Combat Mission – Shock Force 2 débarque bientôt sur Steam (MàJ)

Voilà probablement une bien bonne nouvelle pour ceux passionnés ou curieux de l’excellent wargame tactique qu’est Combat Mission. Et qui a d’ailleurs fêté ses 20 bougies à la fin du mois de mai dernier. Slitherine vient en effet d’annoncer un nouveau partenariat avec Battlefront, dont la première utile conséquence sera de permettre à CM Shock Force 2 (qui est essentiellement une modernisation du précédent volet) et à ses DLC d’intégrer le catalogue de Matrix – Slitherine, et surtout de rejoindre Steam. Cela à compter du 25 août prochain, si tout va bien.

NDLR : Mise à jour, la sortie du jeu a été repoussée in extremis au 1er septembre.

Voilà qui espérons augure d’autres développements futurs pour cette série incontournable (comme l’évoque Steve dans le forum officiel, voir ci-après).

Pour plus d’informations sur Combat Mission – Shock Force 2, voyez cette page chez l’éditeur, ou celle-ci chez Battlefront. A lire également si besoin notre Test de Combat Mission Shock Force – NATO.

Communiqué

Combat Mission Shock Force 2 – Out on August 25th

We are proud to announce that we’ve partnered with Battlefront to bring Combat Mission: Shock Force 2 to our stores. The game, and all its DLCs, will be available from August 25th on Matrix Games, Steam, and other digital stores.

We already work with Battlefront on some very engaging professional projects where Combat Mission is used for training and analysis purposes (voir cette brève). We are now genuinely excited to be able to bring it to our wargaming community.

What is Combat Mission Shock Force 2

Shock Force 2 brings you to a hypothetical conflict in Syria between the forces of NATO and the Syrian Army, in which you can play either in real-time or with the innovative turn-based WeGo system. Take command of US Stryker Brigade Combat Teams (SBCT) and Heavy Brigade Combat Teams (HBCT) to fight against Syrian Army Infantry, Mechanized and Armored units in an arid setting. Experience the full range of modern threats to conventional military forces, including irregular combat forces, terrorists, spies, suicide bombers, IED’s and other deadly tools employed in the asymmetric warfare of the modern-day. Play the Task Force Thunder campaign, more than a dozen carefully crafted battles, or unlimited Quick Battles. Shock Force 2 focuses on tactical platoon-level action and features both a single-player campaign and multiplayer (Hotseat or PBEM).

Check out the product pages to know more:

Combat Mission Shock Force 2

Combat Mission Shock Force 2: British Forces (DLC)

Combat Mission Shock Force 2: Marines (DLC)

Combat Mission Shock Force 2: NATO Forces (DLC)

 

Précisions de Battlefront

We’re pretty excited about the expanded relationship with Slitherine.  We’ve been talking with them about this for… 4 years?  Something like that.  Commercial possibilities were kicked around in parallel with our military contract agreement discussions, but we wanted to work with them a bit on the military side before committing to commercial stuff.  Anybody that knows us knows we’re a bit cautious.  As we had hoped, everything with the military side has gone exceptionally well right from the start. 

It took a little while to figure out the specifics of how Slitherine and Battlefront could best work together for commercial CM products as the standard publisher/developer relationship didn’t fit for either of us.  The thing we like best about Slitherine is they aren’t afraid to try something new, which is not our experience with other publishers.

A reminder for some and new info for others, Battlefront has had a few dozen publishing and sales arrangements over the years.  Mostly involving retail, with a few involving online sales.  Two of them deals we made were quite large (CDV with CM1 and Paradox Interactive with CMSF1).  Some worked better than others, but none harmed us.  As stated above, we’re cautious about who we do business with and how we structure our agreements.

Our partnership with Slitherine, though, is a little different than we’ve done before.  Normally we have clearly established territories to avoid competition between Battlefront and the Publisher.  In this case there we both have world wide rights to sell to whomever.  Theoretically this puts us into competition with each other.  In reality, though, we know that Slitherine has a much larger customer base than we do and that even if we lose some sales to them we’ll gain more in the end.  And if we gain, so do you all because you know we’re just going to plow the money back into CM products.

There’s no such thing as a perfect business relationship, and we don’t expect this to be an exception.  However, it is possible to have a NEARLY prefect arrangement where everybody, including the customers, comes out ahead.   That is what we believe we have with Slitherine.  You can be assured of that because your 20 years of support has allowed us the luxury to say « no ».  The fact that we said « yes » to Slitherine at this time and in this way kinda says it all.

Steve