Western gamers don’t always welcome innovation. If the changes are too drastic from the original, a lot of the bigger fans of the original will complain. Look at Dawn of War 2. It made drastic changes to the RTS structure to innovate, and some of the biggest fans of DoW and CoH are crying foul. They believe Relic ruined the game by attempting to innovate the genre.
It’s my understanding that DoW2 is VERY well received in the gaming community. Not a perfect 10 or anything (what really is?), but generally 8+ on a scale of ten, multimillion seller, massive online activity, etc:
http://www.metacritic.com/games/platfor … dawnofwar2
http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3172899&p=1
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/warha … -ii-review
http://www.gamepro.com/article/reviews/ … of-war-ii/
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/war … slot;img;3
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/warhammer-4000 … 250p1.html
http://pc.ign.com/articles/954/954749p1.html
Way more love it than hate it. Game is getting an expansion fairly soon. Massive profits. Etc. You always have purists when something changes. That’s just the nature of change. 
There’s a difference between what critics think and what regular gamers think. DoW2 is a good game, but many RTS players despise it for simplifying the game too much. From what I gather on forums, I’d say a lot of people don’t like it. In fact, a lot of the people who play it and enjoy it have never played the original or CoH, and a lot of them don’t normally even play RTS games. Relic succeeded in bringing the game to a new audience, but it seems like they alienated a lot of their old fanbase in the process.
While the game has sold well, I doubt it reached even a million copies sold, and there aren’t that many online games being played (based on how many I see in the custom game list and how many games auto search finds).
I’ve found you can’t use forums as a basis to determine if a game is well received or not. Case in point: Fable 2 (which I hate, but that’s besides the point). The official site forum has hundreds of negative threads and thousands (yes thousands) of bug complaints. Aliened the old fans (with the new magic system), not what was promised, etc. All this and Fable 2 is a major XBOX360 success: outsold the original XBOX Fable. Critical acclaim… blah, blah, blah…
One of the first things I learned about customers when working at Taco Bell as a teen: people who are unhappy are waaaay more vocal than those who are content.
Also just to note: the first link I provided was from Metacritic it rates consumer opinions: 659 votes says 8.1 out of 10… and considering how many rabid purists give zeros into the matrix (which was all know from our school years, REALLY impact the high score potential), that’s not something to laugh at. Critics give it an 8.5 on the same scale… so the +/- 4 points really means they view it the same.
You can always trust retail data. There’s no reason to expect them to lie, because they need truthful tallies for investors and sales. The title is an international success:
http://kotaku.com/5165265/dawn-of-war-i … l-pc-sales
http://kotaku.com/5169214/and-the-top-2 … ruary-were
http://kotaku.com/5183058/pc-sales-char … ng-must-go
THQ stock also got some nice gains, and they were happy to make make note of it on the exchange (which they needed, because of bankruptcy woes)…
Data show a consistent sales rate, which mean positive word of mouth grabbed more customers, in comparison to games where negative word of mouth kills it (see Dragon Quest Swords for the Wii). It’s difficult to find hard numbers, but estimates and shipping data show well over a million units moved. If DoW2 is a bad game, then this is the kind of bad game I want to make. There’s no expectations that the upcoming expansion will fail either. What the purists are saying, isn’t what reality is reflecting.
Now I’m not saying that DoW1 is a bad game… it’s a damn good game. But DoW2 is doing just as good… and from comparing sales charts, it appears to be doing better. Even during the “aftershock” period when the game hype catches up with reality. Innovation won in this scenario.
I’m not saying DoW2 is a bad game. It’s a good game (though with many problems), but the people that are buying it aren’t the normal audience for the type of game. You’ve been saying that the Western fanbase wants innovation in their games. I’m saying this is one instance where innovation alienated the old fanbase and created an entirely new one. This new group likes the game a lot, but the old one despises it. The SP game plays like an action RPG, and there are a lot of people who are buying it because of that. These are people who were never into RTSes before.
You were saying that Japanese fans of a game gobbled up sequels that were similar and Western fans of a game gobbled up sequels that innovated. This is a special situation. This would be saying something like Mega Man somehow turned into an awesome eroge ( :lol:), and all the eroge fans who never played Mega Man before buy it and love it for what it is, but many of the original fans of Mega Man hate it for being radically different despite it innovating the genre (if making Mega Man into an eroge were somehow innovating it).
Stardock’s feels the heat for NOT using a DRM! :shock:
Stardock’s Demi-God servers smashed by 102,000 pirates
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/star … -20090417/
Speaking of DRM and recent games, it looks like Riddick’s worked. Ten days now and it hasn’t been cracked. I think Bioshock took what, 2 weeks? Let’s see how long this one lasts. I doubt it can beat Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory’s record.
all their games on the website should drop Saturday what are your guesses for what will and won’t come out mid day Friday- early morning Saturday
i really what suika and The Queen and Princess as your rewards could be good
I’m thinking none of them will release to be honest. Although I’d totally buy suika and the Q&P if by some miracle they really do release this time.
My guess: an apology/excuse for the next delay 
:twisted:
The funny thing is that people now cant complain anymore about just 10 people being on the gameservers looking for other players :lol:
I vote for something like BattleNet for all games.
Oh, no, that won’t happen until Sunday. They may or may not notice before the titles go up for sale and need to be yanked.
Well they are releasing Suika on time the other games are as usual postponted(well in any case it would be ridiculous to lauch them all in the same day )
In their own words :
We are proud to announce the English release of Suika.
However, the following games that were planned to be released on 4/25 will be postponed in order to futher improve the script quality.
We apologize for the inconvinience.
The Queen and Princess as your rewards 4/25 → 6/15
Sandwiched by my wife and her sister 4/25 → 6/15
Suck my dick or die! 4/25 → 7/2
Seems like it might just be time to dig up the creditcard from the wallet again… awesome news really. 
Wow, that’s a pleasant surprise. I’ll be picking up Suika this weekend undoubtedly, especially concerning the improvement translation wise with Da Capo… I maybe didn’t like Da Capo as much as some other VNs , but I definitely enjoyed the work they put into it, and Suika seems to be closer to what I like genre wise from what I’ve read/heard about it.
Of course, this way, we still have releases to look forward to from MG in the coming months I guess. MOAR EROGE is MOAR BETTAH.
Oh man… Suika really is a must-buy !
It just confuses me a little that they push the other titles back by two months again.
al least suika is dropping
that is the only game of theres i care about at all
I’m actually stunned they’re actually releasing anything, fully expected another one month delay for it all. I’ll grab Suika but I probably won’t have time to get into it until next week. After all, eroge are fun but the NFL draft is just another dose of my greatest addiction.
it would be a good idea to get it before it gets pulled my guess is manga gamer will pull the same shit they pulled with da capo and release for a few hours then pull it
I was expecting another delay, to be honest. Anyway, I’m happy that’s Suika that came out, and not one of the other games that were supposedly scheduled for today. I won’t take it now, though, since I’m really really busy these days (I’ve finally decided to learn Japanese, and it’s sucking most of my free time). I’m looking forward to seeing some comments on the game and, more importantly, on the quality of the translation 
By the way, any word on their next big title? I mean, all the titles on their pipeline at the moments are sexromps. Nothing bad with that, but I’d be more happy with an announce about Kira Kira being translated.