge playerbase in Korea, there's a groundswell of support for BW rising again, we can modernize it with all these features. We expect to move X units over Y time at Z price with a development cycle of 18 months, therefore it will be profitable.

Maybe since the release of 1.18 they ran some more simulations over the demand of SC:R and determined that the X units they initially projected was now only going to be 0.8X, so they had to increase the value of the Remaster product by moving matchmaking exclusively to that in order to hit their numbers. I don't know. But it's absolutely imperative that the playerbase supports the development team (not just the developer) if the product is going to succeed. If SC:R hits 2X or 3X its initial projection, that's going to ripple out to other teams that SC:R's approach was a little different, and this is what worked for them and what the players like the most, therefore this is something we could apply to other projects.

On July 01 2017 11:04 Dazed. wrote:
Well thats a frankly ridiculous tact to take, and if more people looked at games like that, we would be force fed shit on a regular basis and never get a good game.

No company is owed my support or my gratitude, unless they make something I'm actually grateful for. Which, at this point, is up in air. Blizzard is not my friend, they are not my buddy, I owe them nothing. If their product is shite, or they lied about what they were intending, or whatever, I'm not going to give them any leeway, because why would I?

This mcdonalds burger tastes like ass! But mcdonalds needs my support...what?

You either give me a product I want, or you dont and your irrelevant to me. Thats how the market works. Worse than that however, they could be giving us a product that destroys a pre-existing product! Thats not just a bad tasting burger, thats something far worse.

We want to encourage a healthy, competitive ecosystem for StarCraft, and this measure will limit griefing of new and lower-level players.