Thrid

Today I noticed something odd about the orc bandit random encounters. They were supposed to scale (a tiny bit) by adding an ogre bandit or an ogre destroyer. So why don't they?
One simple spelling mistake. "Third" was written as "Thrid".
So there you have it. The ogres are in league with the orc bandits.

 

Where can we find this entry to fix it? Sounds fun.

 

It's just as buggy as the rest of the game...

 

Its what happens when your latest and greatest new game gets dumped onto the internet for free, you company goes bankrupt. The price of piracy.

Its been standard practice to dump beta games onto the retail market and let the end-user find the minor flaws, and then release a patch to change the game into a functional (non-buggy) game. Probably when they were looking at going under they just said F-it and never bothered fixing the rest. I'm kinda suprised they even put out the patch they've got.

Can you imagine what the game could have been if it didn't get shanghighed? We'd probably be talking about Arcanum III right now....

 

In some ways it might be a blessing. If Arcanum were popular it would be in danger of attacting too many fans and Troika might make the mistake of trying to popularize it more. Games with a limitted fan-base tend to stay more true to themselves. If they wind up making too much money then they start getting milked.

 

I hate when companies are trying to accuse "pirates" for their poor sales.
Without "pirateing", I would have never met Arcanum.

 

Settle down Blackbeard, nobodies accusing you of killing Troika.

Through poor advertising and internet distribution, they probably lost too much money to keep the whole show afloat. Sure, we've got a limited fan-base, but how long will that last? And, we never got Arcanum II, or an expansion pack, which would have happened if they'd turn a profit.

Ultimately, its Troika's fault (oohh I'm a blasphemer now) for not properly securing their software and hiring a descent marketing company, though I dont recall too many other companies doing much there either. Maybe Troika's demise was the wake-up call to the rest of the industry?

 

Well at least someone gets it.
It wasn't all pirating, but pirating definitely helped. Advertising, too. I've said before that I never saw an advertisement ANYWHERE for Arcanum when it was coming out.
I know that I'll never be sick of this game. I'm sure none of us will be sick of this game if we ever really liked it. Unfortunately, there seem to be so few of us.

 

I just ahppened to see one last copy in the shelf. I'd never heard of it before, and until a friend of mine (who doesn't own the game, but played it with me) found the patch on TA, I didn't hear of it after either.

 

Your comments about the lack of advertising intriqued me.

There's a new and used video game place where I live, and yesterday the owner let me dig through the old V.G. magazines he still had. Even after going back as far as early 2000 all the way through 2003, I couldn't find a single ad.

 

I seen an ad for it! It was kinda small and didn't say much about the game, and it had a pix of some techie on it. It was in a computer gamers mag, but for the life of me I cant remember which one.

I found the game on a shelf a year later and didn't see much else to choose from. Lucky me. :roll:

 

PC Gamer had a 2-page spead advertisment, rated it as an Editor's Choice as well as awarding it "RPG of the year" when it came out. The poor sales lie squarely with the gaming community. Incidentlly the first PC Gamer I purchased had the arcanum demo on it's disc - a beautiful beginning to my life as a gamer.

http://www.pcgamer.com/archives/2005/06/arcanum.html

 

Well ok then. But wasn't PC gamer the only one to pick up on the greatness of Arcanum?
I read their article, but this is the first time I've seen it.
Of course, it doesn't matter how many people actually read the article, it's how many buy the game. If everyone on this website bought Arcanum new, at around 40 dollars, that's approximately 141,000 dollars. Not a very good revenue.
Of course, I'm not saying that we could be the only people to buy this game. It could very well be that there are more people out there with Arcanum who have simply never heard of this website.
I don't know; without any more data with which to keep talking, I'm basically at an impasse...with myself.

 

Uhh... 141,000? How did you come up with that number?

 

PC Gamer did indeed have ads, and a lot of smaller Australian gaming magazines went NUTS over it (I've still got a three-page article around... somewhere, and even PvP did a strip on it!

DAMMIT, GAMERS! WHAT DO WE HAVE TO DO TO GET THE POINT ACROSS?

*ahem* Sorry. Needed to be done.

 

He probably used:

and multiplied it by $40

3547 * 40 = 141880

That assumes spambots even know what Arcanum is. Alos, I got mine for $20, so his figures are already off. Then you've got to figure in pirates, hackers, and bums who borrow someone elses games. After its all said and done its probably:

Cost to produce: $2500000
Advertising: $50
Taxes: $750000

Revenue generated: $ 3450000
- Total costs: $3250050
= Net profit: $199950

Declaring Bankruptcy and going on vacation: priceless