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Modern Warfare 2 Surpasses $1 Billion Mark; Dedicated Servers What?
The Opposable Thumbs blog is running an interesting article contrasting everything Activision did "wrong" in creating and marketing Modern Warfare 2 with the game's unqualified success. Despite price hikes, somewhat shady review practices, exploit frustrations, and the dedicated server fiasco, the game has raked in over a billion dollars in sales.
"There was only one way to review Modern Warfare 2: on the Xbox 360, in Santa Barbara, under the watchful eye of Activision. Accepting the paid trip, along with room and board, was the only way you were going to get a review before launch. Joystiq noted that this broke their ethics policy, but they went anyway. Who can say no to a review destined to bring in traffic? Shacknews refused to call their coverage a 'review' because of the ethical issues inherent in the situation, but that stance was unique. The vast majority of news outlets didn't disclose how the review was conducted, or added a disclaimer after the nature of the review was made public. This proved to Activision that if you're big enough, you can dictate the exact terms of any review, and no ethics policy will make news outlets turn you down."
Yes, thats the best added benefit of dedicated servers. However, I haven't really seen such blatant cheating around. There's sometimes an occasional one, but then everyone bitches at him and he leaves. Maybe geographical location has something to do with it, I don't know (as the matchmaking gets those players closest to your physical location)
However, as 50% of MW2 games end in a tactical nuke
I disagree here tho. I've played MW2 hundreds of hours and I've seen tactical nuke two times, and on the other time the guy did it 10 seconds before round end and said on chat he though it would be a fun ending.
That being said, I don't really play deathmatch or such where the cheaters most likely hang around. Domination, capture the flag and hardcore HQ are more fun.
I consider myself a hardcore PC gamer. I pretty much switched to playing multiplayer FPS games almost exclusively after Doom came out; I just love the genre and the competition of playing against real people. I loved it so much it ended up becoming my job; me and some friends founded a company to provide multiplayer gaming servers for other people in Australia (which went on to become the biggest online game service provider in Australia, blahblahbalhablah).
As a Ye Olde Time PC gamer, I remember the days of games like Doom, Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal - when you could drop AUD$80 on a game and know that you were going to be able to play that game for years, because it had freely downloadable and publicly available dedicated servers, meaning anyone could run a server anywhere in the world, at any time, with any settings. Not only that, the games were generally moddable - which meant the game experience would always be changing.
This model brought about things like Counter-Strike (probably the most successful multiplayer FPS ever), Desert Combat (directly responsible for the development of Battlefield 2), Day of Defeat (one of the first of manymanymany WW2 shooters). It brought about Team Fortress, which has since turned into Team Fortress 2 - another staggering success story. (Lucky Valve are still on the ball.)
There's been a clear paradigm shift recently though. I feel that it began with Battlefield 2, and more games are following the new model. Yes, there's a clear focus on console gaming. But more significantly, I feel, is the focus on trying to really sell brands over and over again as fast as possible.
With few exceptions (Blizzard, Valve), game developers and publishers don't want you to be playing the same game for three or four years. They want you to upgrade to the new hotness so they can get another chunk of cash out of you.
I didn't buy MW2 - I'm completely and utterly uninterested in it if it doesn't have dedicated servers, and I put my money where my mouth is and didn't buy it even though I've heard its pretty awesome. But it's hard for me to come out and say what IW are doing is clearly wrong - because obviously it's commercially successful. I do feel it's not in the best interests of gamers - I think we'd get much more /value/ if they went back to the old model. But MW2 has set a precedent, and I'm sure MW3 is already on the drawing board and not very far away.
You forgot the aimbot hackers that are in 1 in 4 games. That, by far, is the most irritating part of the multi-player experience. While it's easy to tell (thank you kill-cam) it's just irritating after getting connection to host errors 3 games in a row.
Not everyone who pulls of insane shots is using an aimbot. I have never played COD online, but I have played AA2 and AA3 a shitload. I have been banned from plenty of servers for dropping the admin at long range with a crap gun. If you always try for the insane shots, you quite often find you start pulling them off.
I dont read