Atomic Systems

Well, what a fortnight to have been away.

I see I not only missed the great sale - but also all the speculating re the announcements made his last few days.
I clearly have catching up to do in my reading.

Can I however make a serious plea for commonality in the name of this new upgrade/release/product.

Can RW please call it 'RAILWORKS 3' - and not 'Rail Simulator 2012'

I think it better reflects the ongoing development of the product that was a concious step change from the previous product 'RS'.
It would avoid confusion with that other 'rail-sim' product which uses the year in all release names.

Also, having a year in the title 'e.g. 2012, is building in an 'ageing' factor, which may not help sales once 2012 is gone.
It also puts pressure to repeatedly issue at least annual major updates - which may well be the plan, but why tie yourself to such a process when it is unnecessary.
Railworks should be proud of the Railworks brand name and continue the established naming format - Release numbers are fine - just ask Microsoft.

So please RAILWORKS 3 let it be.

It is definitely not Rail Simulator 2012.
It think it is "Train Simulator 2012 - Railworks 3" or the other was around.

We will certainly go on calling it RW or RW3. But for the novices, it has a great advantage to call a train simulator "train simulator". There are bus simulators and flight simulators, and this is a train simulator and people need to be told that it is.

Besides, no one is interested in rail works, and there are no rail works in RW anyway. Also rail simulation is not something RW really does, although with the new track quality parameter, you get a glimpse at that.

As far as the year is concerned, I would not worry too much about that. Their marketing department might already have a plan, what to do in summer 2012, in order to prevent their latest product looking old. But of course, they don't talk about it now, it is totally top secret!

As long as it is as compatible as it gets, and we all get free upgrades, my answer to your question would be: Nothing, plus hope that things get better over time.

In my opinion, For the sake of the forum it should stay as Railworks or RW since when the upgrade is applied Railworks 2 will no longer apply much in the same way Railworks did when it was updated to Railworks 2, I know this might seem confusing to newcomers to the site after the upgrade, but not half as confusing if we start refering to RW, RW2 and RW3 as separate entities!

Hi

From the horses mouth ... when I asked Paul Jackson how we should refer to the upgrade he said that it is still RailWorks 3 but it will be promoted as Train Simulator 2012. Their own promotional material also refers to it as TS2012.

It is as simple as that.

Let's try to cut RSC some slack. They are in business to capitalise on their recent developments as much as possible by attracting the casual shopper as well as rail enthusiasts. I think it is a bit much to grumble at a name when most of us on these forums are going to get TS2012 absolutely free while other people minus Railworks will pay. Train Simulator 2012 is very cunning marketing, as it will take over a famous and respected marque and consign its previous wearer to history and, perhaps, the dustbin.

Best wishes,
Padster

Padsterdood wrote:Let's try to cut RSC some slack. They are in business to capitalise on their recent developments as much as possible by attracting the casual shopper as well as rail enthusiasts. I think it is a bit much to grumble at a name when most of us on these forums are going to get TS2012 absolutely free while other people minus Railworks will pay. Train Simulator 2012 is very cunning marketing, as it will take over a famous and respected marque and consign its previous wearer to history and, perhaps, the dustbin.

Best wishes,
Padster

You can look at like that (and there is most likely much truth in that view of course) but the main impression seems to be that this is a Train Simulator and that is what RailSimulator.com are in business to develop.

The full title suggests that, as with many games these days, we may be in for annual 'new' games and the cynic in me suspects that, having got us on the RW3 hook, there may a charge for upgrading to the '2013 game'. But that is probably me being uncharitable, given that the major money spinner is doubtless not RW itself but sales of add-ons.

dsrose wrote:The full title suggests that, as with many games these days, we may be in for annual 'new' games and the cynic in me suspects that, having got us on the RW3 hook, there may a charge for upgrading to the '2013 game'. But that is probably me being uncharitable, given that the major money spinner is doubtless not RW itself but sales of add-ons.

I would also add that if we were to pay for a 2013 version, is there any harm in that? When you consider we haven't had to pay anything since Railworks was released, remembering that even then, you were eligible for a discount if moving over from RS. I think we have had it pretty good.

I wonder if anyone ever did do a projection for giving the base product away gratis, and it's effects on DLC sales. With the ever increasing size of the DLC library it might be interesting to look at as a sweetener, at least.

It is the official view of "the gaming scene" that future funding models will largely rely on payware addons (under all sorts of names) with the platform being for free (more or less) to easily invite new potential customers of content into the scene. (Ok, there is no single official view, so make that "prominently discussed view" or something.)

Anyway, I guess the price of the base game is not too important in the calculation. And in term of railway simulation, it is not important that it is zero either, because valuable customers will not mind to pay a little for the base game. In contrast to many online games, where you get in for free, just because there is a ton of them and not enough time to see them all anyway, and then they sell you some stuff to impress your friends for a little while. Railway enthusiasts are a bit less dynamic than the average, I guess. And just compare all these collectors of 00 models stacked in showcases on the wall. For them, the RW back catalogue is a steal, without any special sales.

Anyway, my private crystal ball clearly shows Train Simulator 2013 costing me as much as Train Simulator 2012.

The RW back catalogue will eventually become obsolete though - in a few years time when we can have vastly better meshes for instance, or new types of texturing - whereas I still have boxes of my father's 00 stock which would probably still work with a modern layout. I guess you might be able to port current models to future engines, but that ruins the DLC sales model

Again, I suspect that what is in the name, is marketing considerations to countries outside the UK, since Steam is an international store. Calling a factory a 'works' is a very common British idiom which most of us in the UK recognise, but it does mean the name Railworks is rather colloquial as far as international marketing goes. Not true everywhere of course, the Railworks name scans for Germany too (another big content area for the sim, so an important consideration), since it is similar to 'werk' or more literally 'Gesamtwerk', but in other countries the meaning of the name gets a bit lost. Calling it Train Simulator removes all doubt or confusion as to what the product is about, more importantly, if someone is looking for a 'train sim' and types that in Google, the developers will want their product name to come up high in the SEO.

Regardless, I should imagine people will end up calling it what suits them to so do, as we can see from various iterations of Microsoft's Flight Simulator, for example 'Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight' (the official name) gets called all kinds of things, including: 'FS2004', 'A Century of Flight', 'MSFS', 'FS', 'FS9', or sometimes even 'FS9.1' or 'FS Nine and a Half' when in patched form. Having several different nicknames and semi-official names doesn't seem to do it any harm and everyone knows which program people are talking about when any of those names are used.

So really, there is nothing in a name, or at least nothing to get 'werked' up about (see what I did there? LOL), it is still what you want it to be.

Al

dsrose wrote:The full title suggests that, as with many games these days, we may be in for annual 'new' games and the cynic in me suspects that, having got us on the RW3 hook, there may a charge for upgrading to the '2013 game'. But that is probably me being uncharitable, given that the major money spinner is doubtless not RW itself but sales of add-ons.

That was suggested last year also

FoggyMorning wrote:

dsrose wrote:The full title suggests that, as with many games these days, we may be in for annual 'new' games and the cynic in me suspects that, having got us on the RW3 hook, there may a charge for upgrading to the '2013 game'. But that is probably me being uncharitable, given that the major money spinner is doubtless not RW itself but sales of add-ons.

That was suggested last year also

I wonder, based on number of people who predicted RW2:TS2010 would be a paid upgrade last year and that RW3:TS2012 would be a paid upgrade this year, how many people would be willing to run up their colours and leave a record that they predicted the next version would be a paid upgrade? If everybody last time around had their names recorded in a stickied thread there would be either a huge amount of eating words going on or a huge amount of embarrassed silence!

You know, I think I saw a large crow a couple of days ago. Maybe we can catch that and cook it up for some peoples' dinner?