[Zaxx]

I had a look at Blood on Steamcharts and found something mildly interesting:
http://steamcharts.com/app/299030
If you look at the monthly avarage player counts it seems like that since BloodGDX surfaced (around May of 2017 if I remember correctly) Blood's Steam player numbers are slightly going up. Now chances are there is a very little amount of people who play BloodGDX through Steam because getting the game up and running that way needs a bit of extra work with replacing the DOSBox exe and all that but after this many months it seems pretty clear that BloodGDX is responsible for that increase. It's not huge by all means, more like a tiny blip on the heart monitor that says "if you listen you can hear it kinda lives again!" but that's enough for a small community.

What I'm sad about is that Steamspy doesn't have data for the long term so actually there is no way to see how sales are affected now. Currently it sits around 70 000 copies sold but we can't check how that number changed since May. One thing is for sure: I remember maybe half of that from 2016.

However the point is that looks like even a small and mostly invisible project like this had an effect on the player counts so chances are it had an effect on the game's sales too. Guess BloodGDX did not hurt Atari at all...

[Lunick]

I'm not sure if there is any correlation with Blood GDX. On SteamDB, we can see that the amount of owners went up significantly when it was included in the "Nemesis Bundle 3" from Fanatical. https://steamdb.info.../299030/graphs/



However we can see on the "Players every day chart" that this bundle didn't really affect how many people were playing, maybe by 5-10

[Zaxx]

Damn, I didn't know about the bundle, guess we can throw away any speculation regarding BloodGDX in connection with the sales numbers. Well, maybe next year.

Anyway it's interesting that there was no real change in player numbers at that time but when you look at the bundle it kinda becomes understandable:
https://www.fanatica...emesis-bundle-3
I think it's safe to assume that nobody bought this because of Blood: it's in the second tier so the price is the same as if you'd buy the game in itself and there are very different titles in there when it comes to the other games on offer. Chances are most of those guys did not even start the game and that definitely seems to correlate with the Steamspy numbers of (currently) 66 000 owners but only 35 000 players in total. 30 000 people not launching the game even once? A large portion of those must be people who bought the Nemesis 3 bundle.

[Lunick]

A lot of people buy these sort of bundles to inflate their Steam game count, regardless of if some of the games in a bundle are quality or not.

[Zaxx]

Lunick, on 16 February 2018 - 11:50 PM, said:

A lot of people buy these sort of bundles to inflate their Steam game count, regardless of if some of the games in a bundle are quality or not.

Yep, my personal experience is that I buy a bundle if at least 2 games from it interest me but if the price is right I can settle for only one. So basically more than half of a bundle will be useless fluff on my account.

Well, at least we can gather that the increase in player numbers is from BloodGDX, that much seems obvious even if you look at the screenshots in the community hub, most of those are from BGDX. On top of that I know I bought the Steam version because of BGDX, I had the game on GOG already but once I heard that the port works fine with Steam I jumped over. Playing Blood and using the overlay is so nice so that's one extra sale thanks to the port.

Anyway I hope that one day Blood will get an official source port because chances are a lot more people would jump on that one thanks to the promotion and general visibility remasters get these days. Since BGDX I'd even say that Blood holds up a lot better than Duke 3D, it's definitely the Build title where "modern" stuff like good mouse aiming and widescreen makes the biggest difference. The graphics may look dated but the gameplay is as fresh as it gets, it's basically "Duke 3D meets Quake".

[axl]

Zaxx, on 17 February 2018 - 12:35 AM, said:

Anyway I hope that one day Blood will get an official source port because chances are a lot more people would jump on that one thanks to the promotion and general visibility remasters get these days. Since BGDX I'd even say that Blood holds up a lot better than Duke 3D, it's definitely the Build title where "modern" stuff like good mouse aiming and widescreen makes the biggest difference. The graphics may look dated but the gameplay is as fresh as it gets, it's basically "Duke 3D meets Quake".

I'm not sure if an official port would be the best solution. Most official ports aren't that good anyway... When you look at Megaton, World Tour or Redux... all have various issues.

When you look at the other old FPS games, they live on because of the community and their ports: EDuke32, Quakespasm, Gzdoom, ECWolf, ...

What we really need is the official source code of Blood.

[Zaxx]

axl, on 17 February 2018 - 01:07 AM, said:

When you look at the other old FPS games, they live on because of the community and their ports: EDuke32, Quakespasm, Gzdoom, ECWolf, ...

That's true when you view what favors an existing community but here's the thing about Blood: it was never as widely successful as Doom, Quake or Duke 3D so it never had a community that could live on. The Blood community is basically a niche inside the Duke community, the game never had the chance to shine on its own.

Why would an official port matter? Because that's the only thing that would give Blood a second chance at establishing a following of its own. When I look at the gameplay today I see a lot of potential because I don't feel that the core of the game aged significantly. That's not true for other Build games so my gut tells me that in this day and age where retro shooters like DUSK can get a following Blood could get a second wind with an official port / remaster.

I really think that Blood offers so much even today compared to other classic shooters that with a good port and good tools for the job a lot of Doom mappers would love to give it a spin and make maps for it.

[axl]

Zaxx, on 17 February 2018 - 02:44 AM, said:

When I look at the gameplay today I see a lot of potential because I don't feel that the core of the game aged significantly. That's not true for other Build games so my gut tells me that in this day and age where retro shooters like DUSK can get a following Blood could get a second wind with an official port / remaster.

I really think that Blood offers so much even today compared to other classic shooters that with a good port and good tools for the job a lot of Doom mappers would love to give it a spin and make maps for it.

Don't get me wrong. I love Blood and I would place it in the top 3 classic FPS games of all time along with Doom and Duke Nukem 3D.

However, Blood has always been a "niche" game and probably will always stay that way. It was not only regarded as a step back technically (at that time you already had Quake), it also didn't deviate a lot from the Duke 3D formula. Basically many people see Blood as Duke gone horror. The same way as they see Shadow Warrior as Duke In the East and Redneck Rampage as Duke gone Redneck. The only new feature Blood really added to the Duke Nukem formula was the ability to "alt-fire" and the ROR effect (both also featured in Shadow Warrior).

[Zaxx]

axl, on 17 February 2018 - 03:16 AM, said:

Don't get me wrong. I love Blood and I would place it in the top 3 classic FPS games of all time along with Doom and Duke Nukem 3D.

However, Blood has always been a "niche" game and probably will always stay that way. It was not only regarded as a step back technically (at that time you already had Quake), it also didn't deviate a lot from the Duke 3D formula. Basically many people see Blood as Duke gone horror. The same way as they see Shadow Warrior as Duke In the East and Redneck Rampage as Duke gone Redneck. The only new feature Blood really added to the Duke Nukem formula was the ability to "alt-fire" and the ROR effect (both also featured in Shadow Warrior).

I kinda agree in the sense that Blood is not an innovative game, I just think that what it doesn't have in innovation it has in polish. Most of that has to do with how Monolith clearly had a deep look at Quake so Blood became faster than Duke and the emphasis is more on fast, twitchy aiming instead of just positioning. Jumping is floatier and you have lots of air control so there is a lot more you can do with movement, enemies hit the ground and you face small creatures so aiming is more vertical etc., at the end the game is more dynamic overall.

The problem with that is one thing: a 2.5D engine in 1997. Quake was fully 3D, it ran a lot better with 3D acceleration, the fully 3D environment made mouse aiming a lot more natural etc. Meanwhile Blood is in this weird place where it was designed with mouse aiming in mind but it has an engine that doesn't really work out for that, instead autoaim is used to power through the lack of precision, the gameplay is fast but 3dfx acceleration was never fully implemented, the low resolution where performance is still okay is not ideal for gameplay etc.

Now what happens when you modernize that stuff with a source port? You disable the autoaim, you make precise mouse aiming possible, a "true" 3D renderer like Polymost makes camera movement natural, the game is running with hundreds of fps and that's when the mechanics really click. When you introduce that stuff to Duke 3D it's a bit weird because the game starts feeling a bit slower (well, more like you're super fast and the enemies just can't keep up with you) while that's the opposite in the case of Blood: the moment you lose some of the limitations of the original Build engine the gameplay actually becomes better. Add to that all the alternate fires, the more complex level design with the 6 key system and the fact that one of the recurring complaints about DUSK is that it's copying the early 3D look instead of using old school 2D sprites and you have the most complete classic FPS package to date. On top of that Caleb is a badass, the destructible 2D objects make the outdated graphics look dynamic and the excessive blood and gore is something only Brutal Doom can offer at a similar level.

So you know, "Blood 1997" is a great shooter that Duke fans will love but it's a bit janky because of its technical limitations, "BloodGDX" on the other hand is an "indie retro shooter" you can sell in 2018.