CSLA, its prognosed low sales and future of Creator DLC's

[.kju 3244]

What is considered "good sales" for a CDLC - to have a reasonable return for the time invested (ie not below minimum wage)?

 

GM according to their own statement was done working almost two years full time - next to their normal full time job.

Both are professionals for VBS for many years as far as I know. 

Yes it's good to get recognition/return also in terms of payment for your work, yet I seriously doubt the return can match their job salary in any meaningful way.

I am sure they were aware of this likely outcome, as should be all our CDLC participants. However to state this is a financially successful outcome is very likely far from reality.

[PuFu 4600]

On 9/29/2020 at 6:58 PM, .kju said:

What is considered "good sales" for a CDLC - to have a reasonable return for the time invested (ie not below minimum wage)?

 

GM according to their own statement was done working almost two years full time - next to their normal full time job.

Both are professionals for VBS for many years as far as I know. 

Yes it's good to get recognition/return also in terms of payment for your work, yet I seriously doubt the return can match their job salary in any meaningful way.

I am sure they were aware of this likely outcome, as should be all our CDLC participants. However to state this is a financially successful outcome is very likely far from reality.

It depends on a number of factors
a. number of sales

b. price set (negotiated with BI - the % is non-negotiable though)

c. number of invested people that would share the profit somehow

d. time spent on stuff that might have little importance, but can increase workhours in a major way

 

So, GM, just like CSLA have been working in the background a bit before they applied for cDLC. So there was a start, there was some work already done.

It is definitely a higher risk involved, especially when you start from scratch, especially if you not have a good core-team

 

So while 100k @20€ retail price (35% = 7€ / cDLC going towards the developer = 700k before taxes) could be ok-ish for a team of 2 (GM case), might not even come close for a team of 40 people, especially since one cannot really push the retail price up indefinitely towards a full game release. Again, this is the best case scenario, but it isn't the realistic scenario considering a lot of the products sold are done under steam %sales

 

Let's assume there's the same 40 people that are going to equally share the profit (not really gonna happen equally anyways) for a DLC that has a retail price of 35€ (upper range if you ask me) that sold for 100k (so about 30k a person before taxes that can vary between 20% to 50% depending on country, annual income etc) for something that they have worked on for the past 2-3 years. Is that worth it? Not really sure, it depends on a number of personal factors really.

 

For most EU countries and US, especially for 3d artists and coders that can get some similar jobs, even freelance, is not really worth the time, considering there is no way to get the normal (average) rates, most likely half, if lucky.

Sure, if you are doing something else and this is a side gig of sorts (although you are expected to put weekly time in, will need to crunch, to respect deadlines etc, unlike modding side-gig by comparisson), or you aren't working (student etc), being unemployed or some stay-at -home dad or alike, sure, it's an extra that would otherwise be non-existent. 

 

You definitely can save some time and get away with a few things, like purchasing/licensing some of the content from 3rd party stores and get a jumpstart (although at times that can end up being more time consuming), but at the end of the day not everything can be sort of circumvented. 

 

But all of the above, both the terms of the cDLC deal with BI (price related, not % related), the number of people required/involved, the time spent and the risk involved for a game that is over 7 years old (while it does have a pretty stable monthly playerbase, it also has a lot less active annual base/purchases than 5 years ago = potential customers), together with the fact that most of the stuff is already available in one form or another for free in mods, has to be taken into account before embarking into this journey. Is it possible, surely is, but as i said in a previous post, 100k sales is optimistic, anything above 150k i think it is fantasy (my personal 2 cents based on all the information i have at this time).

 

 

 

[R0adki11 3949]

Spam and Flame-baiting posts have been removed from the thread, lets keep this thread on topic.

[Tyl3r99 41]

I for one am looking forward to returning back to the similar OFP era well sorta 

 

I'm definitely buying it and every right that Modders get something out of it.

[jmurkz@gmail.com 1]

3 hours ago, Tyl3r99 said:

I for one am looking forward to returning back to the similar OFP era well sorta 

 

I'm definitely buying it and every right that Modders get something out of it.

I agree, as someone who was a very small part of an ArmA 2 modding team, I fully appreciate how much work is carried out by the main players of the modding group.

[sv5000 127]

I loved CSLA in the OFP days and I'm happy to support them now.

 

Oh, and maybe we need to get an 'Old Farts' forum achievement?

[nettrucker 142]

I will  support the CSLA Mod Team as well. I always enjoyed the content they have created since OFP times and it was always quality work. The Arma 2 CSLA mod was great as well I have fond memories. They have dedicated lot's of time during all these years to create their Mod for free to let community enjoy it. now that they have the possibility to get maybe it little but more then only recognition I will happily support them. I'm mostly into Single player and CSLA has always provided SP content. Looking forward to it.

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers

[nkenny 1057]

@TesACC
As a leader of a community of that size, I think that your analysis of the problem is spot on, even as I don't agree with your conclusion.  It is hard, if not impossible to justify adding GM and CSLA to our mod repository for the reasons you outlined. For all practical intents and purposes CUP and RHS offer adequate, comparable or superior assets.  Assets which are inherently compatible with existing Arma3 universe. 

I think the underlying problem is this: Global Mobilisation is everything Arma3 should have been on release: specific in scope and having an inherently interesting scenario/setting. The cognitive dissonance arises because GM is fundamentally and thematically not compatible with Arma3. Example: If a 7.62 from a GM rifle performs radically different from vanilla, RHS or CUP weapons it is incompatible. If the vehicles added in GM do not fit out-of-the-box into the default A3 sandbox, they are incompatible. All of this translates into a confused message.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is an easy solution. I will continue to buy and support Bohemia products, but I don't expect to see massive use of neither GM nor CSLA anytime in the future. 

-k
 

[Sparker 185]

That's right, and to add to the dissonance, a cold war era DLC in in the same niche as the numerous cold war era mods available for free.

And the underlying problem is simple as 2x2: the creation of free content for whole life time of the game, to the point when there is so much variety of it, that noone would want to buy anything because it's replacable by a compatible free pack from another modding studio. The modding community has forced this situation upon itself, unconsciously - because it loves to make content for free. The consequense is that nobody can sell anything in this case. Situation is terrible, but it is what it is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Solution also seems obvious - if you want to sell something, make something which has no alternative in the mod sphere at all, Apex DLC is a good example of this, no surprise it's the most widely-accepted DLC out there.

[lilwillie 47]

On 12/13/2020 at 12:16 AM, sv5000 said:

I loved CSLA in the OFP days and I'm happy to support them now.

 

Oh, and maybe we need to get an 'Old Farts' forum achievement?

Yes, us old farts do recall the original days. CSLA was fun. 20 years of BI. I played that OFP demo so damn much and often.....Think I even keep the tower that it is on.

[cozza 24]

I remember a 1 hour long intro to a campaign.

and a car with a subwoofer. But that might of been FDF, not to sure now.

[krzychuzokecia 718]

1 hour intro was CSLA. Car with subwoofer was FDF. FDF is clearly better :D

[cgibson2 5]

On 9/23/2020 at 12:48 AM, scimitar said:

Personally, I'm glad that CSLA is the next CDLC. I hear people complain all the time about the problems with the CDLC concept and multiplayer but some of us just don't care about multiplayer. I only play SP and  enjoy official and user made campaigns and dynamic missions such as those created with Hetman War Stories (over 70 ports on the SWS) and Dynamic Civil War. There are actually a fair number of players that do the same and a lot of us will be purchasing CSLA just as we did GM (over 80 mods for it on the SWS). Also, as an older gamer that's a Cold War era military veteran, I'm looking forward to it immensely. I've always felt that A3's jump to 2035 was an immense mistake and I'm glad that there are CDLC and mod makers bringing the game back to it's roots. As for those complaining, I suggest that they don't buy it but shut the hell up about it not being free or an integral part of the game. They're just whining because they don't want to spend the money for it. When you consider the price of getting into PC gaming and the upgrade costs along the way as well as the price for new games and gaming accessories, $20-30 for a new CDLC is negligible. There are also those that only complain about GM or the compatibility files being a 30GB download that they don't want taking up space on their drives and cite that as the reasons that they don't buy it or download the compatibility files. I wish they would shut the hell up too because their complaints are irrelevant and contribute nothing. If they don't want to play on servers that also run GM, then they should find other servers to play on. I would also suggest that everyone lighten up on the CDLC negativity. No one is forcing anyone to buy or install anything that they don't want to and complaining about it is useless and tiresome.

 

 

NO KIDDING!!! Just can't wait for its release!! I have posted this before I keep reading, lol. In our house, we have to buy 3 copies of everything for Arma... so this new Creators DLC is no different. Price lower would be nice, but if you look at what comes with it like GM did... that was rated way low in my opinion...it should have been more like Apex... I think we paid 35 each for GM.... it was forth it though.. and this is USD. Also, if it is like 30GB... so be it... that is like buying a new game in some cases. CDLC... we have been waiting since its announcement! 🙂

[Chairborne 2594]

I fail to see how having LITE packs is an improvement over the current solution of compatibility data packs that give you the content in high resolution and a reminder on screen.

As for who has an appeal for CSLA, some people like to run clean games with as little unnecessary data as possible, so swapping out mods for smaller CDLCs that focus on a couple factions is something they might like, also from my knowledge there's no mod that currently provides a cold war Czechoslovakia faction.

Do mods cut into the revenues of these DLCs? Likely, but at this point arma 3 has been out for 8 years and its a game with an active modding community, had the program started earlier things would've probably gone differently (but we'll never know, guess we'll see what happens when a new Arma game rolls out).

[scimitar 221]

20 hours ago, Chairborne said:

...also from my knowledge there's no mod that currently provides a cold war Czechoslovakia faction...

 

Not to detract from your points but there are at least two mods that provide a Cold War CSLA faction. Neither are as comprehensive or as accurate as the CDLC will be but from what I can tell, both were primarily created and released as temporary CSLA mods until the CDLC or a more comprehensive Czechoslovakian CW mod is released. I'm aware of these mods because I spend a lot of time on the workshop and on the Arma Cold War Discord server following CW mods, as it's my primary area of interest. I haven't tried the "Cold War Overhaul" mod as I consider the dependencies to be a bit much but the "Cold War: ČSLA" mod is fairly good as a stand in until the CDLC is released.

 

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2077107235

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2381556368

 

 

[Chairborne 2594]

i stand corrected then, i didnt know about either one

[SzepyCZ 24]

On 9/23/2020 at 7:35 PM, SzepyCZ said:

personally i’m afraid that the assets wont be on the same level of "quality" as GM’s are, i might be wrong, i made this assumption based on  the screenshots from annoucement/videos CSLA made from their playtests

Oh god, just as i thought, it’s true.
vanilla A3 weapons sounds(and some of them are poorly configured), totaly wrong RoF on some weapons, poorly configured gearbox/physX on some vehicles, wrong missile/rocket speeds, bolt action rifle without hand anim (seriously, 2 minutes of weapon framework implementation), wrong anims on some weapons, and a few other things.

atleast the map looks somewhat okay/usable with ai(the sog one is really bad at this).

yes, vehicles looks nice texture-wise, but that’s all, and fortunately in arma funcions/gameplay is more then graphics.

 

sorry, but this is just not enough in 2021 for a paid "mod" (CDLC), especially when things like GM or RHS managed to set the bar so high,  function, gameplay and asset quality-wise

 

and before some of you says that it was just released and things will be fixed/improved, remember that it was already delayed multiple months, it was supposed to release before SOG

[spooky lynx 73]

Seen the stream of this CDLC owner. Putting an airplane with the cockpit of OFP-era middle level quality in 2021 payware DLC? Are you serious?

BTW this CDLC has even smaller amount of assets than in freeware CSLA mod for A2:OA. Come on, guys...