From the Gems of War forums, from a thread about the history of in-game handles:

Sirrian(Steve) wrote:

It's cool to see how active and involved and invigorated Steve is in GoW 'universe', including its forums, and it's very sad to know at the same time how forlorn are his elder Warlords children.

It's the game that's paying the bills right now <shrug>. I guess it will remain to be seen if they can stockpile enough money to work on the Warlords titles in the future, although by the nature of GoW, they're always pushing out content and updates so the whole staff is dedicated to it right now.

I knew this back in 1998.

Not too long after DLR was released I went online and played a player called Sirian. During the game turns we were chatting and Steve confessed that it was him just playing some games in his spare time. That's how I first met him and got involved in the 1.02 update and remained friendly with him over the years.

He's mentioned his alter ego and how it came about before in Maya's (or KMan's) Forum's so it's not news for long time veteran players.

KGB

P.S. GoW is likely to consume all his time for the foreseeable future. I play Marvel Puzzle Quest (licensed from Steve) which came out before GoW and that game is going strong after 3 years and they hope to keep it going another 5+. I'll assume the same will be true of GoW. At that point Steve will be closing in on 60 and pretty much every Warlord will be at least 40 years old with many in their 50's and 60's. How much do you think Steve is going to want to do another game at that age or how much will the old Warlords fans even want one then?

But even now, on GoW forums, he is nicknamed himself Sirian nonetheless. It means that he identifies himself with his labor of love (Warlords universe). I think he would still want to come back there, where he's like at home.

KGB wrote:


I'm a veteran player and didn't know

Vissavald wrote:


Well, to me, it really means he's just keeping a handle that more or less originated from D&D and wants to keep it consistent through all of these years. He may want to come back but times in the industry has changed a lot so it just may not be viable now (I think he alluded to as much on the I2 forums).

Spiderman wrote:


Maybe you need to get out more

Spiderman wrote:


Agreed. He loves his D&D roots. Used to run a campaign up until 2005ish. He may still do so.

He once told me he wanted to do a deep RPG game set in the Warlords universe. So unless he counts GoW as such a game he may still attempt something like that in the future.

There's just no money in a turn based game that's PC only. If it's meant to make money is has to also be on mobile and dedicated platforms (PS3/XBox). Otherwise it would just be a labor of love game.

KGB

KGB wrote:


Well, it depends on what we think as 'money' PC-only TBS won't make you millions, but a reasonable amount of it you could make. Good example is Illwinter Games games - old-school and terrible-looking Dominions and Conquest of Elysium series. Yes, these two Swedish guys who made them have their main jobs, but their labor of love made them some real money AFAIK. And these games are for PC, Linux and Mac. NO consoles, NO stupid cellphone/fridge/hairdryer applications - just a good old desktop.

KGB wrote:


Well, I did miss the heyday of this site, found it long after Warlords IV had come out and even moved on...

The fact that GoW is on consoles *and* mobile instantly widens that market. And the number one purchase for beginning players is an armor that gives +100% to "loot" in the game and costs $50, which is pretty much what one would pay for a retail game. Now certainly, not everyone buys it (I didn't) but going by the Steam metrics alone, there are around 30K active players right now, most likely more since the game has been out for a couple of years now. I don't know the console numbers but I'm going to guess that combined, GoW does a good business so really, there's no reason to stop it and start (basically) re-coding a game just to bring it to a current audience (I guess HD is the term?)

I understand doing labor of love games. But people who do those tend to be young people (under 30) with time on their hands. That's how Warbarons came into existence. People who are in their late 50's rarely do a labor of love game especially since Steve would need a lot of help creating something worthy of putting the Warlords name on (he's stated he's not going to do a half-ass job on a Warlords 5).

I didn't realize the GoW numbers were so low. I thought there would have been a lot more players. Marvel Puzzle Quest has 5+ million downloads on Android alone and probably several hundred thousand active players (maybe even a million) across all platforms. It makes a LOT of money from Whales (who spend thousands on the game which seems incredible to me but definitely happens as many have confirmed). Maybe GoW doesn't advertise enough. Either way, I agree there is no reason to abandon a constant revenue stream to update a 20 year old game (DLR is 20 this year) that may sell only 20-30K copies total.

To get an idea of how much money is available in mobile games consider that Kate Uptons tits has Game of War bringing in 1 million a day in revenue! This article is eye-opening:

www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-176...000-iphone-game.html

KGB