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How Steam Revived a Dead Game
Ask Stenum writes "Rock Paper Shotgun has an interesting write-up about how Unreal Tournament 3 has risen from the dead after Epic Games patched it, made a deal with Valve to put it on Steam and making it available for free for a weekend. It's interesting to see how a multiplayer game that's almost one and a half years old suddenly has become what it never could be; a game with multiple players. What other (maybe older?) online multiplayer games would you like to see make a comeback?"
UT3's resurgence was mentioned here briefly last week as part of our discussion on the future of game pricing.
Advertising is key for game sales. Great games have come and gone virtually unnoticed without sufficient marketing (ex. Beyond Good & Evil).
Good quality racks up great word-of-mouth(which takes time to circulate!), but these big bursts of sales only come when there's enough people aware of the game so that they can take time to consider it.
The free-weekend though was a fantastic idea. Getting to see exactly what you're paying for relieves a lot of the doubts that a potential buyer may have.
Tribes 2. Those who played it know it was revolutionary, even to this day many games struggle to find the depth this game held. It's free now, and although Sierra shutdown the master servers a while back the community of die hard players stepped up and created several workarounds. I'm happy to report that on any given Friday night there is at least one server with close to (or up to ) 60 players picking teams and playing 3 maps. Friday Night Fights. The best part is gaming rigs have finally caught up to the task of running this game smoothly, when it first came out it was pushing the bleeding edge of machines to run it like it deserved.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
UT3 is worth $12 and not a cent more, IMHO. I'll probably play it for a few weeks and move on (I purchased it during Steam's holiday sale and finally installed it to check out the update). So the cost/entertainment ratio is pretty good.
Truthfully, most games aren't worth $20, let alone $50. I was browsing Steam the other day and noticed that EndWar -- a months-old console port with an attractive 67/100 Metacritic rating -- is being sold for the same price as Empire Total War and Dawn of War II. Hell, you can buy World in Conflict Gold for $30. So why on earth should I pay $50 for EndWar? Don't get me wrong, EndWar could provide a few days of stupid RTS fun, but it's simply not worth the asking price.
Anyway, thanks to Steam, Impulse, Gamersgate and GOG, I can buy 5 (maybe more) games for the same price as a new one. Good games are always good, ya know? So not only are publishers competing with current games, they're competing with dirt cheap oldies, too.
Enough with the arbitrary $50 price point. Some games are absolutely worth $50; most are not.
I want that game back!!! All time most favorite and addicting game ever. I found myself calling in sick to work so I could finish a mission.
They're still making Worms games, you know. There's even a downloadable version on XBox Live with online multiplayer.
Of course, us Wii users got SCREWED when multiplayer was removed from Worms: A Space Oddity shortly before hitting the shelves. I was really looking forward to that game! But noooo. Yet another developer takes a dump on Wii players. And then the megacorp game companies wonder why third parties can't sell Wii games. (Here's a hint guys: It helps to make games that people want to buy.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Still looks moribund.
http://www.game-monitor.com/search.php?game=ut3
700 servers and 361 players right now.
BF2 has over 5000 people playing right now.
CoD4 over 8000.
L4D over 6000.
TF2 7001.
And how is this for insult to injury. UT2004 currently has 641 players. Almost double UT3. UT3 just seemed like a tech demo. More to sell the engine to other game makers.
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
Wait, this game was released over a year ago? I've been telling people that I've been getting a launch title for twelve bucks o_o. I'm with this guy *points to above post*
Believe it or not, you can still purchase it:
http://www.gog.com/en/search/sort/search/freespace
$5.99 for the game + expansions. Same for FreeSpace 2.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Quake 3 Arena is like 8 years old and is alive, well, and growing again thanks to id's free beta. Looks like Epic's strategy of copying everything id does is finally paying off...(kidding, mostly)
I hear you, brother! FUCK the developers at Epic who worked on the games to make a living! FUCK their rights! Artists are our slaves.
One problem with UT3 might be the name. I remembered playing the UT4 demo years ago, so when I first heard about the free weekend for 3 I thought "wow, that's a *really* old game!". It was only when I saw this slashdot entry mention "one and a half years ago" that I realized something was amiss. I checked wikipedia and sure enough, the game I remembered playing was UT 2004
Now after the weekend is over and it has been more than a week already, the players count has dropped rapidly. Nice warmping up for old game but it just didnt last. It should be updated regularely to keep people's interest on it. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ (Click link view stats per game)
Every time I see a story mentioning Steam, I'm reminded how my Verizon-provided Actiontec router can't handle the Steam server browser. My only option appears to be to replace the provided router with my own.
I haven't tried fighting with Verizon about how their router sucks. I guess I have the feeling they're not going to do anything about it no matter what I do.
That said, they are still better than Comcast :-/
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
The work around really are not hat hard. If you want to play on Friday night fights it consists of registering your nick on a website, loading the game in LAN mode and then when listing the servers hitting "insert" and the valid IP of a server running it.(hint)208.101.7.64:28000 Complete Instructions can be found at http://www.elitewarriorsonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=137:t2-bouncer-authentication-via-lan
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
Halo sold to mediocre gamers
</anti:ms>
You might want to check out the Worms: Open Warfare games for the DS, if you have one. The second one has online multiplayer and has more weapons and such than the XBox Live one.
I'd like to second this. I also consider myself a serious gamer and had no idea this game was even out. Wwhen UT3 hit Steam I told my friends "Hey, look! They finally released UT3!"
It gets worse, UT2004 is actually the THIRD UT game for the PC. The sequel to UT was UT2003, and it wasn't nearly as fun as the original. Instead of just bypassing that iteration of the Unreal Engine, Epic decided to remake UT2003 into the fun game that the original UT was, and they released UT2004. It had a lot of the same stuff from UT2003, but it was vastly improved.
UT3 is actually the FOURTH UT game.
Learn something new.
Starsiege Tribes 1. enough said.
I think part of that depends on your perspective on it. From a console standpoint, it was pretty amazing. From the standpoint of someone who'd been playing games like Quake and UT, it wasn't nearly so amazing. I remember all the console gamers I knew carrying on about how revolutionary the multiplayer was and all I could think was "I saw this years ago." It's not a bad game, don't get me wrong, just had it been a PC game I don't think it would have made all that big a splash.
Best of all, Good Old Games sells their games completely DRM unencumbered, so its easy to play them with Wine on Linux.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Seconded. That has to be one of my alltime faves. If they overhauled the engine and physics but kept the gameplay exactly the same. Oh and obviously a game browser. For its day you had to know the SPX/IPX or TCP/IP address of the machine you were connecting to. Still be a cool feature. but a game browser would be awesome :D