What has happend to the military sim market.

[Marko321]

When I got my first computer.

The variety of military sims was fantastic nearly every major military platform was simulated Tanks helicopters

Planes ships. Ok the graphics by todays standard would be laughable but the game play missions manuals were Mostly to a pretty high standard There was a good cache of developers (most noteworthy was micropose)

Then year by year there were fewer and fewer new military sim titles released with the exception of games like Delta force Ghost recon although I don't think you could class them as military sims.

Was it the introduction of game consoles.

I think the fall of communism played a part. Peoples around the world lived with the Possibility of a world war Till communism collapsed, But the world has seen more conflict since it fell. so who knows.

There are still some decent company's out there but they a few in number. DCS and Esim

Are about the only two that stand out.

But I for one. Miss the variety Military sim fans use to have back in there heyday.

BRING BACK MICROPOSE.LoL

.

 

Started this thread on sim hq

Some very interesting comments

And some insights from people in a position to make a difference.

 

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3911016/What_has_happend_to_the_milita#Post3911016

Edited February 14, 2014 by Marko321

[Vedexent]

I don't think there ever has been a large Military Sim market.

 

Games based around Military combat, sure. Today, World of Tanks, and War Thunder are doing quite well. I would argue that the products part of the "MilSim heyday" that you are recalling, fall in that category.

 

Non combat civilian flight sims like FSX are still around, despite being 10 years old +

 

DCS and Steel Beasts Pro - which are consumer level products based off actual military training simulators - not as much.

 

Even within the DCS community, look how many people are playing Digital Acrobatics Flight Simulator rather than Digital Combat Simulator: The "free flight", "no weapons" multiplayer servers always have the most people on them.

[joey45]

What happened?????

 

Consoles, that's what happened..

 

Big publishers thought that there wasn't any money in the mil sim market and abandoned it for quick easy money.

[eFirehawk]

Maybe because Complexity happened? :) A simulator made in today's standards is already hard enough and extensive to do as it is, as considering that it's a niche market the teams are small and there isn't so much money around to start big projects. Ya know, back then games and even the simulators were still very simple, escpecially when you compare them to something like DCS. You could make many of them relatively quickly and with small teams. And I don't think people today want sims with the simplicity that they had in the past.

Edited February 14, 2014 by eFirehawk

[GRUNT -Shrek-]

I think you talk about GAMING, not simulation...

Just a peek on current simulation/simulators:

 

Bohemian Interactive - VBS2.0

http://www.bistudio.com/

tags: infantry, CAS, SAM, nighttime

tags: convoy, IED,

 

 

Some random flight sim

http://www.rheinmetall-defence.de/de/rheinmetall_defence/systems_and_products/simulation_and_training/flight_simulation/index.php

 

EADS Eurocopter Training

http://www.eurocopter.co.uk/site/en/ref/Simulator-Training_70.html

 

Faßberg AB - NH90 Simulator

http://www.bundeswehr.de/portal/a/bwde/!ut/p/c4/TYrRCsIwDEX_qJnN1g7f_Aqdb-laRqBrR4nOzzd9EOTAyU1u4AlKoTdvJFwLZXjAsvI1nCacMZmP2VNkCpwj3Puv3tZaknRLKsLqrZHUZo7aJPfm1Zo2hiMseMEJZ5sQ0ar7hjqdpuEf5x252ZMf3eQCjnb4Ace-377p-AlE/

[Scrim]

VBS definitely isn't CAS or SAM sim.

[cichlidfan]

Big publishers thought that there wasn't enough return on investment in the mil sim market...

 

fixed

[westr]

I think simulators have just got so much more complex nowdays. If I think back to sims that I used to love as a kid, Microprose sims like Knights of the sky, F19, 1942, or fleet defender. I loved them and I thought they were complex but in comparison to EDs work now they are very basic. I suppose we have got used to more and more complex sims so something like war thunder we don't class as a simulator any more but in reality its probably as realistic as 1942 Pacific air war was. But to make a simulator as complex as BS2 A10c or P-51 takes such a massive amount of work and maybe the demand isn't out there for developers to invest the required amount of time and effort to develop more of them. Thank God for DCS is all I can say....

[GGTharos]

When I got my first computer.

The variety of military sims was fantastic nearly every major military platform was simulated Tanks helicopters

 

And they still are.

 

There are still some decent company's out there but they a few in number. DCS and Esim

Are about the only two that stand out.

But I for one. Miss the variety Military sim fans use to have back in there heyday.

BRING BACK MICROPOSE.LoL

 

What exactly are you missing in variety? There are modern combat flight sims of various quality, WW2 and WW1 flight sims. There are tank sims as well, as you know.

 

What's missing?

[westr]

And they still are.

 

 

 

What exactly are you missing in variety? There are modern combat flight sims of various quality, WW2 and WW1 flight sims. There are tank sims as well, as you know.

 

What's missing?

 

You have a point, I often forget but there are some decent sims available now. IL2 with the TF mods has made a good simulator. Rise of flight is a good WW1 sim, and we have DCS. Things are much better now than they were say 10 yrs ago...

[lmp]

I don't think consoles or the mainstream game market have anything to do with the number of simulators being released. It's not like the average gamer would be studying 500+ page flight sim manuals with us if not for Call of Duty. Other first person shooters most certainly suffered from competing with it (and other big boys in the genre), but sims offer a very different experience and appeal to a mostly different group of people.

 

OTOH game developers today are experimenting and straying beyond the mainstream market more than ever before. The best selling genres are oversaturated by the biggest publishers, small and medium companies are forced to look elsewhere, and the shift to digital download makes it relatively easy. Just look at the indie market and all the weirdness (in the positive sense of the word) available on steam.

 

Nobody's "stealing" players or developers from the sim market. The market is small because of internal, not external factors. The "as real as it gets" mentality makes the learning curve very steep and development costs very high.

 

Maybe, emphasis on maybe, if the developers made more efforts to flatten the learning curve a bit, they could widen the market somewhat. Better tutorials, training modes, less text to read... there's a very good reason mainstream game devs invest a lot of time and money into making the learning process in their games as easy and painless as possible. Most sims don't do so well in this field. Learning to operate a Black Shark or A-10C is just daunting.

 

Other than that, experimenting with different monetization plans than the classic "buy the whole game for 60$ upfront" can be the way. DCS World and RoF are doing it in fact. It leads to most of us paying more in the end, but it's extended in time (so less painful for the consumers) and gives the devs more resources to keep the show going.

 

I don't think either of my ideas is a silver bullet and certainly they're very difficult decisions to make from a business point of view.

 

The recent popularity of games like World of Tanks and War Thunder might actually be beneficial as well, by giving many people the taste of a flight (or tank) sim in a manageable bite. I've seen people move from WoT to SB Pro PE and from WT to DCS.

 

To end on a positive note, I don't think the sim market is dying or anything like that. If anything, it's slowly growing. But we have to accept it's still a small niche. In the long run it may get a little bigger or a little smaller, I don't believe we'll ever reach the FPS level of millions of players and a hit game coming out every other month, but I don't think it'll disappear either. Not as long as crazy addicts like us exist ;).

[NineLine]

Its all been downhill since Wolfenstein 3D

 

 

When I got my first computer.

The variety of military sims was fantastic nearly every major military platform was simulated Tanks helicopters

Planes ships. Ok the graphics by todays standard would be laughable but the game play missions manuals were Mostly to a pretty high standard There was a good cache of developers (most noteworthy was micropose)

Then year by year there were fewer and fewer new military sim titles released with the exception of games like Delta force Ghost recon although I don't think you could class them as military sims.

Was it the introduction of game consoles.

I think the fall of communism played a part. Peoples around the world lived with the Possibility of a world war Till communism collapsed, But the world has seen more conflict since it fell. so who knows.

There are still some decent company's out there but they a few in number. DCS and Esim

Are about the only two that stand out.

But I for one. Miss the variety Military sim fans use to have back in there heyday.

BRING BACK MICROPOSE.LoL

.

 

Started this thread on sim hq

Some very interesting comments

And some insights from people in a position to make a difference.

 

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3911016/What_has_happend_to_the_milita#Post3911016

[Pman]

Even within the DCS community, look how many people are playing Digital Acrobatics Flight Simulator rather than Digital Combat Simulator: The "free flight", "no weapons" multiplayer servers always have the most people on them.

 

Hehe I think that was a jibe at me :p

 

Either way tbh I always have much more fun doing the acro stuff then combat.

 

Personally combat in DCS can be abit of a chore for the most part where as acro I can peel off and throw it around for half hour and im done :)

 

Pman

[Marko321]

To end on a positive note, I don't think the sim market is dying or anything like that. If anything, it's slowly growing. But we have to accept it's still a small niche. In the long run it may get a little bigger or a little smaller, I don't believe we'll ever reach the FPS level of millions of players and a hit game coming out every other month, but I don't think it'll disappear either. Not as long as crazy addicts like us exist ;).

 

You may find this interesting

if not a little controversial

The guy who posted is heavily involved in military sims.

 

 

I am not in the flight sim business and I don't know the numbers with which the other developers are working, but just to make it clear: When I wrote "pay more" I wasn't thinking of $100 over the current $60. More like $300...400 a year on a single title (WoW makes about $150.- per player and year, and given that it has infinitely more players than a flight sim will ever have I'm applying a factor >2 here just to throw a specific number into the discussion).

 

I think that if we're seriously talking about figures in that range, most will gasp in horror and tell me that I've lost my mind. But really, my gut feeling tells me that this is the kind of revenue that a flight sim title probably HAS to generate per customer in order to be a long-term sustainable business for a team of at least five full-time programmers and a similar number of artists and some dedicated quality assurance people - given that the market is stagnant or shrinking. A second-order problem is that for $300.- a year, people will have much higher expectations. They will invariably compare it to the number of new quests that you get in a year of playing WoW for half the price, and even if that's an apple vs. oranges type of comparison, I don't think that a flight sim could win that argument.

 

Some of you may still remember me as the bad guy who pushed for the then-insane price of $125.- for Steel Beasts in 2006 ... which has dropped some since then (yes, we're experimenting a bit to see the sales response to price variations), and it still seems to me that this is often seen as the upper acceptable limit (or evidently beyond for most). But cutting the profit margin in half means that you need to gain more than twice as many customers as you previously had to make up for a price cut. Conversely, if you double your profit margin and lose less than half your customers you still have a net gain. That's plain mathematics, not some evil plot to rob you of more hard-earned cash.

 

 

As some already mentioned, for flight simmers it isn't unusual to spend A LOT on hardware - HOTAS, the latest graphics cards, surround sound systems, multi-monitor setups, TrackIR, in some insane cases even full cockpit mockups and all. Yet the notion of paying more for software has everybody up in arms in less than a second. Which I can fully understand, mind you... I'm just ALSO seeing the other end of the equation, and with the eyes of a business manager.

Even if you would think of paying $500.- a year for a flight sim subscription, it'd still be dirt cheap in comparison to the partial ownership of a Cessna with the necessary regular flight hours to keep your license, and you'd never get your hands on a fully bombed up warbird to blast baddies on the ground, or out of the sky, no matter what your disposable cash is. Simulations are about as close to the real experience as 99.99997% of all people will ever get (which is pretty amazing, if you think of it) yet we instinctively cling to an arbitrary $60.- price threshold.

 

 

In conclusion, there's a bit of a mismatch here. I don't think that we'll ever see a substantial number of flight sim players spending half a grand every year. As a consequence, fewer and fewer developers will stick around, and those that remain will probably run the show as hobbyists because they have a day job somewhere else to bring in the cash that is needed to take care of life's basic necessities. I can't speak for other developers, I just know that SB Pro PE would need to cost about ten times as much if it had to finance the current team of eSim Games, and one would have to be a pretty insane tank freak to be willing to pay that much for a computer game. I'm pretty callous in price negotiations and defending unpopular decisions in public, but even I would be ashamed to ask for more than a thousand bucks for a single SB Pro PE license (even knowing that there are lawyers who charge that by the hour).

Edited February 14, 2014 by Marko321

[Vedexent]

Hehe I think that was a jibe at me :p

 

Either way tbh I always have much more fun doing the acro stuff then combat.

 

Personally combat in DCS can be abit of a chore for the most part where as acro I can peel off and throw it around for half hour and im done :)

 

Pman

 

Oh no - that wasn't meant at a dig at you at all. You guys provide a very good server, for people who obviously want to fly acrobatics.

 

It's not like you're luring people to the dark side, with cookies - they already want to be there :)

 

But you sum up the attitude that's I'm trying to point out: most people don't want to fly MilSim. Most people want to "peel off and throw it around for half hour".

 

People who want to learn the systems, learn the tactics, learn squadron tactics, learn integrated operations: It's a very small market.

 

That doesn't make the hard core MilSim crowd better - it just makes it different, and small.

 

The OP was asking what happened to the Market; my thesis is that it has never been that large; even within DCS - one of the few detailed MilSim "games" - there's a large portion of the population that thinks "combat in DCS can be abit of a chore".

 

That's their - and your - choice. I'm not saying that such people are bad.

Edited February 14, 2014 by Vedexent

[Marko321]

And they still are.

 

 

 

What exactly are you missing in variety? There are modern combat flight sims of various quality, WW2 and WW1 flight sims. There are tank sims as well, as you know.

 

What's missing?

 

Quantity for one.

Back when I first started buying Games/sims the variety was fantastic.

Its a fair point some have stated by todays standards they would be considered arcade like and probably did not take as long to develop as a DCS model. Although I am a fan of DCS.

Variety is the consumers friend.

If the competition is fierce they have to up there game so to speak.

May be I am being a bit nostalgic for the heyday of the military sim

Which in my opinion was the early ninety's.

[Pilotasso]

Back in the day games were sold in physical packages in physical stores for computer specialists and it was expensive cutting edge entertainment, just like anyone who practiced radical sports or car tuning had their specialized stores with full colourful shelves.

 

Today the market is mature, works based on the internet and has spread to the masses. The only physical games sold today are for consoles. PC games are more and more based on digital download only and gone from the stores.

 

Yeah, I have fond memories of saving pennies for months and then finally going to the store and piking monster shiny boxes full of diskettes or CD's with manuals bigger than phone books. That's gone forever. :(

 

Simulations are still out there but are diluted between thousands of easy-to-learn-fast-mouse-click-brain-dead shooters because most players are of a lower intellectual level and that is the crowd most developers today want to address.

Edited February 15, 2014 by Pilotasso

[Cowboy10uk]

I do miss walking into a store and picking up a simulator box that gave you a hernia. Nothing like having a huge manual to study first, these electronic manuals just don't have the same impact. Hence why I purchase any physical manuals that are available.

 

Microprose, damn now that was the company to follow, stunning simulations of all genres and very very rarely disappointed. I must have spent years flying around in my f14 in Fleet Defender, or fighting off Jerry while trying to manage my crew and limp my poor battered B17 home to blighty.

 

Now if anyone ever did a modern version of B17 or Fleet Defender, :O I would have died and gone to heaven. Don't get me wrong DCS is mind blowing, I love every single airframe I own here and nothing can touch the rotary side, but a full blown dcs quality B17 sim, THAT is the holy grail. ;)

 

Cowboy10uk

[Hellfire257]

There's a distinct lack of competition to drive innovation and improvement.

[Djent33]

You can improve yourself with a bit of practice and compete.

[docfu]

Well if you are rooting for the good ole days nothing beats DOSBOX and a few abandon-ware sites.

 

I recently got Jet Fighter II again to show my wife/students what flight sims were like 20 years ago. She laughed but then realized a lot is the same. The cockpit, instruments, shooting down the bad guys. Some of those old sims are still fun to play around with.

 

The main problem with new games(fortunately DCS doesn't suffer from this) is un-death syndrom. You know, that part where you take 4-5 bullets and are ready to die unless you...somehow pull through...everytime.

 

I miss the old days when games like doom and quake just let you die... DCS is one of the few titles out there that still lets you do that at the expense of having to take off/fly back to the combat area again...

[Djent33]

Sure,.. It’s one of those things.

[westr]

I do miss walking into a store and picking up a simulator box that gave you a hernia. Nothing like having a huge manual to study first, these electronic manuals just don't have the same impact. Hence why I purchase any physical manuals that are available.

 

Microprose, damn now that was the company to follow, stunning simulations of all genres and very very rarely disappointed. I must have spent years flying around in my f14 in Fleet Defender, or fighting off Jerry while trying to manage my crew and limp my poor battered B17 home to blighty.

 

Now if anyone ever did a modern version of B17 or Fleet Defender, :O I would have died and gone to heaven. Don't get me wrong DCS is mind blowing, I love every single airframe I own here and nothing can touch the rotary side, but a full blown dcs quality B17 sim, THAT is the holy grail. ;)

 

Cowboy10uk

 

Or DCS Fleet defender that would be my ultimate. Or I actually think the mission planner and dynamic campaign of Di's Tornado could be left exactly the same but if it was updated with a DCS standard Tornado sim that would be something, did anybody try loft bombing in Tornado that was great. That's why I keep bugging VEAO about a Tornado lol.

[Marko321]

I think this guy has nailed it on the head.

 

I think there are a couple of reasons for this demise. But the single biggest reason is that we consumers got VERY greedy.

 

In the mid-90's, if it had the right number of engines, and you could use flaps to land, it was accepted as "realistic". Today people try finding flight envelope charts to compare them...and promptly dismiss the entire product if it diverges from that chart. And if it uses less than 3000 poly's, or the cockpit is for an A model and not the C model in exterior view, its branded "garbage". Today high rez textures are expected for every visible item...labor intensive for artists to create. Back then 16 color textures....or even no textures at all, just a single color value for an entire wing.

 

In the 90's, making games realistic was impressive to everyone. Today many "gamers" look at the complex switchology of a detailed flight sim... and get turned off at the prospect of punching buttons for an hour before getting airborne, before searching for enemy jets to shoot at. To most "gamers" its too much like school AND work... right when they are wanting an escape from both.

 

In the 90's a campaign was a bonus. A dynamic campaign was amazing. And developers might come up with new features. Today...we are criticizing everything about it, regardless of what's offered. And there are no new features to add...but all features MUST be included.

 

In the 90's we paid full retail price . By 2000 most sims could be bought in bargain bins for $10. And now its all steam sales. Which gives better revenue for the developer?

 

Back then a programmer and a few buddies could hammer out a complete sim from the garage, funded by working part time at Subway, or off the last hit. Today a tier 1 title requires financing of perhaps a million or much more, to support the payroll of so many employees, contractors and subcontractors and purchases from music/sound/object libraries.

 

Back then, every simulator was new...a new plane to fly, a new tank to drive. Today World of Tanks has hundreds of types and variants...and its free. And nearly all the planes have been flown by enthusiasts many times. Online and in campaigns. And back then, there was no "retro gaming" for milsims. Today, retro sims get makeovers upgrades and such from mods. How does a new company compete with an old product costing a dollar, that keeps being tweeked and modified to perfection?

 

There are many reasons for the stunted growth of mil sims. But part of it is that we are now more demanding than the creators are able to match, on increasingly larger budgets?

 

Personally, I would dearly love to see either a sequel or serious upgrade to DID's EF2000 2.0... one with brand new textures. But that's much more likely from mods by fans than from a company.

 

Could any of this change in the future? Yea. It could:

 

- reduce our expectations of absolute perfection

 

- reduce our expectations of having every single feature

 

- creation of new ways to make high resolution textures faster more efficiently

 

- creation of vehicle, terrain, object, sound, and music libraries that have "entry level" pricing options. A sim that sells 40,000 units needs to pay less to purchase what it needs, than an Xbox game with a budget of 80mil and expected sales of a billion dollars in two days. Since a small sim maker can't predict its sales success, the library fees should be on a sliding scale based on sales success, just like a movie star sometimes makes a percentage of ticket sales. The libraries could be filled with objects terrain and content made by simulation enthusiasts, some of whom currently make mods.

 

The core idea is make sims with modular components that a developer can quickly plug this or that into, on a modest budget that matches the size of the market for milsims. Similar to how so many addons for Microsoft FlightSim are available, both freeware and payware. And be more willing to accept minor imperfections that really don't have a deep impact on playing enjoyment. We've taken the notion of "voting with your wallet" to the point of nearly killing the market.

 

Alternatively...we could use the MS Flightsim community as a model to seriously empower the mod makers, extending the life of existing sim classics well beyond the original product.

 

But we as a community of sim enthusiasts need to do SOMETHING. Or it'll just slowly whither.

[Vedexent]

So ... your answer is to go back to expecting pretty looking and sounding games loosely based on military systems, and forget wanting to simulate the actual hardware, systems, and military scenarios.

 

In your point list, you enumerate solutions to get your eye and ear candy, and chuck the fidelity of the simulator: stop expecting simulation perfection; find ways to do graphics better; find ways to ease the user into object sound, and graphics libraries.

 

If you want all the cinematic bells and whistles at the cost of the technical simulation accuracy, it's a game not a Sim.

 

If I want games, I'll go back to games. I don't; I have an unused copy of War Thunder installed on my system. Somewhere. I think.

 

I agree with you that the graphics don't have to be photo-realistic; look at real military training Sims, used by militaries, to train future soldiers: they're not. I roll my eyes a bit at the crowd who has to stuff every single possible graphical fidelity mod into DCS, and then bitches that they don't get 60 FPS - go have a look at Steel Beasts to see what acceptable graphics are for real military training.

 

The game market is doing quite well thanks: War Thunder, World of Tanks, Call of Duty, Battlefield 4, etc. Eagle Dynamics just doesn't have the power to compete in that AAA market; they'd get eaten by EA and DCS would vanish, or warp into something unrecognizable.

 

I realize I'm in a tiny tiny minority of gamers, and a tiny minority of those that want to play DCS, in that I want: the full blown system simulation; as realistic a military scenario as possible; teammates who want enough fidelity in the game play to do things not because they are necessarily needed in the simulation, but they're part of the real life activity; and, I don't really care if the graphics stretch beyond the basics of what I need for immersion and to understand what's going on around me.

 

The community is not "withering". The hard core MilSim community has never been large. Eagle Dynamics isn't EA - their main business is doing actual military simulators for pilot training. DCS World wasn't meant to be Microsoft Flight Simulator - and some people are just now figuring that out (Steam).

 

There's not many of us. I accept that. But we have DCS, and maybe a handful of others like Steel Beasts. You have a veritable horde of "military" console twitch games like Halo, and Battlefield 4

 

Leave mine alone. Don't tell me that I need to adopt your style of play, your game values, and that my playground needs to be just like yours.

 

----

 

On the flip side, I agree 100% with the idea of adopting the Microsoft FSX developer model.

 

However, I think this is already happening. DCS seems to be concentrating on the EDGE engine, the Map SDK, the Nevada environment, and cleaning up aspects to support 3rd party modules like changing up aspects of the AFM flight models. Actual aircraft development recently appears to be all 3rd party: The Mi-8, Huey, Hawk, L-39, MiG-21bis, etc.

Edited February 17, 2014 by Vedexent