By Jim Rossignol on July 13th, 2011 at 10:30 am.
2K bossman Christoph Hartmann has been talking to MCV, and has been defending the decision to make XCOM into a manshoot:
“The ‘90s generation of gamers all love Xcom and we own the IP, so we thought OK, what do we do with it? Every studio we had wanted to do it and each one had its own spin on it. But the problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth. But this is not just a commercial thing – strategy games are just not contemporary.”
So that clears that up, eh? I am sure there will be a lively discussion of this. Can a game genre really get old enough to be abandoned? Should we consigned turn-based games to the past? If the 90s generation love it and that’s a reason to remake it, why try making it “contemporary”? Surely the challenge should bring to bring the game to a new generation, not the IP? Why do publishers think game and IP are somehow unrelated?
“Not contemporary” meaning “we cant sell a strategy game on consoles”.
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This.
Also, on a more general gamer “type” scale, the RTS/RPG gamers aren’t exactly in the majority.
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“Not contemporary” meaning “I am a fucking moron herp derp” you mean.
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I kinda figure Frozen Synapse will either break or make the Hitman’s point. If everyone buys Frozen Synapse, that’ll show ‘em – people will shell out for a strategy game! However if no one buys a critically acclaimed strategy game, then the Hitman’s on the money. Consumer power, eh?
I suspect what Brett’s actually saying is that strategy games generally don’t recoup enough money to justify their mahussive budgets. But that begs the question: why do you need to plough millions into huge games, when doing so just makes them all become more samey?
What was the budget for Freespace 2 or Grim Fandango? Clearly, with tools like Unity or ShiVa or Torque, you can make great games with small teams, providing you’ve got the talent (particularly in the ol’ writing department)
Does every game need to eat up Gears of War/Halo/Duke Nukem reserves of famine relief to get made? Can’t we have fun on a shoestring?
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Pop, for mentioning Freespace 2, I instantly, automatically and forever, like you. Well done you.
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Which is retarded, because Japan has been making tons of TBS games on consoles since the NES. Fire emblem? Disgaea? FF:T?
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Yeah but Japan…
(half kidding ;-) )
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The first time i ever played X-Com was on the Playstation….
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@Pop
I would love to try Frozen Synapse, but they can’t seem to get their head around that “demo” thing.
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@Meat: Agreed. This guy needs a PR rep between him and us.
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@ mouton – An FS demo is in the pipeline, but I think the devs have been concentrating on actually getting the game working again for all the current crop of users after they had server meltdown from it being overly succesful at launch… which kind of suggests that contemporary straegy games are feasible – at least for smaller budgets.
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http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/
So outdated! And they only sold millions of copies. Too Real-Time for you? How about some Civ5, or any 4X-game?
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You are all expecting far too much knowledge from a publisher. I mean you can’t expect him to know about Civ just because he publishes it.
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Has Frozen Synapse showed up on Steam stats, that anyone’s noticed? I know it doesn’t require Steam (but does register there if you want it to), so it might mean nothing if not, but fewer than ~500 people playing at once after a 50% sale doesn’t sound promising any way I can spin it. Not sure the weird BOGOF/required twin purchase (depending whom you ask) pricing has done it any favours. Meanwhile, Terraria…just…what?
Frozen Synapse is only one game, though. Civ still does alright, doesn’t it? And Total War. Can I have Football Manager, or is that pushing it? The man’s a doofus.
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“but fewer than ~500 people playing at once after a 50% sale doesn’t sound promising any way I can spin it”
Having just checked the Top 100 games of the moment on Steam over here I think an indie game like FS would be doing pretty well to have 500 concurrent players (placing it about position 90)
Also consider that since your opponent doesn’t have to even be online at the same time as you for you to take your turns, you have the option of playing anyone of the playerbase across the world (although admittedly arranging the match requires a bit more work).
During the launch week they were hitting over 1000 consecutive users at which point their server somewhere suffered a meltdown and so I think has made quite a few players (myself included) take a step back until they implement a better solution for hosting the game on multiple servers as it’s a botched solution for now.
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bingo.
Also, pop up there has a good point. Maybe we should learn something from the rockstar wives or team bondi. The last year or so, the best games i’ve been playing were made with a limited budget, and a lot of creative freedom. (With the valve exception for the budget part, of course). Minecraft. Terraria. Frozen Synapse. Dwarf Fortress. The Bit.Trip series. These haven’t sold little, too.
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2K have a weak point – TBS were common in the 1990s because computers weren’t able to manage real-time games. Can you imagine playing a game with X-Com’s graphics and scope in real-time? At that resolution there’s no way you can see enough of the world at once to get enough information to direct your shooty dudes. TBS hasn’t got worse since then – it’s just that other game structures have become much better as the PC has advanced.
Doesn’t mean I’m not bitter that New X-Com isn’t Xenonauts though.
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@ Dozer
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Real Time Strategy games were around several years prior to Xcom, with proto-RTS games dating back to the 80′s.
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Oh DOZER, so you just say it’s as simple as “FPS are ‘much better’ than strategy games”? Narrow minded a bit?
Why is chess still being played then, in this age of superpower computers?
Also, you know, Pong was real-time. Same for Pacman, Space Invaders etc etc. “Computer power” argument is invalid on all accounts, stop repeating it, dummy.
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I knew I’d grow too old for gaming some day… This Hartmann seems to try to give me a hint.
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That’s why they call him the “hart breaker” – ha ha… oh
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Yep, that’s how this hit me too. Increasingly I realise that I have turned to games for two or three things:
I enjoy strategy games and particularly turn based strategy, narrative and character development. Neither of which the gaming market apparently encourages development of.
All that’s left that I enjoy are great arcadey games, like the PacMan Championship Edition series, Burnout or back in the day RockBand/Guitar Hero. But I play these in short bursts every once in a while, and I am not sure they are worth investing in the hardware for.
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That’s the beauty of modern video game publishers, they’d rather fail in the most popular genre than succeed in a niche.
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Which is precisely why indie games are becoming so awesome
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Choca, how can you manage to say everything that needs to be said in just one simple sentence?
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Well, to be fair, I think he cheated. That looks like a run-on.
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The problem is more that the failure somehow usually still makes a ton of cash.
Maybe the fact that the gaming industry is moving from a ‘monolithic’ structure to a clearly defined mainstream – indie duality is a sign of maturity? Not that maturity is always a good thing.
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He just needs a colon where the comma is.
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I see it like this. They buy the rights to a classic foie gras recipe, but decide that they’re going to spend $15m making something. Well obviously you can’t shift that much foie gras so they launch a new line of potato crisps. Now the potato crisp market is a big one but also well served, so there’s a good chance they’ll flop and end up making nothing or not much at all. However if they succeed they can churn out flavours of crisps forever more.
However the foie gras fans are left with no foie gras to buy. You could just spend $1m and make a guaranteed return selling them good quality foie gras which they would love.
Despite what the new Gordon Gekko says, greed still appears to be good.
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It would take guts, vision and risk to make an Xcom style Xcom game these days. If they made it and it failed, shareholders would get grumpy.
If they make a generic, just like everyone else is doing, shooteresque game with a couple of nods to the IP, they won’t get blamed if it fails to sell big. Sad, but true.
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I totally agree – it’s all about risk mitigation for these big companies. Which saddens me.
A turn-based game could in theory have the widest potential audience of all, as it allows those without twitch reflexes (typically required of a shooter) to play. Admittedly it tends to require a bit more tactical thinking, which probably is what limits your audience back down again, but a real 90%+, knock it out of the park effort made with modern tech and using everything that has been learnt since XCOM could genuinely bring the genre to a whole new audience.
I still play XCOM regularly even now, and its shocking how advanced it remains. I showed it to a friend the other day who had never heard of it before (!) and walked him through a mission. He was amazed by pretty much every choice you had. Throwing weapons, crouching, shooting holes in walls, smoke from grenades limiting line of sight. Its the complexity of choices in that game that made it so exciting (plus one shot deaths ramps up the tension like nothing else!).
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I think there’s less risk with a cheaper production of a guaranteed seller. Just look at Telltale with Sam and Max and that oh-so-dead-genre of point and click.
They’re taking a huge risk, but aiming at the fat whale.
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I kind of agree with him. I started gaming in the early mid-90s, and even I think the age of turn-based shooters as full, AAA budget titles is over, especially in this age of the huge investment and risk major titles go through.
As far as I’m concerned, turn/squad based strategy, like JRPG, should pretty much be dead.
That’s not to say we can’t see re-interpretations or indie titles, but I think it would be silly for a major studio to risk an AAA title on a bog standard X-com title.
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I agree that they shouldn’t be making a AAA title based on turn-based strategy, but there’s no rule that developers have to be massive teams working on huge blockbuster titles, is there? I agree that turn-based games might be dead as AAA options, but there’s surely no reason a smaller team couldn’t be formed to produce a modern turn-based XCOM game?
Failing that, how hard can it be to take a couple of aspects from the turn-based game and use those in a more traditional shooter (e.g. XCOM style research, maybe base customization, improving ally characters who aren’t all special individuals, stuff like that)
I don’t care whether a game is AAA or not, I care whether I enjoy it.
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“it would be silly for a major studio to risk an AAA title on a bog standard X-com title.”
As opposed throwing all that money at a bog-standard FPS? The idea that every title has to be indie with no budget or an “AAA” title that costs countless millions is one of the dumbest concepts many developers/publishers have slaved themselves to lately.
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I sometimes wish [popular music artist] would die.
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Maybe if they didnt spend millions of dollars for minor graphics upgrades and near pointless advertising (In the case of a turn based game) they could spend it on making a good game eh?
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The fact remains, though, that these bog-standard games sell well, despite being bog-standard. Even if they don’t do superbly, they might break even. Which is why they might not be risking as much as compared to making a turn based strategy game.
Which is perhaps why we simply should not expect these types of games from big developers, and rely on the type of genis that these days are found in for example the devs of Frozen Synapse.
I personally do not have a problem with not expecting these types of games from triple A devs. But, perhaps one day they will become popular again, and then that’ll be well spiffy!
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“As far as I’m concerned, turn/squad based strategy, like JRPG, should pretty much be dead.”
Good thing its/they are not and you are wrong then.
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There were AAA turn-based games in the past????
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@ThesisKO: yes. For instance, X-Com (1994).
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Civilisation rather leaps to mind.
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I just love this, when you look at 2K’s catalogue and what one of their most successful games is.
Or who’s the most up-and-coming publisher today? Paradox seem to be growing faster than anybody else, and what do they specialize in? Oh, wait…
And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – if they’d given XCOM to irrational, told them to take what they did with SWAT4 and apply a strategic layer to it, we’d have a likely classic on our hands that most of the old fans would be happy with. Instead, they started off making a Bioshock clone and have switched to a Mass Effect 2 clone…
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Yep, I always wanted the next XCom game to be a SWAT/Rainbow6 type affair with the geoscape providing randomised levels.
I’m excited by this game on its own merits, but it has nothing to do with XCom.
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This is exactly what should have happened (or at least something very similar). They should have kept the Geoscape strategic element and updated the tactical element, and kept the escalating conflict where humanity was almost always one step behind. I’m going to judge the new game on its own merits, but it could have been so much more. Then again nobody else has successfully released an XCOM clone that really captured the feeling of the original (though I admit some have come close).
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Amen. I’ve only recently acquainted myself with Paradox, but in a short span of time I’ve become to love them above all other publishers. They make exactly the type of games I like to play. They’ve given me hope in gaming I haven’t had for a decade. Yes, 1C had some gems, as did Stardock, but Paradox – Paradox gave me a new love. I can’t even remember the last time I enjoyed something from a big publisher.
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Can’t say I’m a huge fan of “historically accurate games”, but Sengoku looks interesting. I loved Clavell’s Shogun, and this looks very similar. Brings to mind Lords of the Rising Sun, an old turn-based game for the Amiga. Thanks for the tip, I’ll have to keep my eye on Paradox.
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I had no idea that Paradox published so many games that I own!!!
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I wish them goodluck.
Non contemporary gamers will look for other ways to spend their $.
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And contemporary ones will just buy CoD:Whatever dumb thing is next 6 or BF3
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…he said only 12 months after Starcraft 2 and Civ V each sold millions of copies.
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Starcraft II is not turn based though.
And Civ is a strong franchise.
I’d love to see some mix of turn based and real time MULTIPLAYER X-Com game. That would r0xx0rz my b0xx0rz for sure.
Relic needs to work on a Computer based Table top Warhammer 40K spin off also.
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It is a strategy game and the quote is “strategy games are just not contemporary” so imo he makes a fair comparison. I’d also throw in S2TW which has sold well and is also a pretty decent game.
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The man has a point. As far as i know, both Civ V and the DLC which followed sold it’s bloody pants off.
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I love that.. “Civ is a strong franchise” yes, OF TURN BASED GAMES. You can’t just ignore that when you claim turn based game don’t sell.
As for turn based on consoles.. well, how about Advance Wars.. that seemed to do rather well didn’t it? And thats ignoring the Final Fantasy Tactics, the Disgaeas, the Fire Emblems, Tactics Ogres, the multitude of turn based RPGs like the Personas, Dragon Quests, Final Fantasys etc. All of which sell well enough to have sequels made.
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@Nick – Thats very true – the spiritual home for turn-based games does now appear to be consoles, when you list the more recent successes (civ aside). Which you think might give them more reason to take a chance.
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Which is funny, because Civ5 and SC2 are the only triple-A titles I’ve bought in the past 2 years, and I’ve dropped a crapton of money on Steam purchases in that time.
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Yeah, but we’ve got read between the lines here. He didn’t really mean strategy games don’t sell well, he meant “Uh, we wanted to make another FPS cuz they’re a sure bet, and we had this X-Com IP thing laying around, so…”
The “not contemporary” excuse is just typical fluffy publisher babble.
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Woohoo, jump on the Blops train! I’m not against making a game “contemporary”, but the way they want to change it is a bit extreme. Turning it into FPS, instead of, let’s say, a RTS (
JA2 remake) is a bit too much. I understand they want to make lots of money so that the can buy monkey with hats on them. I’m starting to think that it’s just plain old laziness. Or maybe I’m just daydreaming and people just don’t have too much time to play other games than FPS, which makes me wonder about the shitload of MMO’s and multiplayer FPS coming out. Hey, good thing there’s still some SC2 still going on and it didn’t become a Wii Fit game.report
The contemporary line is obviously fluff. He just means it’s not as strictly commercial. You can’t sell TBS to a console market as a £30 title.
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Is that really so? I feel that the FPS era is approaching an end, not to say it will be completely abandoned.
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there have been more big budget TBS games on handhelds and consoles in recent times than on the PC.
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Let’s call it what it is: cowardice. They can’t market X-Com for consoles, especially as the majority of console gamers never played X-Com. They’re not confident in the power of the PC as a platform. They feel it’d be too much of a risk. Instead, they just want to try and milk the name as a Cod-esque manshooter.
Fuck ‘em. I’ve got Xenonauts.
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Surely the fact that people still buy and play XCOM on steam (not to mention hundreds of other strategy games) shows that strategy is still popular enough to sell?
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You are giving *far* too much credit to your average publisher to assume he has any idea about whats going on outside his own company. One good example was Brad Wardell from Stardock talking about how he’d love to do a party based RPG but there was no audience for it.
He had never heard of Dragon Age: Origins. Which btw outsold the far more expensive and much more heavily marketed Mass Effect 2. No audience? No balls to try something that isn’t the current in thing is what that means.
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If strategy games arent contemporary then they probably shouldnt be buying up strategy IP….
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I think he’s confusing “Contemporary” with “Generic”
Lets see if he stands by those words when this gets reviewed as the run of the mill mindless FPS it so painfully looks like
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Amen, brother!
I truly hope that this will turn out in one of two options. Either a massive marketing error (which, I, reaallyy do hope for), or at least a decent shooter (although, I don’t really believe this one).
“Surely the fact that people still buy and play XCOM on steam (not to mention hundreds of other strategy games) shows that strategy is still popular enough to sell?”
Nope, forget it. Let’s turrn them all into Civilizations, C’n'C, Total Annihililation e.t.c. FPS’s.
This shit makes me sick. These outright lies from major devs. It’s sickening. Where’s Anon for gamer’s? They even get on the fuckin’ bandwagon for environmentalists, so why not gamers?
/rant
I’m a bit drunk, so, please, forgive me all the wrong things I’be said and g’night!
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I don’t think someone stupid enough to develop an XCOM FPS will be able to make money among the giants
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A civilization FPS through eras would possibly be awesome…. but pretty much all other strategy->FPS conversions have been failures, as far as I know (even blizzard couldn’t achieve it)
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Civilization 6 will be Dynasty Warriors clone because seriously fuck strategy games they just aint contemporary aw yeah
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The problem here is mostly tunnel vision. They could have probably made the game at a lower overhead cost if they’d made it turn based. Or, they could have thrown some decent resources into the project and marketed it as a breakthrough in the genre. As it is, this game will probably not stick out from the crowd enough to get the sales they want, and the IP will be dead in the water again. The industry is not learning the lessons indy developers are providing for them: you don’t have to make a AAA title to make AAA profit. They are just now coming to the realization that micro-transactions can be more profitable than the usual pricing scheme, but I’m afraid they think that means every game needs them to maximize profits. If they realized they could just throw some new textures on the old game and make the down time between missions more colorful, they would. Too bad business school never taught them to use the imagination they could have developed playing the original XCom
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I’m not sure what they’re trying to do with this bit of PR. Are they trying to convince the turn-based strategy purists that their favourite genre is, in fact, a bit rubbish?
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I still play TBS games. Magic the Gathering Online is my most played game of the past two weeks (partly due to the Commander releases getting me into that format) and prior to that was Blood Bowl: Legendary Edition.
And when it comes to money (which is what they are really talking about when they say strategy is dead) I have probably spent as much on MTGO this last year as I have on all my other games combined and I am not a huge spender where MTG is concerned.
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Panzer Corps Says Hello, Basically a remake of Panzer General 1 and 2.
Massively popular Atm and is has very good reviews: http://www.slitherine.com/games/panzer_corps_pc
And there are many more examples of 90′s games remakes.
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Yes but WHO IS DEADLIEST?
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So advance wars series, fire emblem games, civilzation games, worms games etc do not sell now because they are turn based games!
Oh Wait, you couldn’t be talking out of your buttcrack as a way of saying “pandering to the shooter crowd is the way of making lots of easy money now, so thats what we are donig”.
I would actually respect a company who is honest like that, much like i would respect EA if they would just come out and say “BF3 is not on steam becuse we want you to use orgin” instead of the BS they are saying
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Strategy games are not contemporary (big wtf there really) so let’s buy a strategy IP!
The 90s generation love Xcom, so let’s make a game that has nothing to do with it besides the name.
Great thinking minds they have.
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Well.. obviusly Plants versus Zombies is soo a failure. No one wants to play a strategy game.
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I would rather have seen X-Com as a low budget project true to its source than as an AAA shooter devoid of links to its past. King’s Bounty, Sins of a Solar Empire, Frozen Synapse, all relatively low budget games which nevertheless have been extremely successful and prove there’s a market to be tapped for these sorts of games. Hell, I’d bet that if they made the controls intuitive enough it’d even sell well as a downloadable title on consoles.
But no. Rather than investing small towards a niche title and hoping for a good turnover it seems all major developers are stuck in an ‘all or nothing’ mentality. Every game *must* be AAA, must cost millions to make, and must sell even more just to hope to turn some tiny profit. And in order to get that profit and to appeal to as large an audience as possible they turn a clever idea into the equivalent of gaming porridge. Nourishing, but bland and nothing you’ll remember the second you’ve finished eating.
At this point the best I can hope is that it’s decent porridge.
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I like porridge.
( I don’t like gaming porridge though, just the breakfast)
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As in, “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”?
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@jon_hill987
Porridge is alright, especially when generously sprinkled with brown sugar. But I’d rather have pancakes, bacon & eggs lightly dribbles with powered sugar and maple syrup. Mmmmm.
@JackShandy
Naturally, is there any other? Poor Mr. Norrell hasn’t much caught onto this electronic machine idea yet, but I find the idea rather charming.
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From that same article:
“I use the example of music artists. Look at someone old school like Ray Charles, if he would make music today it would still be Ray Charles but he would probably do it more in the style of Kanye West. Bringing Ray Charles back is all fine and good, but it just needs to move on, although the core essence will still be the same.
“That’s what we are trying to do. To renew Xcom but in line with what this generation of gamers want. The team behind it is asking themselves every day: ‘Is it true to the values of the franchise?’ It’s not a case of cashing in on the name. We just need to renew it because times are changing.”
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This interview is everything wrong with the industry right now condensed into one article.
Even if the new X-Com does miraculously turn out to be great I’m compelled to ignore just because of how loathsome the attitudes expressed in this interview are.
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Ray Charles in the style of Kanye!?!
/loses all hope for humanity…
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Clearly Kanye West is superior. Look at what he does with taking other contemporary hits and then talking over them! It’s like a director’s commentary! GENIUS!
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The new XCOM is like Kanye’s song Gold Digger. Ominous.
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“Look at someone old school like Ray Charles, if he would make music today it would still be Ray Charles but he would probably do it more in the style of Kanye West. ”
I can’t decide if this is parody, or there really are people who get employed to talk such utter bollix.
P.
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Kanye West has made more money than Ray Charles did, therefore he is superior.
So goes the logic of the management.
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I would go to a Ray Charles concert. I wouldn’t show up at a Kanye West show, though. Argument debunked. Hartmann 0, JFS 1, where can I apply for his job?
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“Yo Civilization IV, I’m really happy for you. Imma let you finish that turn. But Call of Duty: Black Ops is one of the best sellers of all time.Of all time!”
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So I guess the question is, why are we allowing the Marketing Department to dictate creative design, art direction and gameplay decisions?
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@Nalano:
Indeed. This is why mainstream gaming is so shit. Entire studios, like this one here, are run entirely by marketing departments rather than people who actually know what the hell is going on.
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Contemporary games need less strategy and more auto-tune.
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So Dawn of War and Starcraft arn’t contemporary either then, oh wait….
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Nor Total War.
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I can understand why they don’t want to make strategy games, but to make out that an entire market “isn’t contemporary” is just silly.
I’m also not convinced that they gained much by using the XCOM name for this instead of just calling it something else, but that’s a lot less clear cut.
I do wonder sometimes whether publishers actually PLAY games. The idea that there’s more to a game series than just a rubber stamp with its name on and maybe a few gimmicks seems alien to some of them. It is a curious thing.
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“I can understand why they don’t want to make strategy games, but to make out that an entire market “isn’t contemporary” is just silly.”
This is what annoys me the most about this new XCOM, and the industry in general. It’s not enough that they don’t make the kinds of games I would like to play ; they also have to publicly insist that those games aren’t worth making at all, by anyone. And not just from a commercial standpoint (see the earlier comment, about turn-based games “wanting” to be real-time).
Don’t make turn-based games if you don’t want to, that’s fine, but you don’t have to rub it in, do you ? :/
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“Trains aren’t contemporary. Air travel is best.”
Until delays due to commuter jets clogging up all the runways is the norm and China ends up with all the high speed rail.
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When I hear things like this, I feel extremely guilty for all the games I pirated.
Publishers are so incredibly terrified of releasing something that might not appeal to 100% of the gaming demographic, they instead release and endless stream of titles universally regarded as ‘alright, I guess’.
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Don’t blame yourself for their short-sightedness. When gaming turns out to be nothing but “CoD12″ and “BF7″ and ends up dying due to lack of interest, we’ll have the marketing department to blame, not you.
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I get it, this whole interview is actually an ARG-style coded message.
Fortunately for you lucky folks, I have decoded it to the best of my ability:
D/O/N/O/T/B/U/Y/T/H/I/S/G/A/M/E/I/T/I/S/S/H/I/T
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Indeed. I’m boycotting it. I’m sick of shit like this.
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I’m not boycotting the game. I’m just not buying it. It might be the best game ever made, but I just will not reward stuff like this.
It makes me furious, sad and lethargic at the same time. It’s quite a feat, really.
That said, if I ever decide to change that stance and get a look at the game myself so I can froth at my mouth and know what I’m talking about, I’ll pick up a used copy for one of my consoles so they see no money from me.
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It gives indie developers free reign to create fun turn based games.
Now I want to play Silent Storm again…
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I’ve said it a lot recently, but take a look at Xenonauts if you haven’t already. Tapio, the sound designer for Amnesia, is part of the team working on it. And yes, Silent Storm was fantastic.
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Is Xenonauts is a playable state yet?
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Sort of. It’s still technically an alpha/early-beta. A lot of features aren’t implemented yet and it’s still pretty buggy. But from what I’ve played, they’re right on track.
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What a bunch of clueless idiots.
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My god this man is an idiot.
Paradox are running a business entirely off of strategy games, as are others.
Sure they aren’t making EA money but there is a demonstrably valuable market out there.
Actually he’s probably not an idiot – just disingenuous.
What they really mean is they are not interested in anything that can’t be developed cross-platform.
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Xenonauts, Panzer Corps, Skulls of the Shogun, Team Assault, Heroes of Might and Magic VI, UFO 2: Extraterrestrials, Pride of Nations, to name a few…
Turn-Based Strategy games are making a comeback.
ps.: It wasn’t my intention to quote you. Sorry for my mistake.
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” Why do publishers think game and IP are somehow unrelated?”
Because it seems that they think that IP is much more important than the game itself.
They believe people will buy this game, just because it’s called “XCOM”. But it seems like they get a lot of negative press because of improper use of the IP in their hand, instead of excitement over the new Xcom title..
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Let’s show this clown how much his junk sells and how much indie game Xenonauts do.
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“But the problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth” – I am the markets bitch….
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It seems like a curious marketing strategy to systematically alienate anyone who actually cared about your franchise.
Previously I was prepared to go with “Ok, it won’t be X-COM but maybe it’ll be an interesting game in its own right.” After a statement as bone-headed as this I’m increasingly doubtful they’ll even manage that.
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“It seems like a curious marketing strategy to systematically alienate anyone who actually cared about your franchise.”
It’s not really all that curious, is it? Every time they make another statement like this, the old fans of the series (a fairly small population compared to the current market) become incredibly noisy, filling forums with their anger and disenchantment. Passersby who are unfamiliar with the series will just see controversy, and some proportion of them will be intrigued enough to look into the new game to figure out what’s going on. Meanwhile, few of them are likely to be moved by the old fans’ complaints, which are motivated by a nostalgia they simply don’t share.
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So essentially they never intended to appeal to old fans, they just wanted someone to troll for free publicity? If that’s true I guess I completely underestimated the degree of ruthless cynicism in the industry. That scares me.
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Wonder if they would have considered games like minecraft and terraria contemporary. I kind of doubt that they would and yet there were millions to be earned on those games.
Maybe publishers and big developers should stop making games they think will sell well and start making games they’d actually like to play.
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Tell it to the developers making TBS games for the Nintendo DS (Mr Gollop included).
It’s pretty easy to deconstruct what’s being said here, and a few people already have so I won’t, but if this philosophy is how they’ve chosen to direct the project, then clearly we have cause to worry. I admire Hartmann’s candor, but I think he’s revealed a bit too much about his attitude and the general attitude that the large studios and publishers seem to take nowadays. X-COM was not a “AAA” title when it was first released – such a thing simply didn’t exist. In a way, trying to make it into one is already violating the spirit in which the original title was made.
His Ray Charles example doesn’t hold water. Kanye is an artist with Charles in his musical DNA – heck, he samples a Ray Charles song in his breakout hit (as sung by Jamie Foxx but still)! The correct analogy would be if Ray Charles’ music was produced today in the style of the Foo Fighters or Lady GaGa – an entirely different and only vaguely related genre.
I don’t know. I want this to be as good a game as they’re trying to make because I think there are some risks and some interesting angles, or at least there were in the initial previews. But at the same time it wouldn’t shock me to see this fail, and I think big failures like this need to happen before we see a change in the gaming landscape at the top studios.
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This Hartmann fool knows he publishes fucking Civilization right? Well, indies to the rescue! :)
LE: Also the Ray Charles thing.. I don’t even… Words escape me….
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Strategy games are more contemporary than Art Deco. Unless by contemporary what he means is massively popular on the xbox.
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Blargh.
While the new Xcom game seems more interesting to me now than it did when I first found out it was going to be a FPS… it’s still stupid that they are calling it Xcom.
The setting of the game(which they aren’t really using) wasn’t what made me play it non stop for months… It was the gameplay.
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Not contemporary. NOT CONTEMPORARY? Ok 2k, go tell that to Blizzard and Valve who obviously have no Idea about how to make games, UNLIKE THE GLORIOUS 2K! Good we have 2K around to tell us how Starcraft and Dota games are not contemporary. What a bunch of retards.
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WARFACE!
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Methinks RPS needs some sort of tag for these kinds of posts, like say “the cowardly forces of industry”.
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It’s not as easy for 2K to become Paradox as you might imagine. Clearly the AAA industry needs to change and it will (why do you think EA just bought PopCap?) but that doesn’t happen overnight. Having 2K Marin go from Bioshock 2 to Europa Universalis would make about as much sense as handing Paradox the Call of Duty license. They wouldn’t know what to do with it.
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If Activision handed Paradox the Call of Duty license, I might actually end up playing it for once.
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Aren’t a lot of Facebook games – the ones that have tens of millions of players and make Zynga more money than god – strategy games?
‘Cos you can’t get much more contemporary than that.
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Funny you’d mention that. There was actually something on Gamasutra earlier this week:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/35555/Strategy_War_Titles_Lead_FastestGrowing_Facebook_Games.php
Beat marketing with its own weapons: Raw Data
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Strategy games aren’t contemporary?
Well then, I’d better delete all the Paradox games off my comp. And cancel my Crusader Kings 2 pre-order.
Thanks, guy, you really saved me from having a good time, there.
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I can’t imagine 2K’s PR department is happy with this interview. More proof that you should never ever let your company’s CEO talk to the press (see also Bobby Kotick).
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The funny thing is that he actually goes on to say some interesting stuff. But it’s easier just to get all butthurt.
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like what? How he would turn Starcraft into a FPS if he had the chance, to make it more “contemporary”? Im not interested in anything somebody has to say who only cares about shareholders, not gaming.
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“Our studios don’t want to do the same things all the time,” he says. “I have seen so many franchises die because of poor quality or creativity running out. Not everything is meant to go on forever. You have to push yourself and build new things, there’s no way around it.
“My vision for 2K is to be the Miramax of the early days, when you had all these great movies that won Oscars but were also commercially really successful. That’s what we want to do.
Hartmann stresses the importance of building games that studios want to create, and not just assigning projects based on corporate planning.
“I am not of the belief that you need to strategically move into genres because they are growing,” he explains. “You have to have the right studio that is passionate about that genre and believe in it. And you need to add a unique twist to it, like Gearbox Software did with Borderlands.
“It’s not about having our matrix and saying ‘oh we don’t have a game in this genre,’ and then saying ‘well, who can create one for us? How about 2K whoever because they have just came off a project.’ “That doesn’t sound like a good formula for success. Someone needs to drive it and the team needs to have a great idea.”
P.S. You know that Blizzard tried to turn Starcraft into a third-person shooter, yes?
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@ Rii
“P.S. You know that Blizzard tried to turn Starcraft into a third-person shooter, yes?”
Yes, but it was to be a spin off, not a sequel.
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Not only was it a spin-off, it was a failure and rightfully never seen the light of day because it was a retarded idea. Therefore, they put it down and went on making Starcraft 2. 2K just doesnt have what it takes to make great franchises like Starcraft, Diablo or Team Fortress. They buyout a franchise and make a generic shooter for consoles for a quick cash in. Its the sign of a mediocre and low talented games developer.
And its sad one of the greatest titles ever on the PC has to land in the hands of those people. What a shame. Xcom deserves better.
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Astounding. His goal is to make games that are commercially AND critically successful. What a revelation. You can almost hear the accumulated thumps of palms hitting foreheads, as developers and publishers the world around breathe a collective, “ohhhhhh! Why didn’t I…”
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Yes, because the Weinsteins are such great role models.
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I can’t believe this statement. 2k Games publsihes Civ, why isn’t this now a shooter where you get a technology between missions? In a few months Heroes 6 will be released, another big budget TBS.
Let alone the success of the total war series or pure RTS games like starcraft and he argues strategy games are outdated?
Oh, not to mention the plethora of low budget games trying to be a successor for X-COM. Altar interactive released three games between 2003 and 2007, Chaos Concept released another one in 2007. That’s 4 commercial x-com style games in the 2000s. None of them was able to capture the atmosphere however. In addition to this is the open source Alien Invasion and the Indie-title Xenonauts, both in development (albeit slow development). On top of that I hear the classic X-COM games are fairly popular on Steam. All of this clearly indicates nobody is interested in a true successor to X-COM, doesn’t it?
The new XCOM is in the words of Spoony “BETRAYAL!” It has nothing to do with the original except for the name and they can’t seriously believe people will buy or like a game based on that. For a gamer it’s important that the gameplay has that familiar feeling to it, they just need to take a look at Dungeon Siege 3, another game which has nothing to do with it’s predecessors except for the name and the massive outcry by fans because of that. There is a lesson to be learned from that, but still they defend this abomination of a game. Well, if Hartmanns target is to alienate XCOM-fans completely he has achieved his objective.
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It’s not really a justification for anything; more an appeasement thinly disguised as opinion. Ask him what he thinks of turn-based strategy the next time 2K are about to release a new Civ and watch that ‘belief’ wash away in the rain.
The big publishers won’t unshackle themselves from the skeletal framework of CoD clones until someone smaller takes a risk which pays off big time. Then they’ll talk about how they love Strategy games, and play Risk together every night, and reread Sun Tzu’s The Art of War every Sunday morning. They won’t mean it then, either. That man is not a person, with a personal viewpoint, in this context. When he speaks it is the voice of a thousand grey suits in unison clamoring for your money, not your love. Your money AND your love, maybe, but firstly the money.
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Do they think that all gamers from the 90′s were hoovered up and sent to the Gulags? We’re still here you know! And we’re still looking for engaging strategy games to pour our evenings into.
Don’t make me play Aftermath again! I’ll do it you know!!
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I think the guy is trying to say he thinks strategy games are passé. I also think that that was an incredibly foolish (and/or arrogant) thing to say, considering the fanbase.
I can only hope the game doesn’t sell at all (Okay, the game’s not my thing so it’s not as if I would have bought it anyway). ‘t would be poetic justice. On the other hand, it’s a shame if the game is any good.
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you missed the best quote:
“I use the example of music artists. Look at someone old school like Ray Charles, if he would make music today it would still be Ray Charles but he would probably do it more in the style of Kanye West. Bringing Ray Charles back is all fine and good, but it just needs to move on, although the core essence will still be the same.
“That’s what we are trying to do. To renew Xcom but in line with what this generation of gamers want. The team behind it is asking themselves every day: ‘Is it true to the values of the franchise?’ It’s not a case of cashing in on the name. We just need to renew it because times are changing.”
this is yet more proof for my hypothesis that game developers are the dumbest people on the fucking planet and nothing is worse for pr than letting them open their stupid mouths
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Yeah, letting Hartmann open his mouth was nearly as bad an idea as letting Kanye open his mouth.
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“this is yet more proof for my hypothesis that game developers are the dumbest people on the fucking planet and nothing is worse for pr than letting them open their stupid mouths”
This guy is a publishing executive, which is about as far away from game development as you can get in this industry. His comments prove this point pretty well; I would be surprised if he has ever even seen screenshots of the original X-Com titles.
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2K Games can go fuck them selves.
It appears I’m “not contemporary” either, so, I’m going to go about buying up old games that offer real RTS\RPG rather than some kind of flimsy half hearted “LOOK WHAT WE OWNZ”
Dawn of War moving away from base building warfare pissed me off no end.
Fucking corporations….. (grumbles on in an incoherent manner)
I’m too old for this, not buying these shitty games is the only way companies will learn but there’s a million herpers out there who’ll grab it and squee all over it ¬¬
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So what? Strategy games don’t sell nearly as good as shooters, that’s something one can hardly deny. The next Call of Duty is most likely going to outsell all strategy titles of this year combined and that’s what he is saying.
I’m kinda disappointed about RPS just letting that stand there, looks an awful lot like “bigwig says something stupid and outrageous” and the additional catering to the people who whine about the new XCOM game. Meh.
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@Anthile: “I’m kinda disappointed about RPS just letting that stand there, looks an awful lot like “bigwig says something stupid and outrageous” and the additional catering to the people who whine about the new XCOM game.”
It’s a very contemporary thing to do.
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“Strategy games don’t sell nearly as good as shooters, that’s something one can hardly deny.”
No. Luckily, a strategy game doesn’t need to sell anywhere near as much if the budget if reasonable, and can even have more relative success compared to blowing multi-millions on yet another FPS that gets overlooked in an already heavily saturated genre.
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Rii, you’ve been a pretty tireless defender of 2K in multiple comment threads. Any affiliations we should know about?
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@JP
I love 2K Marin’s previous title Bioshock 2, find this new XCOM an intriguing prospect, and in any case have transcended that stage of development wherein the forebears of works that are not slavishly faithful to them can arouse and enlist my rage in their defence. Having had some time ago to reconcile my good regard for both Starship Troopers the novel and Starship Troopers the film – two works that could scarcely be more different from one another – I have passed through the eye of that particular needle already and am able to see with clearer eyes.
And that’s it.
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Yep, definitely something wrong with this picture.
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You know it’s bad when sega wow making a niche anime world war 1 similie for PS3 in the form of Valkyria Chronicles disproves your argument.
For those PC only peeps who don’t know it’s a fully 3d strategy game with consecutive turns and the units control from a 3rd person viewpoint with a movement meter that goes down. Units cost action points to activate and can be activated multiple times with decreasing movement each time. Enemy units also fire back at player controlled units during the players turn when they are controlled. Your units do the same in the enemy turn.
As to sales well that’s mostly to do with advertising nothing else, I’m willing to bet you could reskin Valkyria chronicles as a gritty modern combat game or a zombie defense game, advertise the shit out of it and it would sell well.
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I’m of the opinion that Valkyria chronicles is very close to how the new Xcom should have been designed. That game is amazing, and its defection to the PSP saddens me.
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Mr Gollop actually said that his last “biggish” proposal for a PC strategy game in the early 2000′s was very similar to Valkyria Chronicles. I think it’s in his Eurogamer interview from a few months ago.
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The PSP version was awful, not cause of hte change of platform and the new battle mechanics, they actually worked well.
It was the story structure and the massive reuse of levels that really really sucked, havign to do 3 random missions with nothign to do with teh story… to do the story…. EVERY SINGLE SODDING MONTH.
(as you can guess i never finished the psp version :P story was good when i could see it!)
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I kinda agree with what this guy is saying. I like turn based games BTW. No telling how many hours I’ve spent in 4X games.
He is saying turn based is an old game design. It morphed into RTS which is more modern.
I also think he is saying that 2K isn’t setup to do turn based games. FPS games require much more staff and funding. Which 2K has experience with and staffing for.
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HOW DARE YOU SYMPATHISE WITH THE DEVIL!
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“It morphed into RTS which is more modern.”
“Modern” my ass, RTS genre was born in ’84.
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“He is saying turn based is an old game design. It morphed into RTS which is more modern.”
Are you really trying to say that RTS games are more mature or advanced strategy games than TBS games?
Surely you jest!
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Christoph Hartmann’s face is not contemporary.
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Maybe he didn’t think of the Civ series, because he couldn’t see his company’s catalog past either of his chins.
Sorry. I’m incandescent with rage.
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Turn based strategy games will have their revenge on his lunatic on mobiles and smartphones, or maybe already have…
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The fact that this viewpoint is held by the publisher of Civ5 explains so much about that title’s many shortcomings.
Also, he’s an idiot.
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So um, yeah. What they said (points to everybody above).
I guess its time to take my non-contemporary ass to a retirment home.
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Yesterday:
“X-Com corpse dug up and raped again”
Today:
“X-Com corpse dug up and raped again, and bullshit excuses”.
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Definition : Contemporary – An adjective which means a video game that runs on 5-year-old consoles
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Hmm, with that statement I don’t think I can defend this xcom much any more. :( What an arse.
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The game industry is going to eat itself. If idiots like this are running the farm whom havent got a clue what consumers really want.
I’m not saying I know what they consumers want, but consumers are funny things they dont even know what they want. If somethings good and advertised well people will buy. All kinds of things can sell that no one would ever guess beforehand.
Narrowminded views like this, I dont think theres even any creative thought behind it. Its just they think they know what the customers want, when all they’ve been giving the customers is only a few (slightly)different things. The whole thing, the whole game looks like a calculated piece of work. Not how real people design great works of art.
Its so infuriating they will drive the games industry off the cliff. The so called tripe AAA games industry at least.
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At first his statement kind of angered me, but now I kind of hope 2K’s new corporate stance means the next game in the Civ series will be a God of War clone where you play a disgruntled settler who has to kill the most important World leaders in history by ripping their heads off.
After all, besides shooters the only other “contemporary” genre I can think of is character based 3rd person action game filled to the brim with QTEs.
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I do agree with him as painful it is, Valkyrie Chronicles on the PS3 was probably the best attempt at an accessible turn based X-Com style game I’ve played in a long time and although the game was loved it bombed financially.
Sega switched to the PSP after that for further games, in order to do a AAA X-Com style game your going to have to hit every single platform out there even the iOS/Android devices to reach the small numbers that want such games on each platform.
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The amount of critisim on this thread warms my heart.
“But this is not just a commercial thing – strategy games are just not contemporary”
What i think he ment to say was; This is a completely comercial decision because we aren’t innovative enough to create a contemporary strategy, or even redefine what a contemporary strategy might look like.
“we own the IP, so we thought OK, what do we do with it?” Sell it to someone that might do something interesting in it rather than just creating another blood clot in the oversaturated streamlined FPS market
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Wait, if we can’t define a contemporary strategy game, what’s a contemporary shooter?
What does the latest CoD have that MW didn’t have four years ago? Hell, that series still doesn’t have destructible environments.
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As pointed out on No High Scores: four words: Civilization, Duke Nukem Forever.
Now go sit in the corner and think about what you just said.
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Let’s translate that to a more appropriate headline:
President of 2K doesn’t know what games his own company publishes, is an idiot.
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It might not be a good idea to tell him, if you get my drift. ;)
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Or you know, consoles cannot properly play them and that’s the problem.
Also, Civ V and Shogun 2 say hello. Shogun 2 is kind of mix as it’s turn based strategy with real time combat, but I rarely touch the combat personally.
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Good job alienating the entirety of the original X-COM fanbase, son. Enjoy those ten thousand non-sales.
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Chess. Fucking rubbish, that.
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That’s it, isn’t it? People never stopped playing board games. Therefore, strategy is still contemporary.
(I’m on vacation in Turkey and Backgammon is so massive here. YOu see nothing but cafe’s full of old men sitting around and playing it, it’s what starcraft is for korea.)
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Heh. Now strategy game lovers will know what we adventure game lovers feel.
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That question, “Why do publishers think game and IP are somehow unrelated?” conjures up some particularly interesting implications for me that I can’t quite articulate. I think it has something to do with an editorial Ken Williams wrote in one of the old Sierra On-Line adverteasing magazines of old. He pointed out that his vision of the future of PC gaming included store shelves categorized by genre of story rather than genre of gameplay. That is, Mystery, Romance, Science Fiction &c. games rather than Action, Adventure, Role Playing &c.
Of course, the idea betrayed Williams’ particular approach to game development. Obviously he was working from an adventure game background where such delineations could potentially be useful. Furthermore, it was a hyperbolic way of emphasizing story over game mechanics, which is not necessarily the correct way of furthering game design. And even my young mind recognized it as a peculiar model. Now, I think of it as a somewhat myopic viewpoint as it de-emphasizes the method of consuming a game narrative, which is what makes game narratives so unique.
I think what this has to do with the original question is that it seems a different manifestation of an emphasis on IP over game. If we lived in a world where games where categorized by story genres, changing the game mechanic of an IP wouldn’t be too big of a deal, but, of course we don’t live in that world. And I think that speaks to the weakness of the intellectual property of the story as a determining factor in what attracts people to games. X-Com is a pretty good example of this: it’s a great game, and surely a classic, but that status has little to do with any innovation in plot, character or narrative and everything to do with the innovation in the gameplay. After all the game is about humans fighting aliens with technology. It’s hardly groundbreaking, but it’s entirely functional, and when people remember it fondly they are remembering harrowing battles that were dependent on the strategies they developed around the gameplay rather than the story concepts that 2K are insistent that they’re keeping. People don’t rave about it because of the Elerium.
I guess I’m not really sure what to think about the original rhetorical question. Should IPs and gameplay be completely intertwined, or should a narrative be able to be separated from the game that tells it. If it’s the latter (and the narrative of games improves drastically), then a re-imagining of a game wouldn’t really be that horrible of a thing. Theoretically a game with a strong narrative like, say, Grim Fandango could be reflected in a different light through a first person shooter or something (I don’t know how… but…).
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For a moment I thought this said Christoph Hartmann has said this to an MCV. I don’t think an MCV would react very well to this kind of news.
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GAHHH
YOU WON’T LIKE ME WHEN I’M ANGRY, STUPID BOSS MAN
Seriously, does anyone expect anything intelligent and/or relevant to come out of these idiots’ mouths? They are just fucking corporate dickheads who stare at profit graphs all day and talk on their smart phones to lawyers, PR men and shareholders. Fuck them. This is why I die a little inside whenever I see small developers get bought up by big publishers.
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I think the problem is that contemporary means massively profitable, not self-sufficient. That said, some of the best games out their like Planescape, Psychonauts, and VtMB did not get a ton of sales and might not even have been self-sufficient. It’s hard to tell major devs/publishers to strive for quality, innovation, or serving niche markets when mass-market mediocrity is rewarded.
That said, I wish 2k would get a good, driven small team (5-20 people) and give them the X-com license. I think that a good smaller team that communicates well could easily make a profit.
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I agree with mr. Christoph Hartmann.
I would also remember that soccer, pool, bowling, poker and many others are outdated. I can totally foresee XCOM competing directly with the FIFA and Dirt franchises.
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The guy’s right. The average video game consumer doesn’t play games like Civ, and they don’t want to market strictly to that audience. And since the best selling games are shooters it’s only logical to make it one. All the hardcore cry babies cried about Fallout moving this route and it turned out fine. I’d bet this game makes a successful transition as well.
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I fully expect XCOM the Shooter to be a very enjoyable game. It is not, however, going to be X-Com the strategy game, or a sequel or followup thereto, and I want one of those. Similarly, I enjoyed the hell out of Fallout 3 as made first-person open world explorer by Bethesda, but if someone were to make another Fallout with isometric perspective, turn-based combat, world that updated based on things like my killing shopkeepers, and so on, I would buy it in a heartbeat.
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I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed Elder Scrolls: Capital Wasteland, but trying to compare it to Fallout 1 and 2(which I only played a year before FO3) is absurd. It succeeded because it was an open-world exploration game, those don’t come around too often, so people who like them get the lot and wring all the enjoyment they can out of it because they needs their fix.
X-Com is still a viable turn-based franchise. There’s a little game called Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars on the 3DS, I’ve got it, and it’s great. A couple of guys in Romania, including Julian Gollop, of the original X-Com, have moved just shy of a hundred thousand units, which implies a pretty decent return on the publisher’s investment. It feels very much like X-Com, though it is simplified and is built around set missions that keep me from getting into the mindset that I have to do this right first time, like X-Com does.
The original X-Com was made by a couple of guys using BASIC, it’d be perfectly possible for 2K to have a couple of guys make a new turn-based X-Com set in their new world. Release it as a pre-order bonus, or as a cheap download a month or two before the main game hits to get people involved and invested in the franchise and motivated to pre-order, like with the Serious Sam 3 spin-offs.
Most war games could do something like this. It’d be a great way to give younger, less experienced staff a chance to hone their skills on something more forgiving, but that can still turn a good profit.
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i would say that a fair few average consumers play civ, look at the sale charts
the difference between fallout and this is that fallout 3 didnt literally abandon the established universe entirely and make it a new post apocaliptic IP, and they never dragged it through the mud and called it names
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I have nothing productive to contribute to this discussion, but anyone who insists that entire GENRES OF GAMEPLAY are somehow obsolete and must be consigned to the backwaters of history can fuck right off. Andquit with the making of strategic decisions for major gaming companies, also.
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I am sure xcom enforcer was contemporary for its time… Bwahahahahahahahahshsh
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I was introduced to X-Com on Playstation, but for some reason it seems like TBS on console is considered heresy these days. Maybe the new Wii with the tablet controller can change this perception…
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