Recent forum posts and Steam news items indicate Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts and Ultimate General: American Revolution will get no further updates. As eagle-eyed genre analyst The Historical Gamer noted in a Boxing Day video, the fact that pivotal GL personnel posted unexpected farewells just before Christmas, and owners Stillfront announced in September that it intended to “address low performing games” and focus on “key franchises” suggests that the studio that gave the world Naval Action and Ultimate Generals Gettysburg and Civil War is on the verge of extinction.
It looks like Sea Legends, a work-in-progress first-person piracy and smuggling sim, will survive.
Hopefully, the engine that powered UGG’s and UGCW’s spectacular land scraps will live on in some form too. In the right hands, and judiciously de-cluttered and up-realismed, there’s no reason why it couldn’t wow wargamers for years to come. UGs Waterloo, Austerlitz, or Maiwand anyone?
Sadly it seems they get a higher return on investment in mobile games. Allowing someone to pick up the engine feels sensible, rather than letting it wither and die.
I am glad that Sea Legends may still see a release, that’s been on my wishlist for over six months now.
Sadly, that’s not likely to happen. Far more likely (IMO) that they’ll just sit on it.
You see time and time again across many industries, but I’ve never understood it: the art of acquiring a company only to very quickly destroy it. Sure, you could cynically say that in the case of a direct competitor maybe that makes sense, but almost invariably it’s gigantic companies gobbling up little ones that were in no conceivable way such a threat and within a few years the staff is all gone, the IP is dead, the company effectively acquired nothing.
Yeah, I watched THG’s video when it came out and was frustrated as hell because I am a fan and I waited forever for Ultimate General: American Revolution to come out on Steam only now for them to pull the carpet out from under the Games Lab people. I really never understood why a mass media mobile gaming powerhouse would buy a developer of games for the war game niche market. Silly is as silly does.
It makes sense if the objective was to shut it down all along. While one might ask “why?” well, certain people in business with 1) too much time on their hands and 2) unlimited money would rather the general public didn’t play these types of games anymore. Indeed, wargames (or let’s just say “thinking games” in general) were not always as “niche” as they are today. If you look at the big picture, the downturn on the wargaming graph over time is quite evident, so in a few years time, we could predict that most gamers will only be playing Pokemon Go, Candy Crush, Call of Duty 69 and Madden NFL (20)69. Or at least, that is what “they” would prefer.
I would argue that a great many more people would choose to play “thinking games” much more today if they were more available, more of them and more known. The usual excuse is that they were “not popular” and “didn’t sell as well” but no, the games publishers lied. They just said they didn’t sell; in effect they were the ones who originally made them niche, not the other way around. Why? They were paid off and/or threatened by organised/economic crime.
In a business sense, the plan was always to destroy the competition, by fair means or (as is usually the case) by foul.
The same thing happened to wargamer.com when they were bought a few years ago.
Tim, could you possibly setup an interview with Nick Thomadis please? Not sure if you’ve already interviewed him in the past but now would seem like a good time, thanks. Of course, I’m talking about “Darthmod” himself, creator and designer of Ultimate General etc. Looking forward to it, cheers!