Quote Originally Posted by ToranagaSama
WHAT sort of mentality does a thing like this, I'd like to know? The sad thing is the same mentality appears to have been carried through the entire game, RTW that is!

Reminds me of the American Auto industry, it all started going down hill, when they started to let the 'FINANCE Dept.' guys make all the decisions. Now we got a game company letting the Marketing guys run the show.

Incredulous!
Sad but hardly surprising.

4 years of development of a game in this scope cost several millions of dollars, not something that you expect lying around in the bank from the sales of STW/MTW. To be able to afford this, game development houses make deals with the devil and his servants, the marketing and accounting hordes.

Unfortunately, these people (with exceptions of course) mostly care about numbers – number of copies sold, number of support calls received, number of dollars left in the bank by the end of the day. They don’t care about games, most of them don’t play games or like them, as far as they are concerned they could be adding numbers for a company that distributes office supplies or sells furniture, as long as the bottom line is nicely positive, they consider their job done.

According to their logic, they rather sell 2 million of copies to the unsuspecting masses who would play the game for two weeks and then toss is aside for the next over hyped thing than to sell 200,000 copies and have a dedicated community of hardcore gamers following the game for months and keep coming back for mods and online play.

This logic produces statements like ”The game will be much more accessible to new players while still appealing to the series’ veterans” – which really translates to “Our marketing guys need to sell many more copies than the previous title to justify costs so they are forcing us to make the game as idiot proof as possible and have just enough easy accessible features to appeal to the average gamer and have nice reviews on the media. If 50000 hardcore followers will like the game less because of this, so be it.”. From their perspective, they are right.

Hopefully, RTW still manages to be a great and long lasting game, despite of the devil servants.

- barvaz