Freck YEAH!
TK is a pretty good coder/designer, but he does not earn that badge for running a business.
SF2 should have been more successful. It could have been. However, he made strategic mistakes that kept his sales low.
Primarily, and this goes almost without saying, in marketing. Or rather lack of. Other than a few shots on a FB page he relied almost totally on word of mouth. Thatâs fine when youâre selling homemade jams or furniture, but the overhead in software programming and time to complete a project requires a lot more sales.
The community gave him plenty of ideas. Some were good, some werenât (of course), but he compromised by doing none of them. Pretty much the opposite of a good compromise.
I think the flipside of this was, as Beach alluded to, he couldnât handle any more sales given his volume of support responses. Double your sales, double the people asking for help, and he couldnât code and do support himself anymore. Frankly, he never should have done that, but he couldnât afford to pay someone to handle it to let him concentrate on generating more sales so he could!
I always thought of TK being too much of a fussbudget to risk trying to go big.
I donât think he ever forgave me for the review I did of SF2:NA. To be fair, the guy should never have released it in the condition it was in. The stock Kiev carrier still cannot successfully launch and recover aircraft.
Then, he compounded the error by removing capabilities within the game rather than try to make them actually work. The trees in his Vietnam terrain were causing flashing textures. Rather than fix it, he removed the trees. The carrier lights wouldnât work well with his new water effects in the North Atlantic. Solution? Remove night carrier ops from the campaigns. The AI didnât know how to properly use external chaff pods. Solution? Remove the AIâs ability to use them at all, which may even extended to external ECM pods. His avionics.dll files have RWR that do not pick up active radar homing missiles. His solution? Donât fly past about 1990.
His reactions to criticisms were not to try to find a workable solution, but to simply limit the game. I have them all installed, but I donât play them anymore. Theyâre simply too much of a hassle to work with and on top of that, they donât like Windows 10 or nVidia cards very much. But, Iâve bought every game and DLC he ever put out. That fact prevents me from uninstalling them. The only way I see myself returning to those games is if CAP2 doesnât pan out, which doesnât seem likely because Ed Scio seems way too attuned to customers.
Strike Fighters 2 stands out to me as wasted potential. Those are the two words that come immediately to mind when I think about the series.
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The world is paved with good intentions. Maybe a complete combat flight sim is too much for one man to do in the modern era? âThe first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.â
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Flight sims can be very prone to feature creep in a big way. Without having a solid goal and keeping everything on that track, itâs very easy to get distracted and end up in quick sand.
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Thatâs 180% of development time 
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99 little bugs in the code
99 little bugs in the code
squish one down, recompile it around
126 little bugs in the code âŠ
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Exactly.
Let me put it another way. The US budget is a pie. Weâll cut the pie in half. Now half will go to domestic spending, half to the military, and half to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. See?
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Awwwww niiice
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