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There are 3 questions to answer whenever this topic comes up every few months:

Who, how, and most importantly, why?

Who?

Making Supreme Commander games isn’t profitable. If it were, Square Enix would have made one by now. 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.

Even Supcom 2, a game designed to sell in the console space as well, failed to make enough to warrant a sequel. Were I to wake up as the CEO of Square Enix tomorrow, I still wouldn’t greenlight development of Supreme Commander 3. 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.

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. FAF and LOUD have about 10 and 5 part-time developers, respectively. This would require hundreds of people working 40 hour weeks for years. Volunteers aren’t going to cut it.

Some existing game company? «Hey we just got this IP from Square Enix. None of the 2.5 games from this IP have ever turned a profit. The community largely hates one of them. You wanna make a 3rd?» No, no developer in their right mind would accept such a proposal.

How?

No matter who develops it, it isn’t going to come cheap. If we were to buy the IP, that would cost half a million as a complete minimum. Likely millions in the plural.

That’s just for the IP. In an interview last month, Chris Taylor pegged the cost of a Supreme Commander 3 at $25 to $35 million. That is a staggering amount of money. FAF gets about 18 thousand unique visitors a month. 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. The cost of Supreme Commander 3 (or a remake) is simply far more than the relatively small community can support.

«Oh but we’ll start a Kickstarter campaign!»

Kickstarter isn’t a magical free money button. Here’s a list of significant croudfunded games. 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.

Plus, it’s been tried before. You’ll find Planetary Annihilation on that list: a crowdfunded Supcom/Total Annihilation spiritual successor. That managed to raise $2.2 million. We can be generous and round up to $3 million to account for inflation. That’s still only about 10% of Taylor’s estimate for a Supcom 3. Ever notice how Planetary Annihilation

A: Doesn’t have fancy graphics
B: Has only 1 faction
C: Has the absolute bare minimum of a campaign, without a single cutscene
D: Doesn’t have a sequel

That’s because they simply couldn’t afford any of those things. $3 million is a shoestring budget by game development standards.

Why?

What would even be the point of a Supreme Commander 3? The only things to improve are graphics, performance, and pathfinding.

Graphics

Performance

It would literally be cheaper to buy everyone who logs into FAF this month a Ryzen 9 3900x, a spare for their grandma, and a Ryzen 5 3600 in case their younger sister wants to play than it would be to fund Supcom 3

Pathfinding

And even with those 3 improvements, there’s no guarantee that it would be a net improvement. Supcom 2 did all of these things, and yet people still dislike it. No amount of money is going to guarantee that Supcom 3 doesn’t turn into a colossal trainwreck.

«Oh but Supcom 2 changed X, Y and Z!»

And it’s a good thing they did. I haven’t played Supcom 2 since a few months after release, and yet I’m still glad they tried something new for the sequel. What’s the point of making the same game over again? If Chris Taylor comes flying in with a blank check from Bill Gates, I’d want him to try something new yet again for Supcom 3.

You can’t make improvements without making changes. If I wanted to be playing the original, untouched version, I’d be playing Total Annihilation. Instead with significant changes that turned into Supreme Commander, then with moderate changes that in turn turned into Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, which received a few minor tweaks to eventually get FAF, the version I play.

We cannot as a community develop Supreme Commander 3. We don’t have the people, we don’t have the resources, and we don’t have the need.

Supreme Commander — GameSpot

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