In response to all the angry posts about us jumping the gun and hyping false release dates: If only it were that black and white. When I said it was "done" back in Dec. '06, I meant exactly that. Delta Tao was going to distribute for us. They didn't have the large team of beta testers or other resources that SHFF has, so they were happy with it as it stood, as were we. I personally don't care about a bug or two here and there as long as there is nothing serious like the game suddenly locking up while you're in the middle of playing, because I know we can always make an update a week or two down the road that takes care of any minor quirks. We believed the game was ready to ship. Then a few weeks later, the year rolled over and Delta Tao lost the rights back to SHFF. Begin exhaustive beta testing, changes to art, new features (Novice mode), etc. I'm really not bitter about all of this, as I believe it has made DC3 a better product. But don't misunderstand: It was just as ready then to go public. So, when the public demo 1.1 was released a few weeks back, it was also "done", as in SHFF had it uploaded to the server was ready to flip the switch to make it live. I was 99.99% that is was going to happen that day or the following. Then SHFF got worried about the game being massively pirated and they pulled the plug at the last minute. I apologize about getting people worked up, but I only did that because I was sure that it really was just around the corner. So as to not upset anyone else, I will not be posting any more "hints" about when I think it's ready. "It will be up when it's up." Besides, nothing interesting ever happens on Thursdays anyway... (bat)
Well, there you have it, I know you are all as annoyed as a dog being denied a ball, but at least you have some insight into what has been going on.
2 comments:
don't pull a sony. If you make a good product, people will pay for it. Don't spend your resources trying to fight your customers to force them to give you money. Think like apple. They implement the WEAKEST form of copy protection on their iWork and iLife products. Because they know that they are good and people will pay the price because it's cheap and easy. I pirate lots of programs, not because I'm evil, but because I'm tired of getting "locked out" of programs that I legally payed for. If the program is good, I'll buy it. I've had my money in hand for a long while now. If you want it, here it is.
p.s. there will always be a way to steal. So don't fight it, it's an uphill battle you'll never win. Just be a cool developer and make a kick-ass product. The money will come.
Being someone who buys sony consoles, I am questioning your meaning.
If anything, Microsoft would be a better example.
And I don't think Apple goes out of their way to make the copy protection weak, and I think if they had signs of large amounts of people were pirating it, I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly made it have much better cop protection.
I will not get into an argument on why pirating is good or bad, or what one can do to "Justify" it. That would go nowhere, I just hope that people are willing to spend money on Dark Castle, to show the developers that they made a really amazing product.
Of course there will always been, and will always be a way to steal, I don't think there is any reason to implement more copy protection, if people are going to pirate it, the odds are this wont stop them, but it doesn't mean that every good piece of software, that is piratable sells well. Look at the PSP for an example, there are 20 million+ sold, yet, there are only a few games that have sold over 1 million. The PS3, which has sales around 10 million, has twice as many if not more games that have sold over a million. What's wrong with this picture? It's very easy to pirate on the PSP, where it is not possible at the moment on the PS3.
What it means is that a system, with as much potential as the PSP, wont get the games it deserves, due to big companies worried about pirating. I would assume that SHFF heard something about this sort of thing at the last moment, and thought it was an important thing to add.
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