I'm ready to go into this with an open mind. Cloud-based games are going to be absolutely necessary to take us out of the era of the drink coaster game market. Every time a new game is published, we have a new dev crew who doesn't understand the previous release so they have no choice but to spend most of their effort reinventing problems long solved by others.
They fix some past problems but introduce more of their own. The result is no progress. SH4 was no real progress over SH3. They fixed as much as they broke. SH5, same deal. Break even at best. We are at the end of what a team of generic game devs can accomplish for us.
Only continuous and continuously financed evolving projects can take us any farther than we are. That will necessarily mean some kind of subscription or value-added payment by players. Sorry. Everything has to be paid for somehow.
So I don't expect Silent Hunter Online to be anything more than interesting. This is new ground and it will change. Hopefully they can generate an income stream that will keep a single dev team employed for years evolving and optimizing the product.
Sure, we're going to give up some things in the transition, just as we gave up things in the transition between board games and computer games. But we enthusiastically adopted deeply flawed sims before. We shouldn't hesitate to take this one for a spin either.
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