It's still a beautiful game, and you mostly play zoomed way out.

What would even be the point of a Supreme Commander 3? The only things to improve are graphics, performance, and pathfinding. $3 million is a shoestring budget by game development standards. That's because they simply couldn't afford any of those things.

C: Has the absolute bare minimum of a campaign, without a single cutscene.

That's still only about 10% of Taylor's estimate for a Supcom 3. We can be generous and round up to $3 million to account for inflation. You'll find Planetary Annihilation on that list: a crowdfunded Supcom/Total Annihilation spiritual successor. With the notable exception of Star Citizen (which only made $2 million in the actual Kickstarter campaign), no game has ever even reached half that number. Here's a list of significant croudfunded games. Kickstarter isn't a magical free money button.

'Oh but we'll start a Kickstarter campaign!' The cost of Supreme Commander 3 (or a remake) is simply far more than the relatively small community can support. If we could charge $10 for a month's access to FAF, and that made no impact to the amount of players (which it most certainly would), it would take us between 12 and 16 years to make that kind of money. FAF gets about 18 thousand unique visitors a month. In an interview last month, Chris Taylor pegged the cost of a Supreme Commander 3 at $25 to $35 million. If we were to buy the IP, that would cost half a million as a complete minimum. No matter who develops it, it isn't going to come cheap. You wanna make a 3rd?' No, no developer in their right mind would accept such a proposal. None of the 2.5 games from this IP have ever turned a profit. Some existing game company? 'Hey we just got this IP from Square Enix. This would require hundreds of people working 40 hour weeks for years. FAF and LOUD have about 10 and 5 part-time developers, respectively. Let's assume we get the IP, who would you have develop Supcom 3? Volunteers? The Supreme Commander credits have 250 or so full-time employees. While Supcom FA is by far and away my most played game, I couldn't warrant flushing that much money down the drain, not to mention risking that many people's jobs.

Were I to wake up as the CEO of Square Enix tomorrow, I still wouldn't greenlight development of Supreme Commander 3. Chris Taylor said in a recent interview that the original Supreme Commander didn't make enough profit for GPG to get any money back from the publisher.Įven Supcom 2, a game designed to sell in the console space as well, failed to make enough to warrant a sequel. If it were, Square Enix would have made one by now. Making Supreme Commander games isn't profitable. Who, how, and most importantly, why? Who? There are 3 questions to answer whenever this topic comes up every few months:

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