Tomb Raider: Underworld

[Shifty Geezer]

I said it before, but... I hope there will be no demo before game's release. Demo is a waste of resources and degrades the quality of full game if guys-with-ties think that winter holiday is the only timeframe to release a game.

There's no way I'd have bought CivRev without a demo. Demo's open up your game to curious parties just looking for something to try, and if it's good, you'll bag yourself some extra sales. Not releasing a (well made and well thought out) demo is a very bad choice IMO.

 

[deepbrown]

There's no way I'd have bought CivRev without a demo. Demo's open up your game to curious parties just looking for something to try, and if it's good, you'll bag yourself some extra sales. Not releasing a (well made and well thought out) demo is a very bad choice IMO.

Where was that article that concluded that games without demo's sold more. Personally I don't that's true - I think games that sold very well would sell even more with a demo.

 

[Dominik D]

@Shifty Geezer: please note I said before game release. It's not that you have to buy game on day one.

@deepbrown: I think it's just whining, like that time movie flopped because of a game release. Bad games will do bad, with or without demo. Also one has to remember that demo is a demo, not a full game and not first X levels. Demo has to be a showcase of game's strengths. Unfortunately too many demos these days are just poor, stripped-down version of a full game. I'm sure THAT can hurt sales.

 

[deepbrown]

@Shifty Geezer: please note I said before game release. It's not that you have to buy game on day one.

@deepbrown: I think it's just whining, like that time movie flopped because of a game release. Bad games will do bad, with or without demo. Also one has to remember that demo is a demo, not a full game and not first X levels. Demo has to be a showcase of game's strengths. Unfortunately too many demos these days are just poor, stripped-down version of a full game. I'm sure THAT can hurt sales.

Perhaps. But the best selling games this generation didn't have a demo...then again, most of them were sequels!

Though AC did well without a demo.

 

[rekator]

Perhaps. But the best selling games this generation didn't have a demo...then again, most of them were sequels!

Though AC did well without a demo.

Marketing Buzz is more important than a demo for selling a game…

 

[deepbrown]

Marketing Buzz is more important than a demo for selling a game…

And if creating a demo takes money away from marketing - or more accurately, the demo's cost is seen as part of the marketing budget - I'm not sure if a demo is a better idea than a big bunch of marketing. Both would be nice.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

Where was that article that concluded that games without demo's sold more. Personally I don't that's true - I think games that sold very well would sell even more with a demo.

Most games that have demo's are "bad games", looking at the average review scores of games and if they have a demo or not, shows that the highest scoring games, thus also often the most selling games, tend not to have a demo at all.

Therefore i think the correlation between how good the game is and if it has demo or not, and the correlation between how good the game is and how it sells, are by far the most important factors to look at.

I tried looking for any significant sales that may come for demo's vs similarly scored games without demo's but i couldn't find anything conclusive.

The samples are to small to tell anything of scientific value, but from the little data i could find, it would seem that bad games that have demo's tend to have lower sales than generally bad games without demo's, for 75% + titles i couldn't find anything significant one way or the other.

I would guess marketing (which i have allmost no data of whatsoever) is the biggest explaning factor with sales for all games except for 90+% titles, as EA titles sell on average much higher than they should compared to the reviewscores, and EA has the biggest marketing budgets by far compared to the other games in this group except for first party titles with bug budgets.

Im not so sure if the games without a demo that sell very well would boolster the sales by much.

 

[Tap In]

I bought Top Spin 3 last week purely based on the demo.... great game by the way after you unlearn the pong-like controls of the other tennis games.

 

[NRP]

On the other hand . . .

I was almost certainly going to buy Battlefield: Bad Company . . . until I played the demo.

So I guess it can work both ways.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

Most games that have demo's are "bad games", looking at the average review scores of games and if they have a demo or not, shows that the highest scoring games, thus also often the most selling games, tend not to have a demo at all.

It tends to be the case that games which do well without a demo would have done well with or without one. Demos tend to be for those who are on the fence or those who hold a "might-be-interested-if-they-knew-more" position than those who are initially interested or disinterested in the title. For high-scoring hit games, there tend to be relatively few of those. For those who are interested in TRU in the first place, the demo is little more than a "Oooh, get to play a little early." Those who are disinterested will never download a demo or buy the game in the first place. Those who are on the fence basically see demo downloads as a more convenient alternative to rental. In some respects, you have a theoretically better shot with a demo than with rental because rental gives players access to the full game as opposed to a single small part of a level or a few minutes of play or something.

Tomb Raider has the opposite problem in that it doesn't matter how good the game is -- you're still fighting an uphill battle. I know a lot of people will say they no longer care about things like AOD and how TR has risen like the phoenix from the ashes, but that means little by itself. There's also the history of stagnation in the face of competition and changing tides of gaming tastes which also is a stain on the franchise name. The "another Tomb Raider?!?" type of comments are common enough to be telling. The thing is that there's an image associated with any franchise and that will always color the opinion someone has about a game. The best TR game that will ever be made can never attain even a fraction of the net sales of the worst Halo game that will ever be made... and for similar reasons, it simply isn't possible for TRU to receive high review scores (especially not in the face of games like Gears 2 out in a similar time frame) no matter how good a game it turns out to be otherwise.

In a position like that, anything that doesn't help you will surely hurt you. And without any clear prior precedent for TR, it's really uncertain what the effect will be. Of course, then you have to start asking yourself how good or bad the demo is, both in terms of grabbing attention and being representative of the actual gameplay. Obviously, grabbing attention in some positive way is a few trillion times more important.

Hmmm... maybe we do need more chrome.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Demo's I think are helpful for demonstrating new IPs. Most people who have any interest in a TR title will have some preconceived notions without a demo. I am not sure that the upside of a good demo is as important as the downside of a bad demo. If for some reason the team is way ahead of schedule and they have time to make a good demo, they should at least consider it, but I certainly wouldn't take resources away from development for a demo.

 

[wco81]

But isn't this a TR on new consoles?

So people will want to know how well it's transitioned to the new hardware.

 

[AlphaWolf]

But isn't this a TR on new consoles?

So people will want to know how well it's transitioned to the new hardware.

Its not the first TR on these consoles.

 

[deepbrown]

Don't know if you've answered this yet, but just looking back...you said this:

I figure it's worth echoing what ERP said prior to anything else, but to answer your questions... It again seems to be the case with any CPU. We're not really multithreading anything on the PC, and even the extent of work we have in that respect on 360 is pretty localized to things like audio, physics, and AI. So on the PC we have hell whether it's a dual-core A64 or a single-core P4. Bear in mind that neither of these projects are likely to be out until mid-2008. In a funny way, in spite of having a very incomplete codebase for the PS3, there are already enough SPE-directed tasks to give it something of an edge over the state of code on other platforms -- even though the only SPE code we have at the moment are the really obvious candidates.

Assuming that we can ultimately get around to making more cores fly on the 360 and PS3, and we follow in kind on the PC, you can theoretically see a benefit over 4 or 6 or 8 cores, but I can't say it'll be terrific or horrific... We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Though there are definitely cases where raw CPU power just for our end of the code is a problem on the PC but not on the consoles, but they come down mainly to just throwing a lot of activity into a scene.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=903620&postcount=329
So did you succeed?

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

Its not the first TR on these consoles.

More accurate to say that it may not be the first to have versions for these consoles, but it is the first to be built on a fully current-gen codebase. Versions for PS2/Wii are being done by BuzzMonkey on their own variant engine. Legend was in many ways a PS2 game with 360/PC-specific features that were basically orthogonal to the game-specific systems (e.g. rendering).

Don't know if you've answered this yet, but just looking back...you said this:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=903620&postcount=329
So did you succeed?

Yes and no. It is there, but the scope is still limited to some small areas where the computational load is heavy. Of course, there's the multithreaded stuff which always was multithreaded even in the previous gen, but that hardly constitutes a change, even though the performance yield is a fair bit better now than before. Given that multithreading and parallelism was really lead on PS3, the relative tardiness of the PS3 wrt 360 makes that corner of development itself tardy wrt to the whole cycle of development on TR...

 

[zarbaj]

More accurate to say that it may not be the first to have versions for these consoles, but it is the first to be built on a fully current-gen codebase. Versions for PS2/Wii are being done by BuzzMonkey on their own variant engine. Legend was in many ways a PS2 game with 360/PC-specific features that were basically orthogonal to the game-specific systems (e.g. rendering).

was it the same for anniversary?

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

was it the same for anniversary?

Anniversary is even more of a PS2 game than Legend was. It was never created with 360-specific assets in the first place. Anniversary was branched off of the Legend codebase not too long after Legend hit beta and went through a first submission. That of course, allowed us to do all the engine work independently of TRA, which was also heavily outsourced to Buzz Monkey.

Yeah, there were higher res textures, but that's only because the artists naturally work initially in higher res and direct the build processes to downsample them for specific platforms. Of course, this is also why we have pangs on our end when we keep all these root texture assets around in addition to the built assets. Having both TRU and DX3 on one machine means using up somewhere around 300 GB of disk space minimum almost all the time.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

BTW, since everyone has been asking, and it's been announced, I might as well post this for those wondering :

It'll be airing on Spike TV and Gametrailers first, but will pretty much be everywhere about 10 seconds later.

Friday, July 18 (Midnight - 12:30 AM, ET/PT)

"GameTrailers TV with Geoff Keighley: E3 2008"

Host Geoff Keighley goes head-to-head with the industry heavyweights from the big 3 console companies to delve into their plans for the coming year. Also see the world premiere of Quake Live from id Software and the exclusive debut of the teaser trailer for Tomb Raider: Underworld from Eidos and Crystal Dynamics.

And no, I haven't seen it yet either.

 

[AlNom]

Also see the world premiere of Quake Live from id Software and the exclusive debut of the teaser trailer for Tomb Raider: Underworld from Eidos and Crystal Dynamics.

Looking forward to it... oh and TR: U too.

Boobs. The definition of mesmerizing. Or Nom.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

ShootMyMonkey!

...

Start making those Legacy of Kain games already!
:smile:


No seriously make one please.