Patching the game may not make them immediate profit, but seeing as a huge portion of Stardock's profits depend on fanbase following, I would say pleasing its paying customers is very important. The only way they can do that is with new games or with patches to their existing ones. The patching process is easier and cheaper than making an entirely new game (which most studios have to do at the same time anyway), so really this is the cheap and easy way for them to please their fans.
Plus, if game developers continue to put games out in a 0.99 state then they have to expect a lot of blow back.
RTS games are a really tough one too. You cant ever get the balance perfect, but getting it to a point that is good enough can turn that perceived last 1% of work into 50% of the project time. That's why you don't see Starcraft 2 hitting store shelves already. Blizzard knows how darn tough it is to get to the right level of balance. They could make 10 Starcraft 2's if all it took was pretty graphics and content. It takes way more than simply making the game. It takes months and sometimes years of play balancing for an RTS game to be near 'perfect'. That's why to date there has only been one (IMO) perfectly balanced RTS (Starcraft).
Even games that have two sides that are basically the same like supreme commander aren't necessarily balanced because certain powers can be over the top and 'break' the game (ala Malice/Brilliance in Sins) or the game can come to a boring stalemate if both players build up too much without attacking. For those reasons I've had few satisfying experiences with SupCom mulitplayer wise.
That doesn't mean Sins isn't a good game, it just isn't to the level it could be as far as balance and pace of play go.
I know the arguments against this line of reasoning though, devs need money, publishers create pressure and people get tired of the same old projects, so making that perfect game is very rarely possible, especially in the world of RTS.
Sin's tried to get away from the RTS stigma by calling itself a 4x game, but if its real time, it's an RTS with additions, you can't get away from that. The people who continue to play the game will play it competitively online or likely not at all. Seeing as there really isn't a viable single player component to the game other than skirmishes at this time, it has to be judged on its multiplayer prowess.
I'm not bashing Sins because I played it for about a month with a lot of interest, but once I'd learnt all it had to offer I found there was a limit to its depth and felt like I had just finished reading a good book. Thats not a bad thing, but compare my experience to starcraft which I STILL play (it was 10 years old on april 1st), and you will see that there must be SOMETHING that pulls me back. The thing that pulls me back is infinite depth. I can witness things in starcraft that still blow me away. Every game is different once you get to a certain point. Every game can be won 100 different ways and yet there will still not be one way that is fool proof and cant be countered the next time around if you use that same tactic.
I don't think its that developers in the past 10 years have lost the ability to make RTS games to the level of starcraft, I think its that they have never known how, cannot invest the money to make them perfect or simply that they don't care if balance is perfect as long as they get good sales.
If I'm annoying any fans of Sins or ruining a devs day by calling out these points, I'm sorry but these things should all be analyzed before a game of this kind (a real time strategy game of any sort) is put together.
Surely, it's not fair to compare most companies to blizzard, they have a very long track record of RTS development, they've made the most popular ones to date, and they have had the luxury of being one of the first and best on the scene. I just wish more studios would use their experiences as a template for their own going forward strategies.
Then again, this is not really Stardock's direction and a foray into the real-time genre was in my opinion not really a sound choice for them at this time. I don't think Ironclad were ready to make this game to the level it needed to be. I think another Galactic Civilizations or less ambitious RTS game would have served them better before trying to combine the genres. Become the master in one area before branching out. Take the Heroes of Might and Magic games for example. They defined their own piece of the turn based strategy genre and stuck to it. There were spin offs, but the only truly classic games in that franchise are the turn based games.
I will never complain that someone tries to innovate into new genres however, and so I applaud Stardock and Ironclad for being brave enough to try this.
Perhaps SOASE 2 will be the great game I was hoping the first would be.
Whoa... talk about going off topic... oh well, this thread was going nowhere anyway
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