We probably should have talked more about what’s been going on with Unreal Tournament 3 over the last couple of weeks. Why didn’t we? Because it’s not a game any of us feel particularly strongly about one way or another, and from earlier comments it didn’t look like you lot did either. Having a famous name and being reasonably fun is no longer enough for a technically adept but fundamentally unambitious multiplayer shooter to grab the attention it once would have done.
Last weekend, that changed dramatically. Unreal Tournament is back, baby, back. And no matter how you or we or anyone else might personally feel about UT3, its unexpected resurgence may signal colossal change for PC games.
The popular perception is that UT3 bombed. Did it? Well, at first it certainly seemed as much – reportedly it shifted just 33,995 US copies during its first month on sale. Epic later claimed that it had shipped 1.2million copies worldwide in four months, but that includes the US PS3 release and, of course, ’shipped’ and ’sold’ are far from the same. While there was probably a good deal of exaggeration from both sides of the debate, certainly the half-decade old Unreal Tournament 2004 continued to enjoy a visibly larger regular playerbase than its higher-tech sequel.
Now, traditionally it’s the case that when a multiplayer game stumbles, it doesn’t get back up again. UT3 seemed destined to go gently into that good night, save for the occasional antagonistic comment about PC gaming from Cliffy “Cliffy B” B and Mark Rein. And yet, as we coast into the Spring of 2009, a game released in 2007 is suddenly the talk of town all over again. On the weekend before last, its players jumped by some 2000%.
The key to it all was taking a leaf out of Valve’s book. There may not be such a thing as a free lunch, but that truism doesn’t mean hungry folk won’t turn up in droves if you stick up a poster promising complimentary punch and pie. The Team Fortress 2 free weekends, many timed to coincide with major updates, drew hordes of players who were delighted to get something for nothing. Come the end of each weekend, a fair few were charmed enough to splash out for a permanent copy of the game.
Epic have done exactly that with UT3, releasing a major patch (complete with new maps and modes as well as more fundamental changes based on player feedback) then offering it free via Steam to all comers for a long weekend. Once the first free weekend was over, its 2000% extra players didn’t all disappear – the game (heavily discounted) jumped straight to the top of Steam’s bestseller list. It did so well that there’s just been another free weekend, though observers reckon that’s partially by way of apology to the people who, as a result of higher-than-anticipated interest, couldn’t download the game first time around. Who knows if it’ll truly reverse UT3’s long-term fortunes, but it’s almost definitely earned a big pile of money from a game we all thought had died in the water a year ago.
It’s an incredible precedent to set: making a game a success almost 18 months after a poor launch. It’s something that could only have happened now, and with a system like Steam. Something that can go far beyond a mere demo by delivering a complete game straight to your hard drive and automatically deactivating it at the distributor’s discretion. Something that silently updates a purchase with patches and extra content automatically, so you don’t have to make the decision to seek out some exciting new feature: it’s just there anyway. Something that, if you don’t already own it, advertises that game to you at an agreeably reduced price whenever it loads. Something that enjoys a vast community who are in turn plugged into a sea of smaller relevant communities.
It’s incredibly sinister. It’s also incredibly exciting. UT3 may never be a cult classic – or indeed any sort of classic – but it’s no longer a failure. Think about what this could mean for other, better future games in similar danger of being lost to uncaring history. There is now a mechanism to save them: if something with as negative a reputation as UT3 can come back from the dead, surely anything can. The next Planescape: Torment or Beyond Good & Evil will be less of a risk, less of a tragedy waiting to happen. It’s not Steam or Impulse specifically as much as it is game distributors finally realising how to leverage the internet, and that a game doesn’t stop existing once its initial print run disappears from store shelves. Game retail and traditional advertising alike have never seemed such dinosaurs.
I mean, really. How any other platform could possibly think it can rival PC gaming’s staggeringly vast, fast-evolving, hyper-connected community in the long-term is beyond me.
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@Urre & Optimaximal: The Witcher was neither “a not great success” nor “a middling success” but a huge success for CD Projekt. The sales generated by the game’s first version were enough to allow them to put in another year of work in order to improve the game in every conceivable way. That’s not quite the same thing as re-releasing a game that failed at sales the first time around.
Finally managed to download it on the weekend just gone, started playing it when I had 3 hours left (at just gone noon in England? How is that a free weekend when it finishes before sunday night?). I stopped playing it with about 2 hours and 20 minutes left, and didn’t touch it again.
It was pretty, it was fast paced, it had lots of shiney effects…it also had an incredibly stupid single player mode (that I’d played years ago, first in a game called Turok: Rage Wars) and multiplayer modes that are either older than time itself or have been done a lot better even a long time ago. Really, really, really not interesting to me, even though I was playing Duke Nukem 3D last night.
@Blaxploitation Man
Couldn’t disagree with you more. UT99 is still one hell of a game, offering more options for character customisation than any of it’s progeny. I loved being able to rename the characters anything I chose, and tailor their AI to the personalities involved; I even spent time downloading new character models for each and every one of them! Sooo many happy nights were spent slaughtering bots named after friends, family and co-workers! You could also choose who you wanted to fight instead of just the number of combatants, making for some interesting friends vs family and male vs female grudge-matches. that these features disappeared in later iterations has always been a source of great sorrow to me.
Subscribing to the notion that ALL memories of the past are viewed through rose-tinted spectacles is not only logically indefensible but completely wrong-headed.
As for this UT3 resurgence, Epic have always been good at keeping interest in the UT games alive with free content – if tying this to Valve’s ground-breaking sales model finally makes all publishers/dev houses wake up and smell the shit they’ve been liberally spraying over us PC gamers in the last few years, so much the better.
I share the sentiments above about UT3 having no heart; it’s all flash and no trousers. capable of amusing for a little while but absent that spark of gameplay genius that would prevent it from uninstallation. My copy – bought originally for a crisp tenner and not taken anywhere near Steam for the patches and underwhelming new features – has already been scrubbed to make way for better products.
“Would internet buzz be enough to boost Grim Fandango’s sales in Steam weekend discounts were it released this year?”
I don’t think so. Nostalgia is enough for a few more sales. But most old PC games are old and bad, and by today standards: lacking. By today standards also some games are lacking… Today standards are soo high, very few titles if any can achieve these. We have seen high narrative, fun gameplay styles, great eyecandy, giganteous maps, love to detail, etc… we are spoiled brats :-/ …and to make things whorse, nostalgia paint old games with a legendary aura. But I digress… I doubt old games will get daily sales, only a rare sale here and there. The Long Tail is about having a zillion titles that sell 10 units in a year, is not about “hits” that sells 20.000 in a week. We are still far from that, and there will be some sellers resistence to that model, and maybe buyer resistence. Having a store with 9000 PC titles may be not “dumb” enoug for dumb people (dumb sellers and dumb buyers). Some buyers and sellers will ask for “Please dumbify that for me”. My only hope is sites like RPS, that by “advertising” old classics are reintroducing such titles to new people. Withouth that “advertising” you can bet “The Best Videogame Ever” will die in obscurity, just because is more than 8 weeks old. So, to me, Is a thing about having something like a “ring” of websites advertising *good games*, old and new games that are worth playing. Withouth that rings, i doubt the mere mortal player can cope with a list of 9000 different games.. and PC have more than that, If you include free games, and IMHO, digital shops sould do that, because digital shops can be part of that “ring”. Valve I think is smart enough, but don’t have a blog or other system to do that, so what Valve seems doing is including the indie titles that are worth including in his sales “Indie” catalog. but that don’t include flash games, free open source games.. etc.. Other websites/systems sould report these. I don’t know how much sites like RPS exist, and how populare are. Maybe not enough for the Long Tail to work.
During the christmas sale i got the unreal deal pack for about £12. UT3 campaign probably cost them 1% of the development costs of a game like Gears, so in a way it was a smart move quickly transitioning players to multiplayer.
I dont like how the movement and combat systems are overlaid and the deathmatch while fairly
perfect is no improvement over the past. So UT3 is trapped, either as a game with too much complexity (for its arcade playstyle), or in the shadow of its prequels.
It was a great success as the first big project for CD Projekt, but it was fairly publicly denounced for being a buggy mess, as are all eastern european releases these days. Luckily, it had a lot of customer good will behind it, meaning sales.
While we’re all (rightfully) bashing GFWL, remember that Steam was rather shit in its early days as well. Maybe there’s a cleansing wave of “let’s make usable stuff” going on in Rendmond with the Windows 7 being good shocker and all that, so maybe they’ll get it right eventually.
But probably not :D
@espy:
People has show in the past a preference for bloated Microsoft applications that are sort like forced, withouth opt-out, over elegant and solutions that “just work” and are optional.
The forced bit helps.
Unless some actual figures come out, I’m going to hold fire on saying this has been a big success for Epic in re-vamping sales for the game. Yes it’s at the top of the steam sales list this week, but we don’t really know what numbers that actually means.
More importantly, the most critical sales period for a game is within the first 6 weeks not just because of the hype (which Steam has successfully managed to help re-create here), but because the product is still being sold at full price. All these sales of UT3 have happened with a huge discount, so it becomes a question of how much actual money they made from this week’s sales.
As for GFW Live, it sucks. Yes still. But more importantly, I don’t believe that PC gaming is a priority of MS’s anymore, and it shows in the amount of support and development they’ve actually provided on that front compared to XBL. The 360 is MS’s games machine, and that’s where the money’s going to go. It’s not something to be bitter about (presuming more developers don’t adopt that freaking system), it just is.
EDGE had a writeup about the decline of PC retail and what it means for MS’s PC games business not too long ago.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/is-microsoft-really-committed-pc
I mean let’s face it, the flight sim crew is gone. MS actually sacked the entire Ensemble crew. If PC gaming is still a priority somewhere in there, I’m not seeing it.
@Y3k-bug:
“That staggeringly vast, fast-evolving, hyper-connected community can be boiled down to one word in this example: Steam.”
Except the game wasn’t made for Steam, people aren’t finding out about the offer through Steam, and the people they’re inviting/playing against aren’t being contacted through Steam.
Good on them. It really wasn’t that bad a game, I’m glad people are getting the chance to enjoy it.
I still think that Epic are missing the point UT single player. The first to games were death match as a sport, and the single player should reflected that. It doesn’t need some hammy story, it needs teams, rankings and tournaments.(shock!)
It should have been a game were you start with a crap team and crap players, and have to win matches to earn money to buy better players and train up your current ones, etc etc.
At least I think that would’ve been a much better single player game play mode, with a lot of replay value. Much better then that awful attempt at a story.
Tei:”I don’t think so. Nostalgia is enough for a few more sales. But most old PC games are old and bad, and by today standards: lacking.”
To further clarify my original point, I don’t mean that the LucasArts’ Grim Fandango from 1998 would be ‘re-released’ again this year with a Steam weekend promotional sale. I meant to compare the retail situation in 1998 to 2009.
Suppose for example that a niche game such as Syberia 3 or something – maybe even a completely new IP – is released this spring. It is remarkably bug-free, has fluid animations, high-production values, a phenomenal plot with thought-provoking and contemplative twists, and that certain ’something’ that’s found in a game that surpasses the sum of its parts. Nevertheless, it’s still a niche game. A small core group embraces it immediately, but the overall public remains indifferent – “I haven’t played a puzzle-adventure game since The Dig, do they still make those?”. Over the next months, internet buzz starts building up. Gaming forums are flooded with praise, steamy fanfiction is written, the game gets its own TVtropes entry. Publisher reports only 50000 sold copies in the first three months. Panic ensues.
Would this kind of a situation be redeemable with New Games Distribution? Fork over $15 and download the game to see what all the fuss was about.
Hell, an RPS write-up got Pandemic to Amazon (or somesuch) download charts, there’s potential here.
I don’t want to focus on the far sides of the sales curve / Long Tail. In games biz, the major publishers have an atrocious hit-miss ratio where even the big releases bleed money, and profit is made with a handful of big sellers. A Sims or WoW franchise nets a lifetime of profit but at the same time some genuinely good games get buried. My interest would be to get the quality 2nd and 3rd tier games up a few notches.
Beyond Good & Evil is a good example. It was originally a commercial failure for Ubisoft but has gained enough reputation over the years that they actually commissioned a sequel. Is there a business model where BG&E could at least have made the ends meet on the first iteration? It seems that a lot of people are genuinely enjoying the game even now when they pick it off a bargain bin, they were just not aware of the game at the time, or had no idea how good it was.
In BioShock discussions people are still talking ‘Oh yeah, I just bought that game since I keep hearing how good it is’.
My last three purchases have been Empire TW (2009), Hitman Blood Money (2006) and Thief Deadly Shadows (2004).
There’s plenty of untapped potential outside the first few weeks of the release date.
I’m hoping the likes of gog.com help to push old titles in easy to deploy packs that work since there are so many people with laptops that could easily play them and get hooked into gaming. It would be a great logical step up from the simple flash games played by monstrously large numbers of people.
With a potential revenue stream like that, they could even tart up the graphics so they don’t pixellate to hell when played at a higher res – note I’m not saying add loads of whizz bang to them so they can’t be played on the laptop!
Could you imagine a crisp looking Day of the Tentacle on your parents laptop, displacing that crappy hidden object game?
It’s a market that is just waiting to be tapped.
@ILR: That would be cool, as will put the focus on quality and long term playability / community. Maybe even place modding again in the map.
I quite like UT3. Shooty bang shiny gore. Vroom vroom. Splode! Etc.
Up 2000% sounds like a lot, but really – how many players were online before? If it was like 100 people before and now they have 2000 – it’s not good :)
I myself bought UT3 in offline retail and I remember, that in one month after launch I couldn’t find a server with decent ping and enough people to enjoy the game. So I kept playing Team Fortress 2 :)
So Cliffy B kind of proving him self wrong there then…
I must admit, I’m one of the fools who downloaded it this weekend and then paid for it yesterday morning. I think it’s also worth mentioning that there are many more PC systems out there now that can run UT3 to potential – when it came out I didn’t buy it because my old computer would just have laughed.
I think it shows more how price sensitive people are – sales must have dropped a lot sinse most sites upped prices from ~£18 to £25 or £30 as we see them now. I used to buy 1-2 games a month at £18. I have only bout 2 games for £25 sinse the hike.
It’s all about percieved value – UT3 sold well because the price was right, not just because of the medium it was being sold through.
bought*
now I feel like a genius for buying the collector’s edition at £18 =]
very interesting analysis there, alec. thanks. will have to read it again when i’m awake & able to think.
UT3 is has become an immensely more playable game since the update however I still consider the holp pack to be the greatest means by which to measure the game against its parent titles.
It can be downloaded here:
http://www.gameupdates.org/details.php?id=2090
It’s all low poly fast paced action and for me it’s the closest I’ve come to truly enjoying this game. For me it transported me back to ut3k4 and even reminded me of the sheer, unadulterated joy of Q3.
Still not a great game but atleast Epic responded to the real issue with the game instead of continuing to attack the community for, essentially, not liking it!
Jumped on the free weekend, had some good times. Still not willing to forgive them for shilling that pile of slow-loading dreck as a third-party solution to RPG developers, but the core game does manage to be quite fun.
“Something that can go far beyond a mere demo by delivering a complete game straight to your hard drive and automatically deactivating it at the distributor’s discretion.”
Uhm that sounds both cool (truly better than a demo from all points of view) and wrong (deactivation is at the distributor´s discretion?) at the same time.
UT3 has finally reached the state in which it should have shipped, 18 months ago…and yet the interface is still horribly inferior to that of UT, UT2k3, or UT2k4, and much of the core game design (like Warfare) is a big step backwards from previous UT gameplay systems.
Oh well, at least DM is arguably better – and better balanced – than in 2k3 or 2k4. For anyone who’s into DM gaming, the $11 price tag was totally worth it; others need not apply.
Just had a quick game there and it was great fun. Won two matches as well, which is pretty extraordinary since I’m generally fairly shit!
And don’t forget there is a big modding community and the mod contest. Total conversion mods like these make it even better.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-haunted
http://www.moddb.com/mods/angels-fall-first-planetstorm
I did enjoy UT3 when I played it, but I’m still probably not going to buy it. Other than the pretty graphics, all the good things that I could find to say about it were the aspects where the designers took a page out of the original UT’s book.
Steam is a great idea. I just wished it worked.
I DONT WANT TO DRAG A BAR FROM 1 TO 5 FOR GRAPHICS. SERIOUSLY?
I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth being three-six months out of the loop on new releases. Alright UT3 is a bad example as it came out a long time ago but a lot of games I bought turned up quite heavily reduced not that far down the road. Far Cry 2 and Red Alert 3 for example.
Unless it’s a Call Of Duty game. Call Of Duty 4 is still £30 on Play.com and Steam!
Even freaking Savage 2 had a large, active population for its free Steam weekend, and cost only $10 for the full version. Everything was looking up, maybe more people would finally get into and rejuvenate this dramatically overlooked title.
A week later the game was a ghost town once again.
I played the original UT until the disc scratched… against bots only.
I’m glad I bought UT3. Greed is fun, vehicular CTF is actually new to me… I’m having a ball. There’s still TF2 when I want something more. Just because you like a nice juicy steak doesn’t mean you can’t also like popcorn.
What I really want? Rainbow Six as it used to be, but with updated graphics.
Meh… I’ve had UT 3 (for the Mac) on preorder for 10 months on Amazon. Looks to me as the game has been dead at birth, right ?
Why did it sell good! Because everyone was expecting an game like ut2004. But instead they sold an RC7. The sound and the lightning is still poor, even an the charters look.
No UT3 is not back and yes it is still an failure.
Not mentioned that it’s an gears of war feel like. And all those things UT need are missing….
@Jim: It didn’t sell well; UT3 was a sales failure across all platforms, at least until these Steam weekends. (It looks like it’s now graduated from “failure” to “non-success”.) I presume that’s why Epic kept bragging about how many units they shipped rather than sold; shipping units are always high for a AAA title like this, and sales figures were less than half that for a long time.
And for those who didn’t get Jim’s joke…when we first bought UT3 on physical media, the game .exe on disc was labeled “RC7″. Epic didn’t even have their stuff together enough to rename their release candidate as the actual game before they shipped it. Given the embarrassingly shoddy state in which the game shipped, it was inevitable that “RC7″ would become a new meme in the UT community.
What I wonder is how much it cost for Epic to allow free download of the full game for anyone ?
I mean, bandwidth isn’t free.
I know UT3 will be a huge hit at the next FITES LAN Party with like 160+ people.
I bought it because it was cheap and a good play for about 6 hours. $20 US is hard to turn down automatically and $12 US is downright impossible. Will I play multiplayer? Doubtful, because to be honest the ease of which you can play good games in TF2/L4D easily beats out UT3’s multiplayer.
But I did buy it. The weekend deals on Steam have single handily revitalized PC gaming for me. Viva la cheaper games!
The midlist and baklist have always been a weakness in pc and console gaming. It’s great to be able to buy and appreciate older games, and there are still a ton of games like unreal that could benefit from a discount or free weekend.
“…and automatically deactivating it at the distributor’s discretion.”
No amount of autopatching “goodness” (and, unless it’s changed, doesn’t Steam still have the outright audacity to refuse to let you launch the game while a patch download is in progress?) can compensate for something so fundamentally crooked.
The local crowd and I are still playing regular games of UT2K4, because it’s simply better. It’s not as if games stop existing when bad sequels get released. Well, not ones that don’t depend upon a central activation server, anyway.
As to UT3’s re-release: lol. They still haven’t got the Linux version, which was supposed to be out on the same DVDs as the Windows one, as they managed for UT2004, done. At this point I have to wonder why they’re still bothering, as I think they’ve successfully alienated what fractional Linux market there was.
I’m amongst these 2000%, and this article just now found it’s way to my screen here at work. I’m of the UT sniper\camper mod comunity, and UT3 doesnt have that at all. I left 99 and 2k4 almost 2 years ago, and havent looked back, still dont. Got the free version off steam, and that became an instant purchase after 10 mins of playing!
Now it will have, i’ve started some UT3 mods. The increase in players surely means an increase in my scene aswell.
The attempted revive worked! I’m just one example!
Great job Epic and Valve! A collaboration that paid off greatly!
UnrealEngine3 is great but sadly UT3 seemed only half developed when it shipped. 4 patches later and its still nowhere near as good as U2k4. And whats with the gametypes. They are mostly DM. The new GREED and BETRAYAL are basically DM. And dont get me started on DUEL. What a joke its DM with the settings on 1 player vs 1. Hardly a gametype.
UT3 has been a huge cockup from the start. Leave it now EPIC and start a new and worthwhile UNREAL game.
Perhaps UNREAL WARS???
UT 2004 was a stand alone sequel of UT2003, which was not great at all, it had numerous fixes and balances.
In my opinion UT3 is better than 2k4 regarding the deathmatch and CTF.
Yup I was one of the people that shelled out to purchase it during that free weekend. I was quite impressed at the changes made and around $11 (down from $19.99) was extremely reasonable for a game like that (if only they’d cut down the $49.99 tag on Left 4 Dead and I would get that one too). I actually bought UT3 DURING the promo since I knew I’d be playing this for a long time to come. Great move on Valve’s part. Just further proves that many games overall are just to pricey for what they are worth. Make it reasonable and give a decent trial though (none of this “first map/level only nonsense) and people will come. :)
I have played ut 99 nine years, and in my opinon ut3 it is now a perfect sequel (ut2k4 is an overvalued sh!·i·) I don’t care the opinion of those that hate ut3, me alone I have a good time when playing and I am happy heee, I love this game, it is as ut99 version of 2009. 10++ (.Y.)
Let’s see. Waht did this 2.0 patch bring that was missing. Oh, that would be that it made it more of a PC came than a console game. When they released this “port” for PC I was not surprised it was not great in sales and the game was not great at all, for PC that is. To me, that means it was a flop and the worse released they have done. But, with 2.0 and the showing of commitment with the Titan pack it brought around the game to be more of a PC game. More options added to fit a PC need. Go figure there.
Here is my opinion. Fire Cliff B. ;) He is a console junky and only hurting PC sales with his comments and lack of direction. He is close minded unless slapped in the face. Ever since I have seen him be “console” (GOW) UT has only been on a down hill run.
Also, when you put out a PC game make it a PC game when it is released. Not a year later when people have already developed a sour taste for it. Like the menus have options for PC support, the online server managers have proper filters and worting options, and make a working dedicated server that is actually working and ready upon release.
Maybe they will learn. ;)
I have played all unreal series and playing ut3.
It’s a good game maybe different from the great ut2004 but good.
The patch for me was not so effective since I have changed the interface with great mamixer and the maps I’m playing is from community. so that’s the power of ut3 and all unreal games: modding and community.
Its been said already, but is worth repeating:
UT3 was a port of a console game. It had unfriendly activation requirements. More PC gamers would have ignored this if it had been a great game or even a good one, but it was neither. I understand teh company trying to squeeze the last bit of revenue from it, but I think they already accomplished what management wanted. They effectively killed the franchise and helped turn more people from PC gaming to what most companies view as the future: consoles. This makes me sad, but as long as console sales are as good as there and PC game sale are not as profitable, I expect my gaming days to be limited as I will never own a console again.