[NightFright]

There were any?

[Sanek]

stumppy84, on 19 May 2018 - 08:49 AM, said:

If this does well do you guys think more build games will be made?

Considering it's not expensive AAA project, it's already evident that IM did well.
However, I doubt there'll be many Build games in the future, at least the commerical ones.
If any other studios show interest in the engine, I'm positive that they'll not use Eduke32...unless Voidpoint will be involved in the development.

[Mark]

Are the sales numbers and development costs posted somewhere?

Without those all I can guess is it was well accepted by the community. Not financially a winner yet.

[oasiz]

I'd argue that time is more of a nuisance here than anything
Most of us have full-time jobs on the side, not to mention family life.

From what I can tell is that the game has been doing quite well for an early access title and we're going to start really counting once the full game is out as you're essentially still pre-ordering the game as it is.

Financially, I've yet to get a paycheck on this, actually I've financed some small parts out of my own pocket as well.
But really, it's a passion project for all of us and I believe any sane person would have quit a long time ago
Hours/cost are hard to compare due to this, many have worked hard until wee hours and everyone has their turf to do.

Maybe some day we'll spill the beans on the details but it has surely been a bit of a ride since 2015 !

[Hendricks266]

Mark., on 21 May 2018 - 03:08 AM, said:

Are the sales numbers and development costs posted somewhere?

This is not information the public is entitled to know.

[Mark]

Which is exactly why I questioned Sanek's post about how well IM is doing.

[NightFright]

Another way of answering: The numbers are somewhere, but not in a place any of us is supposed to see. Or needs to see. If the game is doing well, they'll let you know sooner or later. And maybe make more. After it is finished, that is.

[Doom64hunter]

Mark., on 21 May 2018 - 03:08 AM, said:

Are the sales numbers and development costs posted somewhere?

Without those all I can guess is it was well accepted by the community. Not financially a winner yet.

I mean you can kind of extrapolate the relative success of the game by comparing the total number of reviews of Ion Maiden to the total number of reviews of other games.
Of course, with this I am making the assumption that the ratio of reviews vs. total number of owner is about the same for every game on Steam. This might not be true in every case, since there are a lot of instances where people buy games in bulk on sales but then never play them, but I think it is a reasonable assumption to make when restricting the timeframe to the opening month, i.e. the first month in which the game was first released on Steam, Early Access or otherwise.

It also does not factor in sales through GOG or sites like 3DRealms, although I think it is reasonable to assume that compared to the number of sales on Steam, the sales made through these platforms are for the most part negligible. Furthermore, I think the number of sales/reviews on Steam alone is enough to extrapolate how well a game did, and it is unlikely that if a game fails on Steam, it could somehow perform better on GOG or another third (or first) party platform.

You used to be able to do more accurate predictions using SteamSpy, but Valve changed the default settings of Steam accounts to hide game ownership, and SteamSpy now requires you to have an account, log in and do some other bullshit I can't be arsed to do.
So I will base the following analysis entirely using the number of public reviews for each game on Steam.

In any case, Ion Maiden was released into Early Acces on February 28th 2018, and currently has about 610 reviews. It gathered around 500 reviews during its first month of release.

If we compare this to other modern retro shooters, we get the following results:

• STRAFE currently has about 1020 reviews and reviews were opened in May '17. The review graph shows that during the first month of its release, it got about as many reviews as Ion Maiden did. Furthermore, it did not have Early Access.
  
• Dusk currently has 1050 reviews, and reviews were opened in January '18. It was a bit more successful than Ion Maiden, gathering ~700 reviews within the first month of release in Early Access.
  
• AMID EVIL has around 250 reviews and was put out in March '18. Its launch into Early Access was relatively unsuccessful, gathering less than 200 reviews in the first month.
  
• Hellbound has about 300 reviews and was put onto Steam in early May '18. It's probably too early to make an accurate prediction on this one, but the trend shows that it will most likely perform slightly worse than Ion Maiden in its first month. It also launched into Early Access.
  
• Devil Daggers has a staggering 3130 reviews, and was put onto Steam in late February 16'. Definitely the most successful game of its kind. One thing to note here is that this was before Steam Direct was introduced, meaning there was less of a clusterfuck on the Steam Store, and that it had much less competition. On the other hand, it continued to receive hundreds of reviews well into late 2017, only starting to slow down by 2018 (where coincidentally, many modern Retro Shooters, including Ion Maiden, started being released. I wonder if there's a correlation...) Also note that it did not release in Early Access.
  
• Serious Sam's Bogus Detour was released in June '17, has around 150 reviews, and got most of these during the first month. It performed pretty badly, and did not release in Early Access.
  
• Overload was put into Early Access on May '17, has about 220 reviews total, and got 50 during the first month. It also didn't perform very well so far.
  
• Rise of the Triad started pretty slow when it was released in January '13, with only 100 reviews in the first month, but it picked up later on. It currently sits at around 1500 reviews, and of course, did not release into Early Access.
  
• Just for shits and giggles, let's look at Quake Champions. It was released in August '17, and currently has about 3'500 reviews. It got only about 1'400 reviews during its first month of release into Early Access, which is pretty weak for a AAA shooter I have to say.

And to compare it to some Retro Shooters rereleases, let's take a look at how well the Nightdive Studios remasters did:

• Turok : ~400 reviews in the first month (~1350 in total)
  
• Turok 2: ~500 reviews in the first month (~800 in total)
  
• System Shock: Enhanced Edition : ~50 reviews in the first month (welp, 400 in total as of now)
  
• Strife: Veteran Edition : ~70 reviews during the first month (welp, and only 200 overall. Considering it was released in 2014, that's a truly pathetic performance)

So overall, of the listed 13 games, Ion Maiden was at least as good or outperformed 9 of them.
Of course, if you compare Ion Maiden to the usual release on Steam (as in, any game, no matter what genre or how well-known it is), then Ion Maiden is unbelievably successful. Why? Because the average game on Steam gets around 0-50 reviews nowadays.

When considering future performance, one problem here is that we don't really have any data on how an Early Access Retro Shooter performs when it comes out of Early Access. Funnily enough, as of the time of writing, not a single one that was released in Early Access has left it so far.
Though if we look at games like The Long Dark, Subnautica, Darkest Dungeon, Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 a release out of Early Access usually does come with a massive boost of sales, so we can be very optimistic in that regard.

Judging from all of this, I'd say the game is doing relatively well. Not Devil Daggers "amazingly holy shit wow wtf" kind of well, but it's doing well.

(Damn, that's the second time I wrote a huge essay in this thread)

[Zaxx]

Doom64hunter, on 21 May 2018 - 12:58 PM, said:

When considering future performance, one problem here is that we don't really have any data on how an Early Access Retro Shooter performs when it comes out of Early Access.

At this point Early Access is the only thing that makes me a bit worried about the game's success. The problem with EA is that you basically have to launch your game two times: once when the initial EA version releases and then again when the final game is out. That takes a fair bit of planning I guess and in the case of Ion Maiden the pretty great buzz it got so far could end up being a bad thing because by the time the real game comes out the general public has already forgotten about its existence. I bet that a lot of reviewers who published stuff for the EA version won't revisit the game when it launches properly because there are a lot of games out there and when it comes to 3DR... so far they weren't the shining example of competence when it comes to handling stuff.

[Micky C]

How many of these early access games release the unpolished yet full version, compared to a relatively polished demo as was the case with Ion Maiden? The game's size will increase substantially at the full release, with new levels, weapons, enemies and locations. This will make it easier to advertise, as there'd be a lot of cool new, previously-unseen stuff to put in videos.

[Zaxx]

Sure, there's a pretty fat chance that the full version will be an irresistible package of awesome but there is just so much shit on Steam these days that visibility is a problem even for good games. Long story short 3DR has to promote the game correctly at launch because I've seen too many great titles that failed simply because they got buried under all the asset flips and shoddy mobile ports that pollute the land of Gaben lately.

Edit: Also: a Switch version is a must, that's where the money is for indie games these days.

[TerminX]

I'm not worried.

[MetHy]

That's a good analysis Doom64hunter, but some of these comparisons don't seem fair.

I'm sure Strife VE was a lot more successful than it seems, I got the game, beat it twice, and it never occured to me to post a review simply because it's an old game most people should know about and I felt it was not necessary.
Serious Sam Bogus Detour is a top down shooter, and afaik that's not a genre as popular as FPS, even counting exceptions like Hotline Miami.
I've never heard of Overload so perhaps they want to wait for full release before advertising more. It also says "VR" in the tags, so if that's correct and the full version supports VR, it may gain more attention.
Devil Daggers is not as ambitious as the others, as far as I understand it's just an arena mode, as if all there was to IM was the QOTH mode. As a consequence it only costs 5 bucks, so it's more likely to have impulse buys looking for a cheap quick fun, as it appears under the filter for cheapest games on the store. Also that's 5 bucks at full price, since 2016 it probably was on sale a few times.

Still a good analysis, which gives a rough idea.

[Doom64hunter]

MetHy, on 21 May 2018 - 11:55 PM, said:

That's a good analysis Doom64hunter, but some of these comparisons don't seem fair.

I'm sure Strife VE was a lot more successful than it seems, I got the game, beat it twice, and it never occured to me to post a review simply because it's an old game most people should know about and I felt it was not necessary.
Serious Sam Bogus Detour is a top down shooter, and afaik that's not a genre as popular as FPS, even counting exceptions like Hotline Miami.
I've never heard of Overload so perhaps they want to wait for full release before advertising more. It also says "VR" in the tags, so if that's correct and the full version supports VR, it may gain more attention.
Devil Daggers is not as ambitious as the others, as far as I understand it's just an arena mode, as if all there was to IM was the QOTH mode. As a consequence it only costs 5 bucks, so it's more likely to have impulse buys looking for a cheap quick fun, as it appears under the filter for cheapest games on the store. Also that's 5 bucks at full price, since 2016 it probably was on sale a few times.

Still a good analysis, which gives a rough idea.

True, the remasters probably aren't a good comparison because they're older games, and people may not leave reviews for them since most people already know what they are. So there's probably a different ratio of reviews to total sales than with entirely new games.
Bogus Detour I wanted to include since it stems from a series of FPS games, and because it derives a lot of inspiration from other First Person Shooters. Also, I already knew it didn't do very well in terms of sales and popularity, so I wanted to see if that was reflected in its reviews. This seems to be the case.
Overload had a kickstarter, which is probably why there's not that many reviews. I assume many people are also waiting for the full game before reviewing it, which may also be the case for Ion Maiden. I probably should have separated the games by Early Access and non-Early Access in that case, but oh welll.

About Devil Daggers, that's actually true, the pricetag definitely does determine how many sales there are overall. It's also a much more lightweight shooter, easy to pick up and play for a short period of time, which may attract more people.
My analysis right is just an estimation of the relative number of sales based on how many reviews the games has, and not an estimation of how much money it made in total through those sales, so it's quite possible that Devil Daggers, despite seemingly having tons more sales than Ion Maiden, made a similar amount of money overall. I guess to extend the analysis, we could now take the price of each game during its first month of release, and then rank them based on that.

[NNC]

The good thing about IM is that it used an upgraded old engine and pushed into its limits (well, the limits of Build engine are in discussion since 1997), instead of using a relatively new engine like Unity and making an intentionally ugly game like Dusk. It's a much more authentic way to make a retro game imho.

[Forge]

TerminX, on 21 May 2018 - 08:41 PM, said:

I'm not worried.

You shouldn't be.
There are bigger fish out there than Ion Maiden.
IM is quality bait.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Just tried the Preview Campaign, but it runs slow (down to 5fps) even in "classical mode", especially the part where you crawl out of the vent and end up in a large area for the first time. Specs: AMD FX4100 3.62ghz, 8gb RAM, Nvidia GTX 650TI. Will performance eventually improve or is this what I can expect with the full release?

[Hendricks266]

It sounds like you are not using the latest update.

[Phredreeke]

thricecursed, on 22 May 2018 - 10:21 AM, said:

Just tried the Preview Campaign, but it runs slow (down to 5fps) even in "classical mode",

Unless you're running at a very low resolution, OpenGL will likely be much faster than the classic renderer.

[Jimmy]

Sanek, on 20 May 2018 - 08:55 AM, said:

If any other studios show interest in the engine, I'm positive that they'll not use Eduke32...unless Voidpoint will be involved in the development.

They'd be fucking dipshits not to.
This includes an unnamed major studio who owns a popular intellectual property.

[Sanek]

Jimmy, on 22 May 2018 - 09:27 PM, said:

They'd be fucking dipshits not to.
This includes an unnamed major studio who owns a popular intellectual property.

Yeah - they must use it, but they will not. I don't know what's exactly going on behind the scenes but as I understand, it's very hard to do business with Voidpoint - either they want way too much for the port, or the unnamed studio itself don't want to be affiliated with another party. So it makes sense when a new edition of the old game arrives with a port of it's own.

[Zaxx]

Sanek, on 23 May 2018 - 01:10 AM, said:

Yeah - they must use it, but they will not. I don't know what's exactly going on behind the scenes but as I understand, it's very hard to do business with Voidpoint - either they want way too much for the port, or the unnamed studio itself don't want to be affiliated with another party. So it makes sense when a new edition of the old game arrives with a port of it's own.

Guess that from the perspective of Gearbox the problem was that EDuke32 is not multiplatform in the sense that it doesn't support current gen consoles. That's a biggie for a multiplatform publisher / developer.

[Phredreeke]

But the original Duke3D didn't support current gen consoles either, and devs have to target two different APIs for Xbox One and PS4 anyway.

I think it's that Gearbox didn't want to open source or pay for a different license

[MusicallyInspired]

Bingo.

[Sanek]

"PC Exclusive" doesn't mean anything these days?

There's a lot of reasons and Phredreeke's post is spot on, but I think that the main reason is the money reason. These big software houses have the budget to make the port of their own, they don't want to be THAT obligated to a 3rd party, constantly sharing profits or smth like that. EDuke32 is more like a tool for the indie developers, yet there's only 1 commerical game after like 18 years of it's existense thanks to port guys.

[Phredreeke]

TBF, for many of those years, Build would have been seen as old tech, yet at the same time not old enough to be considered retro. Also, I'd be surprised if many devs even knew licensing eduke32 was an option. Now that Ion Maiden is coming out hopefully that will change.

[Kyanos]

Phredreeke, on 23 May 2018 - 10:19 AM, said:

Also, I'd be surprised if many devs even knew licensing eduke32 was an option. Now that Ion Maiden is coming out hopefully that will change.

I'm curious about how all that works, is it just through 3D Realms? or 3DR + Voidpoint, and others?? Silverman? JonoF? Saettler?... it could be a very long list.

[Zaxx]

Drek, on 23 May 2018 - 11:54 AM, said:

I'm curious about how all that works, is it just through 3D Realms? or 3DR + Voidpoint, and others?? Silverman? JonoF? Saettler?... it could be a very long list.

Well this is what IM's legal info says:

Quote

Ion Maiden
Copyright © 2018 Voidpoint, LLC.
All Rights Reserved.

Build Engine used under commercial license.

Ion Maiden uses open source EDuke32 technology. The following terms apply only to the Ion Maiden game executable:
Engine code available under the Build License. See buildlic.txt.
Game code and supporting libraries available under the GNU GPL v2 with a linking exception for the Build Engine. See gpl-2.0.txt.

So buildlic still applies to the code but when it comes to the commercial license of Build it doesn't say where that comes from. Guess it's Silverman or 3DR, most likely 3DR. Since Ken made Build for 3DR while also being an employee of 3DR I'd say the engine belongs to 3DR but the 90s was such a wild time in terms of legal stuff that I could be mistaken.

[Hendricks266]

The DOS engine source and Polymost belong to Ken. Subsequent modifications belong to JonoF and Voidpoint. You can talk to us and we'll handle the legwork.

3D Realms is not a party at all.

[Wild Dog]

I just Ion Maiden at the Steam sale. So far i like what i see, also the nod to Wolf3d/Doom when she smile when using the chaingun is a nice touch BUT
I got a question, is my PC or there is a performance issue with the game preview at the moment ??? I'm using OpenGL and the game goes from 200 fps to 10 fps, then back to 30 fps. Also is can't change palette emulation, anisotropy and texture mode.