Before anyone starts screaming at one another: I think it's worth keeping in mind with all of this that there's plenty that's REALLY subjective.
The whole TA vs SupCom thing, for instance.
There's a couple of things to keep in mind with that.
For alot of people, SupCom WAS revolutionary. REALLY revolutionary. Now, the arguement I'm seeing is "No it isnt, TA had already done this stuff", but there's one really major factor that needs to be kept in mind: Time. TA was released back in 1997. Supcom was in 2007. That's an entire 10 years difference.... and in this industry, that's a *very* long time. And you know how PC gamers often are... if it's old, either A: it's not relevant to them any more, or B: they have no idea it exists. So for many, SupCom comes along and is suddenly doing things that the RTS genre as a whole just was not doing at all (and the genre overall seemed to have alot of games in it back then). Hell, *I* hadnt ever heard of TA. All I knew was suddenly here was this RTS that actively avoided pretty much ALL of the problems I'd constantly had with the genre. I bought it, and I wasnt at all disappointed. Hell, it's still pretty much THE game of that type that I remember the most fondly. As far as I'm concerned, the first game to challenge that spot for me that it has is actually AI War, which I only started on very recently.
There were glitches and such with multiplayer, but.... that one is really hard to quantify, in terms of what effect it had on it. My experience with alot of online games around that time was that ALOT of them could get weird. Glitchy or laggy or whatever. Not to mention, there was a large group that bought it just for the singleplayer, which is often pretty unusual with that genre. That game did it very well, whereas I cannot always say that about most other games in that genre. Usually, it's a genre that's geared more towards multiplayer for many fans, and that game was a rarity in that regard. That matches could be REALLY long also furthered this.
Regarding the sequels and such, the high sales of the second game doesnt necessarily have as much impact on the probability of the third game as you might think. There's LOTS of things that go into the decision-making with such a thing. Alot of people have this misconception that sales numbers of the previous product are the be-all end-all to this. It's not. It's only one of many factors, really. And that second game had.... issues. I cannot remember what they were exactly, but the one really major thing I remember about the second one was that it rather lacked impact. It didn't stay relevant very long once it had released. And there was something really off about it.... I cannot remember exactly what that was. Even I, a huge fan of the first, sorta had a "meh" reaction to the second, and I didn't stick with it. What players think of a game AFTER they buy it is a really huge thing that publishers HAVE to consider, as publishers cannot just rest on their laurels after a given release. They HAVE to already have started planning for whatever they do next, and a player that got excited for and bought a game but didn't LIKE it (or didn't find enough replay value or something in a game they expected to have alot of) is NOT a happy player, and is much more likely to abandon that developer/publisher than anyone else. Those who simply decided not to buy it, instead of buying it and disliking it, are likely to keep on with that publisher if they already liked some of their stuff in general, instead of abandoning out of anger. So even a game that sells well can do some nasty damage when considered over time, because it can negatively affect FUTURE sales. And while I seriously just do not remember the reasons, that game really did just lose it's relevancy really fast, unlike the first.
Also, timeframes for sequels... why am I even seeing that in arguements here? There's LOTS of examples of it going both ways. Either games getting a sequel real fast, or taking a zillion years to get one. There's too many reasons for either to happen, and again, it's not all to do with sales numbers. And it's worth keeping in mind that yes, expansion packs actually do count here. On consoles, sequels are a way of giving fans of a game/franchise more of what they want, while generating further money for the developer/publisher. That's the true point of sequels.... but it's ALSO the true point of expansions. The fact that PCs make games capable of having expansions means that expansions will typically come first, but it's pretty much the same thing. A popular-as-heck game will get expansions FAST. In the console world, this would be a sequel being made, not an expansion. It's almost a matter of semantics, to a point. Of course, that's all up to the devs and publisher. There are those that, on PC, will indeed go for a sequel instead of an expansion, even if they're doing it real fast after the previous game. My point being that there's just so much to consider with this aspect of it.... it doesnt really bear arguing over.
Really, NONE of this bears arguing over, if you ask me. All of this bit with sequels and sales and blah blah blah doesnt have much to do with wether Planetary Annihilation, the focus of this topic, is a good game or not, or any aspects of it, really. Inspired by TA, maybe. That's it's connection to this stuff in the past But does it matter THAT much? All that matters is the current state of THIS game, I think.
