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November 8th, 2005 - American Civil War . . . (Page 1/7)

I want to apologize for the long delay in posting a new development journal entry. We were waiting until the TCP/IP/LAN version of WaW was finished and this ended up taking several more months than we had expected. Don't let the delay fool you though, as we've been very busy working on several game projects. So what's new at 2by3 Games?

World at War (TCP/IP/LAN, data changes, localization and future patch plans)

Although it took a few months longer than expected, we've finally posted a beta version patch for WaW that allows players to play online. There are a few known problems, but we encourage any interested players to try this version. We expect to release several updates before the patch is ready for primetime, and the more players that give it a try, the faster we can find and fix the problems that remain. You can find information on how to get the beta patch at the Matrix Games WaW forum.

Even those not interested in playing online should download the patch as there are many data changes and a few rule changes that are in the patch.

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November 8th, 2005 - American Civil War . . . (Page 2/7)

These were based on listening to the experiences and views of WaW players over the past few months and are intended to lead to a better balanced game that allows for even more strategies to be employed. We still have some work left to do on WaW. We hope to put out a patch before the end of the year that fixes some minor yet potentially annoying bugs, completes the TCP/IP/LAN work, and reacts to player feedback on our most recent data and rule changes.

The other news regarding WaW is that the European version is due to hit store shelves in Europe in early November. With French, German, Italian, Spanish and British English versions, we should see a large number of new WaW players in the near future. Although the online beta patch is not fully localized, owners of the European version of WaW will be able to use the beta patch with only a small amount of English text. Eventually once we are ready to turn the beta patch into an official patch, we expect that it will be fully localized and will work with both the US and European version. Users of both versions can play against each other online as long as they all have the beta patch installed. We're hoping that the retail release of WaW in Europe will help to increase the WaW community, and we're hoping this will be reflected in the activity at the Matrix World at War forum.

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November 8th, 2005 - American Civil War . . . (Page 3/7)

In addition, we do have some other plans for 2006/2007 that involve expanding on the World At War system. We should have more to say about this in early 2006.

American Civil War

Work has been ongoing on our Civil War game. We expect to be making a public announcement regarding this game before the end of this year and should have some screenshots to show at that time. The game has been playable for the past few months and we'd like to get it into outside beta testing before the end of the year. If things go well we're shooting for it to be on sale before next summer. It uses a greatly modified World at War system. The biggest difference is the inclusion of leaders (over 1000 historical leaders are in the database). Units are attached to leaders, and those leaders must gain initiative in order to participate in offensive action. The game has monthly turns and the map consists of over 400 regions. The importance of cavalry for not only reconnaissance but also for disrupting enemy supply lines is addressed as well. Our goal with this game, similar to with World at War, is to create a game that covers the entire war, can be played quickly and without a steep learning curve, yet retains a very large measure of historical realism.

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November 8th, 2005 - American Civil War . . . (Page 4/7)

Russian Front

Our Eastern Front game has moved forward, albeit slowly. Mike has continued publishing beta patches for War in the Pacific, and this has taken up most of his time, keeping him from being able to do much on the Russian Front game. There was progress however in that thanks to Matrix and Steve Ford, Mike now has a solid development map that he can use for the game. He expects to pick up steam on this project this month. Our hopes are that this game will come out sometime in 2007.

To Retail or Not to Retail

I wanted to say a few words about our distribution strategy, both past and future. When we started 2by3 Games in 2000, we expected the future of computer wargame distribution would be via the Internet. When Uncommon Valor was released in 2002, we fully expected to see the game sold only via normal mail order. However, Matrix Games found that after 4 months of mail order sales, several retail chains wanted to carry the game. Since we had already gotten the bulk of the serious gamer sales via mail order (where Matrix and 2by3 obviously net more per sale), we agreed with Matrix that the increased exposure that UV and Matrix would get at retail was worth the lower net per sale.

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November 8th, 2005 - American Civil War . . . (Page 5/7)

Since mail order sales to the rest of the world was more difficult than in the US, we were happy when a European publisher picked up UV for European distribution. Given the Pacific topic and the lack of language localization, we didn't expect to see a lot of sales though. All in all, we were happy with UV sales and felt that the added retail exposure had set us up well for the upcoming War in the Pacific. When WitP was published, Matrix was ready with their digital download method of distribution. Given the hardcore nature of WitP, we felt it made much more sense to keep WitP as a digital download only product. Although the worldwide unit sales of WitP has been lower than UV, given the higher retail price and the direct distribution, WitP will have brought in more revenue (at a lower physical cost) over the life of the game than UV.

Again, although we'd always like to sell more, we're pretty happy with the sales of WitP via digital download.

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November 8th, 2005 - American Civil War . . . (Page 6/7)

When WaW was in development, we decided early on that it would be targeted for retail. The reasons were:

1) the game is easier to play than most wargames.
2) it had a more popular subject matter, one with worldwide appeal.
3) we could design the game from the start with ease of language localization in mind.

We're always looking for ways that can broaden the base of wargamers, and for ways for more people to find out about 2by3 Games and our publisher Matrix Games. The price of going to retail is that the retail price usually needs to be lower and we obviously take home a lot less of the money being paid for the game. Some criticized Matrix for going to retail with WaW after starting their digital download program. I personally don't see what's wrong with picking the distribution method that is right for each program. Although it's hard to say exactly what has sold through at retail, from what we can tell WaW has probably sold at least three times as many copies as WitP, and this is before the localized language versions have been released in Europe.

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November 8th, 2005 - American Civil War . . . (Page 7/7)

Ultimately, WaW could sell as many as five times as many copies as WitP. I am absolutely convinced that many of these sales would never have taken place had WaW not been available at retail. To us, selling a copy of WaW is the best marketing we can do for our future products and for the wargaming genre.

So what distribution method will we be using in the future? To some extent it will depend on each game, but we expect that most of our games will follow the WitP path and be available via digital download only. This doesn't mean we aren't happy with the WaW results at retail. On the contrary one of the reasons we feel we can go with digital download is because there are now more potential customers that know about us. I would look for our releases in 2006 to be limited to digital download, but in the future if we have a product that we feel can expand our base and which is suitable for retail, we won't hesitate to go to retail again.

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