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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.