Modern Warfare 2 Surpasses $1 Billion Mark; Dedicated Servers What? 258
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."
MW2 (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the game is great, especially multiplayer with its leveling, perks and the amount of customization you can do to your characters game style. Even those who complain about things are still playing it full force.
It's also nice that you can just jump in to the game (without friends, or with them in same lobby - you always get to same side and see each others with different color on radar and name). No need to hunt for different servers which can be crappy. Yes, there are host migrations and other stupid things sometimes, but the easiness to just jump in to the game outweights them. I'm not a serious gamer and neither are majority of people.
When the cheapest way to get a product is $60, of course you're going to beat sales of something that costs $15 or less.
This doesn't make sense. You aren't going to beat a great and popular movie that costs $15 with a mediocre or bad game that costs $60. The higher priced product also has to be good, which MW2 definitely is.
But who cares? The majority of gamers will experience the game on consoles, and PC gamers don't need things like a console for tweaking the game or support for mods.
No they don't. Me and almost all of my friends play it on PC because of keyboard and mouse. And to tell the truth, I rather don't see so much tweaking and mods by the users and get all stupid doom and quake sounds or no gravity when I join the server. I like the game the way IW made it.
Why spend all this money on flying journalists to a resort in Santa Barbara? Because it works. Activision refuses to comment on the review situation, and the Metacritic score for the game stands at 94 percent.
And the game actually being great has nothing to do with it?
I don't spend that much in games, but I've spent days playing MW2. It deserves the scores it got, it's definitely the best game of 2009.
Re:MW2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, nothing beats the great game play, well, except for "double shotgun dude" running around a map and dropping a nuke to finnish it, makes for a great game, unless of course he is cut short on his rampage by the host dropping from game, that just RULES :)
Back to TF2 for me, strategy + fun + dead stable == win.
Oh and the $120AU price tag was criminal.
Re:MW2 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:MW2 (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't, I got mine on steam, but there were a lot of suckers who didn't.
I did get my $60 or so of play out of it, but compared to TF2 for replay value per dollar spent, very very fail.
Re:MW2 (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a heavy PC gamer (level 70 prestige 2 on MW2), and played CoD4 competitively.
There are only two problems with the IWnet scheme, especially from the competitive gaming perspective:
1) Latency. This is simple, IWNet doesn't artifically impose any latency on the host of the game, meaning that whilst all others may experience high latency, the host has an effective ping of 0. This gives about .1-.2 seconds of advantage to the host, which is usually the difference between success and death in games like MW2.
2) Competition. The servers are more or less unregulated, comp servers don't exist and neither do mods. Instantly ths drives all the ProMod and PAM4 players from cod4 to frustration, and yes you *Can* play competitively on MW2, it's nowhere near as balanced as it was on the old dedicated server model.
Re:MW2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Even those who complain about things are still playing it full force.
I just find this sad personally. I think it was a bad idea for them to not include things like modding and dedicated servers and I haven't bought or even rented the game for the console. Note that I always knew the game would be a blockbuster hit, I just disagree with the route they're taking. It saddens me that people who said they would not buy the game did anyway. People need to grow a backbone.
It's also nice that you can just jump in to the game (without friends, or with them in same lobby - you always get to same side and see each others with different color on radar and name). No need to hunt for different servers which can be crappy. Yes, there are host migrations and other stupid things sometimes, but the easiness to just jump in to the game outweights them. I'm not a serious gamer and neither are majority of people.
The ability to jump in and out of a game is always good. Personally I always found communities I enjoyed through trial and error and generally stuck around. Until just recently I even helped run a rather large one in my free time.
I see it as a trade-off. With the type of system in Modern Warfare 2 you don't really get the same communal feeling as you do with dedicated servers, you just don't. I know the whole friends list thing tries to rectify this, but it's not really the same. However, it's very easy to start the game and start playing without having to deal with empty servers and poorly run communities. I personally value strong communities that I can help out. It's really just a matter of taste.
This doesn't make sense. You aren't going to beat a great and popular movie that costs $15 with a mediocre or bad game that costs $60. The higher priced product also has to be good, which MW2 definitely is.
To my understanding consoles have a licensing cost when you develop games for it where as the PC does not. I don't know how much truth there is to this, but a lot of people felt the extra $10 for console games was because of this and they questioned why the PC version needed a $10 price hike. However, I'm sure MW2 was ludicrously expensive to produce, so it may have been required.
No they don't. Me and almost all of my friends play it on PC because of keyboard and mouse. And to tell the truth, I rather don't see so much tweaking and mods by the users and get all stupid doom and quake sounds or no gravity when I join the server. I like the game the way IW made it.
This is where I'm going to disagree a lot. First of all you don't need to use a mouse and keyboard, you could have easily just used a controller on a 360 for the same experience. You prefer playing games with a mouse and keyboard, the same way that a lot - but by no means the majority - of people prefer to have custom content and the ability to generate it themselves. Just because you and your friends don't personally enjoy such things doesn't mean other people don't either. It's a personal preference and you really have no right saying what everyone should like.
Second it's not just minor game tweaks[1]. It's a whole range of things. Custom maps[2], models, sounds, gametypes, small modifications, and total conversions. You may think nothing interesting comes from modding but I'd disagree. Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Red Orchestra, Killing Floor and Insurgency to name a few. The first two morphed into commercial games with very, very large player bases, the two after also went commercial.
I actually enjoy playing unmodified games as well. My all time favorite multiplayer FPS, Starsiege: Tribes, was exceedingly modifiable. People are still modifying it to this day. Even with all of the mods I still prefer playing base. However, I play a lot of custom maps and a few custom gametypes. Some of the best competition maps for that game were custom content. I'd also like t
But what of the long term value? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Only really a decent game for consoles (Score:2, Interesting)
Gamers (Score:1, Interesting)
88 comments so far - and about 80 of them are about how wonderful the fucking game is, about 8 on the ethics of journalism - if you include the posts that said the article left out how great this game was.
Activision has you suckers pegged dead right and you have no independent press serving you because you deserve none.
Goodie for the rest of us - you people also get to drink, smoke pot, drive cars and make babies - fucking me me me me me wankers that you are.
Re:MW2 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Marketing budget dev budget (Score:4, Interesting)
That's merely Activision's decision tho. Infinity Ward had $70 million to develop the game (actually Activision tried to give them more, but they declined). Since it is actually a great game, Activision saw that it would be good to spend that on marketing. Putting $130 million in marketing budget of a crap game would not only be really risky, it would be outright stupid.
What Activision wants to spend on marketing is irrelevant to game quality or Infinity Ward.
Re:MW2 (Score:4, Interesting)
mouse + touchscreen-stylus?
Re:MW2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Used to be same in Unreal Tournament, I have a friend who was MEAN using the sniper rifle, going for headshots every time. He could get himself vote-kicked off any server in less than five minutes, two on the touchy ones. So he was already being misidentified as an aimbot, and once the instant-aimbots were banned a new generation turned up who were more like an extremely fast and accurate player with luck. There's no real way to win that battle.
Re:MW2 (Score:2, Interesting)
While I'm not disagreeing with you, there are absurdly good players at any game out there, there is also a wide range of people that actually do hack. In the case of the entire call of duty series there is a group that has turned it into a business of selling hacks. Here they are [callofdutyhacks.com].
There are definitely people that call out good players as hackers, but it's usually pretty obvious to me who is a good player and who is a hacker. Quite a few them don't even have any problem admitting they are using hacks, commonly saying things like "If you don't like me using them then leave the server".
The ranking system built in to modern warfare 2 is also a bit of a give away right now. It takes a significant amount of playtime to get to "Level 70" in game. Once you reach level 70 you can go into prestige mode which starts you back at level 1. Most of the players that are Level 70, prestige 10 (essentially level 700) are hackers. Not at all of them mind you, there are some people out there that seem to have legitimately put in the ridiculous amount of hours to do that legit.
TL;DR Hacking is extremely prevalent in MW2
Re:MW2 (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the game is great, especially multiplayer with its leveling, perks and the amount of customization you can do to your characters game style. Even those who complain about things are still playing it full force.
Leveling *SUCKS*. It's almost not fun. Perks are broken. Completely. Spawn deaths from aircraft fire suck. Particularly when you're no where close to the Javelin or the Stinger in levels and your only choice to knock one of those things out of the sky is a missile that seems to lose against aircraft counter measures. Which brings me to weapon unlocks...
Skill progression is great, don't get me wrong. But I'm really disgusted by an FPS game that demands I baby it so I can get the best weapons and gear. If I show up late, I'm taking a *lot* of rounds from higher level players before I can really make progress in the game.
MW2 is a fucking mess. Bugs everywhere, game balance is horrible and it's just not worth playing. Not only that the character customizations *suck*. I came from playing Metal Gear Online pretty hardcore, and I'm taken back by just how stupid and generic the player characters are. If I'm going to grind levels can I atleast have a character that's my own? Is that too much to ask from a billion dollar megahit?