Quote:
Originally posted by Mike D
And CSteinhardt, I'm sure that if given the opportunity to have the polls being opened indefinately in Florida probably would have given us a new President.
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That analogy doesn't really hold water. Every registered voter in Florida knew when the election was going to be held. In this case, I'd venture to say that a *lot* of OOTP users didn't know this poll was
even going to happen, let alone know when it was going to take place. It may be hard for us who use message boards to fathom, but there are many who play computer games who spend little/no time at message boards, playing multiplayer, or doing anything that is "community" related. What is even harder for those of us on message board to fathom is that
these people make up the majority of the people who buy games. Just look at this poll for evidence. It has been up for over 48 hours (a long time in message board land), and only 609 people have voted. Now, I don't know what Viatech's percentage take on sales is, but for easy math's sake, if OOTP were to net $20 per copy, that only adds up to $12,180 in net revenue.
I'd imagine that it has to net at least 5-10 times that amount to keep the company afloat. My guess is that we're looking at a poll in which, at BEST, 20% of OOTP users voted. (My guess is that it is more in the neighrborhood of 5-15%.) Granted, the online users tend to be the most vocal, but they also tend to be the ones who want the game *yesterday.* So, this poll is somewhat representative, but is by no means a scientific sampling of OOTPers.
On this topic, here's something that boggles my mind, but would lend more credence to the theory that the huge majority of OOTPers aren't represented in this poll. I play Empire Earth. EE is an *outstanding* multiplayer RTS game, but it sucks for single-player. The only way that the AI can be competitive is to cheat--and the way it cheats doesn't even make sense. I would be fine with an AI cheating that caused it to, say, gather gold 15% faster than the human player at the highest difficult level, for example. however, this game simply GIVES the AI extra resources at time intervals--rendering the common-sense RTS strategy of limiting your opponent's access to resources useless. What the point of me saying this, you ask? I'll tell you. Despite the fact that playing against the AI works so horribly, I read that
over 90% of the people who purchased Empire Earth *never* have used the online servers. Even computer gamers aren't online as much as we message board junkies would think, guys.