40% of C&C Players Go Online Says Sean Decker - EALA GM

[Sonic 296]

GamesIndustry.biz recently sat down with new EALA General Manager, Sean Decker. And during this interview he states that "Right now the majority of our players play single player, but when they're done with the game about 40 per cent go on and play online". Here's part of the article.

 

Around 40 per cent of gamers playing the last Command & Conquer game went online for a multiplayer experience, but while the team at EALA is working to motivate a higher proportion to do so in the forthcoming Command & Conquer 4, it'll never hit complete saturation.

 

That's according to the studio's head, Sean Decker, who told GamesIndustry.biz that while online experiences had become more compelling over the years, there would always be a section of the player base that just wanted to play solo.

 

"Right now the majority of our players play single player, but when they're done with the game about 40 per cent go on and play online," he said. "So I think you need to respect both of those - and first-person shooters have the same thing. The vast majority of people would finish the campaign, and then about 40 per cent of players would go online."

 

While he admitted that consoles still had some work to do with respect to the real-time strategy genre, he praised them for making multi-player accessible and popular.

 

"The consoles have done a great job of online... Xbox Live, you can collect everything you've ever done, and it's super-easy to connect - just give us your line and your accounts and go from there. We need to get to that level of accessibility for people [on the PC] and find more reasons for people to play.

Click here for the full article. If you would like to read the entire interview with Sean Decker you can find it right here.

[Luk3us 63]

40% huh? That is higher than I thought it would be.

[Silverthorn 0]

I'm not sure if his calculation is correct, I doubt it could be based on only in the US, but what about those in the other countries? Remember the connection issues or those who can't afford one but forced to stick with internet cafes?

[Gben 20]

I think, reading between the lines, that he means 40% of C&C owners went online... at least once... rather than actually saying 40% of owners are active online.

[Nmenth 291]

I think, reading between the lines, that he means 40% of C&C owners went online... at least once... rather than actually saying 40% of owners are active online.

Probably. I usually play online for a few matches, get bored, and then go solo the rest of the time (except Renegade). I can see 40% of people doing that.

[Malevolence 6]

The statement is very vague and inaccurate.

 

Online experience are often ruined by a bunch of ill-mannered idiots spending day and night finding exploits and following closely to a particular strategy in order to win. Online, meh. Maybe once, after that, forget it.

[Nmenth 291]

Online experience are often ruined by a bunch of ill-mannered idiots spending day and night finding exploits and following closely to a particular strategy in order to win.

Which I doubt C&C4 will fix. The idiots come in greater numbers and have more time on their hands to find exploits than the EA developers have to counteract them.

[Gben 20]

It would nice to see "active" account numbers vs total sales.

 

I want to see high online numbers because ultimately that leads to more EA games, but I don't think this is a very good argument to use to defend an always-online approach.

I'm not saying I'm a typical player, but my casual online gaming is restricted to these experiences:-

1) C&C3 tournament... plus my epic defeat of Luk3us in a friendly [i'll never let that die!]

2) less than 5 games of the RA3 Beta

3) 5 campaign games in co-op mode with a guy playing it for the first time, after I had already finished it. We only stopped because he started night shift work which meant our stars didn't align.

 

 

That being said, I try to play APB regularly, and I used to play renegade regularly. I prefer RTS, but the easy way to join these FPS games and the rank system made it fun. If I could drop into a RTS game like I an drop into a FPS game that would be fun.

[Johnnyxp64 20]

i have been online few times and try to cound the accounts that was online there is no way those few accoutns was the 40%. 40% as you say is just how many try at least once to play not the actually always active users!

 

and in the end what the heck are they trying to say? that the 60%+ should kneel before the 40%-???? who does the statistics in there!? did he ever finish the school?

 

i would prefer EA to say the clear truth out loud and stick with that boldly (i would respect it more) rather than telling as totally crap excuses and try to change our minds. hello???? you are reacting like a bad mother!!!! dont do this dont do that and you are forcing people to do the opposite!

 

how hard is to make a statement like :" hey piracy is killing us we have orders to try by any means necessary to bring more original player and sell more copies, thats why we are doing this always online stuff, but we are also trying to make it worthy to players".-

 

not crying like babies and making totally crappy excuses. they are insulting our intelligent .-

Edited September 15, 2009 by Johnnyxp64

[Silverthorn 0]

EA may do well to fix our community problems when noobs & idiots are getting pwned and they don't come back (a.k.a. sticking to offline gaming after that), but I still doubt that may cost C&C4 itself, I do wish they fix that on a new RTS game, not to do that on C&C4 which cause many disagreements like we saw today.

[Luk3us 63]

Online experience are often ruined by a bunch of ill-mannered idiots spending day and night finding exploits and following closely to a particular strategy in order to win. Online, meh. Maybe once, after that, forget it.

 

Almost any game I buy, if it has an online aspect to it, I will play it to death. I just find MP must more satisfying to play than against a computer. Of course you have to wade through the hordes of idiots to find decent/nice players, but its been like that for years.

[Sonic 296]

I'd say the 40% figure comes from some sort of customer feedback report where they only surveyed a cross section of people that is meant to represent the gaming public as a whole. Because when you think about it would be near impossible to accurate survey everyone.

 

Perhaps APOC could shed some light on how they come up with these numbers?

 

Which I doubt C&C4 will fix.

That's not a good statement to be making at this stage. But I do partly agree. My interest on C&C 4 (as it was for TW, KW, RA3) is for the single player/story line part. Unless multiplayer is radically different for C&C 4 I don't see that changing for me.

[Malevolence 6]

Almost any game I buy, if it has an online aspect to it, I will play it to death. I just find MP must more satisfying to play than against a computer. Of course you have to wade through the hordes of idiots to find decent/nice players, but its been like that for years.

 

Yea I know, if you're playing with other friendly causal players its alright, maybe your classmates or colleges, but when you play against just one random exploit-expert idiot posing as a newbie who's making a hella idiotic noise, your day is simply ruined.

[Silverthorn 0]

Or more like those smurfs as I remembered since Greg Black explained it before. Overall, if I would be online, I rather join in one of those friendly clans, playing with random people can be dangerous if you don't know who that person is, some can be good while some can be the idiots we saw.

[ORCaLoVeR 0]

The only C&C RTS i played online, was tiberian sun. I played that one from 2000-2005. It was great, but ye, Time's move on. Also clan wars became revived with XWIS.

I always was a GDI player. I even managed to defeat the common Nod Bunker noob who just bunkerd itself it, and used banshee's for attacking.

 

 

But for the rest, the only time i played C&C online, was with mates. Twice even drunk, oh GOD that was funny as ****

 

I remeberd it well on VOIP=YO DUDE IM GOOON A BUY 5000 NOD ENGINE EERS and ATTACK UR MARV YO LOL"

 

 

such fun times

 

Ra3 was bullocks imo online. Allies are wortheless. The only thing they had online, was their airforces, and they got so nerfed.....

Edited September 15, 2009 by ORCaLoVeR

[recover 2]

When KW was released, I went online to play a few times. But because of the crashing and bugs, I soon stopped to await a patch. The patch took so long so that when it finally came out, it was too late. Something else had already taken my interest and I didn't bother with KW anymore.

[Johnnyxp64 20]

When KW was released, I went online to play a few times. But because of the crashing and bugs, I soon stopped to await a patch. The patch took so long so that when it finally came out, it was too late. Something else had already taken my interest and I didn't bother with KW anymore.

 

now imaging that scenario repeating it self with cnc4!?? total disaster ...

or the server lags every time you try to start a damn game.....black screens, etc....

or the worst disconnecting from server while you are in a middle of a mission and then because their server was down you loose all your current progress!

 

i love the idea of common progress in all multi-skirmish-single it make you wanna play more and more and you dont start from 0 with every battle, but this must be implemented correctly, with player's accessibility in mind not just money!

 

synchronization is the only best solution, (sc2 style) everything locally in my pc and every-time i login i update my profile, if i got disconnected i dont care i would keep on playing i will not loose my XP and i will update my profile next time they fix there damn servers.

 

they must have an option when their servers will be of-line for any reason, planed or unplanned, and allow as to play the game offline at least the skirmish and campaign, untill their server is back online, its not a damn MMO but they are doing it so.....forgive me Eala i love your efford i support it and you know it but when it comes to server and online reliability you are a disappointment. (so far)

Edited September 15, 2009 by Johnnyxp64

[mirza044 4]

another day, another interview, another chance for EALA people to say more excuses for what they are doing with C&C4, this is getting more and more repetitive and boring...

[Mighty BOB! 5]

That's not a good statement to be making at this stage. But I do partly agree.

Well I see Nmenth's statement as a kind of general thing. All games are going to have exploit-whores and idiots online and it is pretty much impossible for any game to "fix" that.

[Malevolence 6]

I have a feeling that once C&C4 is out it will encounter the long waiting black screen connection thingy before main menu.

[F15pilotX 4]

another day, another interview, another chance for EALA people to say more excuses for what they are doing with C&C4, this is getting more and more repetitive and boring...

Excuses? They're just being honest and realistic, and if you think about it, what Sean said made perfect sense. Also, if you actually read the full interview, you'd figure out that EA didn't bring that out, it was the magazine.

 

Come on, at least think about what you're posting.

[Sonic 296]

another day, another interview, another chance for EALA people to say more excuses for what they are doing with C&C4, this is getting more and more repetitive and boring...

This interview doesn't really have anything to do with C&C 4.

[mirza044 4]

I think we're doing some of that with Command & Conquer 4. When Westwood first started the genre, from Dune 2 onwards, there have been some things that people have pulled in - like resource-gathering and buildings - and to break out of that, you have to break out of some of those tenets that people think you have to use.

 

For example, Battlefield said let's take 64 people and throw them in a sandbox, and see what they want to do. If you think about Command & Conquer 4, we're taking lots of those tenets and kind of throwing them out - now you're really one person controlling this battle, and it's all based on something that actually moves, as opposed to the Tiberium harvester and so on.

 

We think of World War I to World War II - the first was all about the trenches, the fixed positions, and that's the same as Command & Conquer. The second one was the Blitzkrieg, everything on the move, and this is where this is going. You don't know where the guy is, he's not fixed in one location.

 

It's things like that, and player progression - people want to feel some ownership of what they play. With multiplayer in the past it's been win or lose, but now it's more about how a person did, how much experience they gathered, maybe they get another unlock so they can take them on again with a different tactic...

 

So there are a lot of innovations in Command & Conquer 4 right now and I think you'll see us continue to innovate year-on-year.

 

Right now the majority of our players play single player, but when they're done with the game about 40 per cent go on and play online. So I think you need to respect both of those - and first-person shooters have the same thing. The vast majority of people would finish the campaign, and then about 40 per cent of players would go online.

I'm just criticized parts of the interview which are directly or indirectly related to C&C4.

Edited September 16, 2009 by mirza044

[[NE]Fobby[GEN] 10]

With exception to Renegade and Generals, the C&C community has not had much of an online tradition. You have to remember that we started playing C&C games before online gaming was popularized, and before Westwood Chat, which was awfully buggy, C&C 95 and Red Alert only had a sub-par online system. If I recall correctly you had to connect to the other player via phoneline. Also, most people used 56K internet until about 2002, which was bad for multiplayer games.

 

So, most C&C players are used to playing the campaigns and skirmish games, but not so much playing the game online regularly. I'm personally a pretty hardcore C&C gamer, and with exception to Renegade, I don't really play C&C games online. Partly because the people that do would eat me alive ingame

[Aaron Kaufman 0]

We should all remember Sean Decker had a pretty big hand in Renegade and he did help found the Battlefield franchise, so the man knows a few things about making a great online game and online experience.

 

All in all, Sean is a really cool guy and is bringing a fresh energy to our EALA studio that I welcome. Mike Verdu was like a close best friend to me in a co-worker kind of way, but I'm glad his shoes have been filled by someone like Sean with a really reputable successful resume. You guys know me...I wouldn't just come on here and say that, knowing he may actually read my words here, just cause. I've been in this role as C&C Community Manager for far too long to pull some cloud over your eyes, I'm pretty honest =)

 

I think I can safely and friendly argue that many of you that post here at CNCNZ.com are not hardcore or even moderately hardcore multiplayer, with the exception of a few. You guys are pure bred single-player universe loving tiberium fiend junkies, hehe. You're more part of that 60% that hardly goes online, but maybe you do from time to time. That's just my friendly observation. I'd have the same one at CNCDEN, Planet C&C, C&C Files, and C&C World, amongst a few others as well.

 

Sonic, i'd love to share more background on Sean's quotes, unfortunately it's not my place to disclose. All I can say is, as the GM of our studio and someone who is very honest, realistic, and upfront, I know his data was driven from very accurate metrics and research.

 

Though, whenever they say some crazy stat like 1 in 4 Americans are obese, I chuckle =) How do they know this?!!!!

 

-APOC