Julhelm

No you don't have a point. If it's DanW's artstyle that is the direction then any other art will match that style, regardless of whom the artist is. That's how it always gets done. So clearly that is not why TW won't hire anybody.

The problem with conventional proprietary engines and middleware like the ones used in Ace Combat or HAWX is that they are pretty much optimized for arcade shooters and lack a whole set of features needed to build a "proper" flightsim engine. Flight manages because it has about 20 years of MSFS tech to build on. Whereas AAA console titles usually use smoke and mirrors to appear large-scale and as such cannot be easily modified to fit a whole different type of game.

Devs and simmers themselves also tend to forget that the best-selling sims always were the lite surveysims like Fighter Bomber, Jetfighter or Jane's ATF/USAF. Whereas the audience for study sims shrinks exponentially as you increase the complexity. My theory is that the audience that bought a lot of the "lite" sims bought the first super-hardcore sims like Janes F-15, Fleet Defender etc, causing these to be comparatively big sellers, only to get frustrated with the huge complexity and learning curve involved, and shelved the games after a few tries. So when the next wave of super-hardcore sims hit the market, they bombed. Conversely, the crowd that bought the lite survey sims aren't interested in arcade shooters like HAWX, so we're left with this idea that "flight sims do not sell" when the answer is probably that the devs are making the wrong kind of sims.

No I don't. Even in the smallest of indie projects, you will have some kind of art direction which any artists, in-house or remote, will have to conform to. Learning to adapt to fit styles is something every artist who thinks about going professional needs to do. And TBH there's not like there is any real texture consistency in the game outside of the aircraft themselves since except for the aircraft, most of the content still dates back to SFP1 days. My personal opinion is that TK rather cutting entire modelled units than hiring temporary help is due to him being incredibly averse to doing anything that would require him coming out of his 10-years-and-counting comfort zone.

...the likely result would be that a publisher like EA contracts the studios that have a demonstrable track record. As you said for yourself, it's been over 10 years since the old studios were all shut down by publishers. All that talent is now either out of the game industry or split up into other studios. So any big publisher wanting to get in on the cold war crowd would have to contract an outside developer because they simply lack the in-house talent and tech necessary to do it themselves.

That's why studios have art tests for junior artists...

How many except people on this board even knew about the ME to begin with? The trend among other indie developers is continuous communication with their target audience throughout the entire development cycle. Not keep everything hush-hush, refuse interviews and free exposition.

But doing so would mean he'd have to make his sales figures public, and for some reason he always seems real secretive about that.

Can't afford = doesn't want to.

I don't believe Iran would be a cakewalk with their fragmented leadership and command structure.

How did she accidentally annihilate your desktop?

That makes little sense - Isn't the whole point of training to prepare you for dealing with emergencies like that? Anyone who has a drivers license will have trained to recognize the onset of loss of traction, but also on how to recover the spin when it happens, even if you are not "expected to get there".

O_o

CoD is hyperpopular because it taps into both the male gun fetishism culture thing, post-9/11 patriotism AND american soldier-worshiping and packages it all in a sleek, streamlined, accessible Michael Bay-like package. In fact, CoD is exactly what you would get if you made a Michael Bay movie interactive.

Except most of the old games really aren't very playable by today's standards. Load up pretty much any 90's flightsim and most if not all are bogged down by s**t UI's that severely detract from the gaming experience. Personally I think eyecandy is important to a flight game since it directly helps suspension of disbelief. Why do people pay $200 for ORBX addons for FSX if eyecandy doesn't matter? I mean, I remember back when I first played Strike Commander and was like "OMFG THIS LOOKS REAL" but if I boot it up today, while it remains playable it looks so cartoony and old that it severely detracts from the gaming experience. Rose-tinted glasses FTW. Also the last thing the big publishers want is a game with a solid, healthy modding community. They want a franchise that they can monetize the f*** out of on a yearly basis, and noone can argue the CoD model hasn't been a massive success, and they've locked down their content so that they don't have to compete against mods.

Marketing alone can be over $10 million. And to put costs in perspective: The original Counter Strike characters could easily be modelled and textured in a couple days by a skilled artist. A Call of Duty character can easily take a month of work since you have to do hipoly sculpts, advanced facial rigging, various texture maps etc. Then as far as programming goes everything is more advanced and therefore more expensive now. AI, sound systems, rendering engines, you name it.

The point is that people who whine about the lack of flightsims are still living in the 90's with the old business model of developer-publisher. Any reasonable flightsim today will have to be independently funded or crowdsourced. Console gamers didn't kill sims. Greedy publishers did by flooding the market.

Maybe instead of getting all outraged that Apple raise the prices on some dead has-been's record you could get outraged at the fact they use what amounts to slave labour to manufacture those precious Iphones and Ipads.

Analgas?

...you can call them as you see them.

It's pretty simple. The big publishers flooded the market with derivative flightsim shovelware back around 1999-2001 at a time when Half-Life had just redefined gaming, and when these promptly bombed the big publishers decided sims were too risky to be profitable and simply stopped making them, shutting down developers in the process. You have to understand that the big publishers are incredibly risk-averse and will not pursue any IP which cannot be readily turned into a yearly franchise ala Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. Since all of those developers you listed were dependent on the traditional publisher businessmodel for funding, they promptly folded. Spectrum Holobyte/MPS in turn were killed off by Falcon 4. Only Microsoft remains and are doing anything to innovate in the genre. The russian devs survived because they relied on independent funding or publishers like 1C. And until some western indie dev produces or MS Flight turns out to be a smash hit, AAA western flight sims will continue to be dead for the foreseeable future. Of course, all western indie flightsim devs except Aerofly and TW seem to be fat nerds so they invariably become bogged down in feature creep and turn into vaporware, lol.

Feb 25th

I dunno. People had no problem buying $15 outfits in our iOS game.

I have Jetfighter IV original btw. It's basically JF2 with 3dfx graphics. It's funny when you think of it. Jetfighter 2 is a really simple sim but they get so many things right that HAWX and Ace Combat get wrong. Like realistic weapons and mission scenarios.

Even Jetfighter 3 was as much sim as SF2. Certainly nothing like HAWX or Ace Combat which are more like 3d versions of 1942.