Mark, on 28 November 2019 - 06:33 AM, said:
( puts on dev/marketing expert hat) Personally, I don't think any new Duke game is going to be a top seller. The market is so flooded with titles that might be considered great except they get thrown in with 126 other similarly great games for next to nothing thru GOG and Steam. Players whip thru all these to the point it becomes hard to stand out with something. Add to that the differing opinions on where and how Duke should move forward and you have another game with mediocre sales. As I say in every other thread this subject comes up in, I would like to see Duke spread out into new territory. No more space stations, moon bases, or same old aliens. (takes off dev/marketing expert hat)
You don't even have to put that hat, a hat of average AAA gamer is more than enough. Kudos to you for "market flooded with great titles", by the way, but you made a mistake by mentioning GOG, instead should've mentioned PSN and Xbox Store.
Ironically though, the truth is, we've never got nor will we ever get a game like Duke in modern industry because western developers would never take any kind of risk to make a worthy Duke game, hell, they can't even produce non-bland or just innovate games, let alone FPS games, and you absolutely must take risks to produce a good Duke Nukem game. Though this wouldn't be the main problem, after all Duke 3D was made the way it is not because the devs wanted to chase other genres or wanted to be innovate for the sake of it, the people that made Duke 3D simply wanted to make something really cool with various cool stuff they like themselves, they were enthusiastic and had a passion for DN3D. There are no enthusiasts anymore who themselves love video games, sadly, with the exception of indies maybe, the ones that do make games not just for the sake of money alone, but out of their love for video games in general. It works the same way for pretty much a lot of games though, not just Duke.
Games like Duke 3D were a fluke at this point, and there were many like it, including System Shock, Deus Ex, C&C, many games, really. Those games were made by enthusiasts who had a passion and love for video games, but now we live in an era where companies have a passion for profit which is why they're trying to make rehashes of the older successful titles made by enthusiastic people, the rehashes that are from average to terrible compared to original games in most cases.
What's really interesting is that thus far people standards became extremely low, to the point that even games like Terminator, a pretty average FPS that is not shit are considered actually "great". I would put id games into that category as well, honestly. I bet if suddenly a Duke Nukem game like 3D would appear on the market, but improved (with no big innovations, although DN3D on its own looks very innovative compared to modern FPS), and I'm talking about FPS developed for PC in mind with no politically correct bullshit in it, people would call it a masterpiece or a "FPS of a decade".
I mean, just look at success of Joker, which is really an average movie, not even a superhero movie (technically, even if you remove Batman themes it still would be almost the same movie), yet it's getting a high praise from the people and is called literally a "masterpiece" or also a "movie of a decade", just because it's a fresh movie compared to the rest of the crap produced in Hollywood these days. They made a fucking billion from this average movie. Movie industry has it the worst compared to video games, but I think it's fair to compare it to the AAA video game industry. Joker was, unsurprisingly, attacked by "journalists" shitheads too, and yet they did little to no impact on its performance.
Anyway, the world does not deserve a good Duke Nukem game. I hope Randy let the franchise rest in the closet, and that at worst he'll just use him as an excuse to "prove" people that Randy is not a leftist or don't support pc culture in arguments on his Twitter, just because he owns a Duke Nukem franchise. lol