Erik Rutins -> RE: Unity of Command Bundle $7.49 (4/28/2013 7:09:55 PM)
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I just wanted to add a note about distribution releases. Some of what you've all observed has also had to do with growing pains here. In the past, we had some extra bandwidth beyond our exclusive releases. Both in order to make available to our community releases that were not exclusives (but which we felt were great games) and in order to try to establish a working relationship with those developers which might lead to an exclusive arrangement in the future, we tended to include at lot of distribution releases in our catalog. All of these were treated exactly the same way as an exclusive release at that time, from release through support, though obviously we had less leverage over a non-exclusive developer than one that was exclusive to us and that was probably the main historical downside, that sometimes these releases were not as well supported as our own. More recently though, the success we've had means that we've got more exclusive releases in the works with more developers than ever before, but we also already had more distribution releases signed up as well. There is often unfortunately a lag between the increase in workload that growth creates and the time when bandwidth catches up with the additional workload. There are a number of great games (I'm thinking especially about Achtung Panzer and Unity of Command) that ended up as distribution releases but at a time when we had to internally devote more and more of our time to our exclusive releases. Complicating this is the additional change over the last five years of widely varying price structures for distribution releases, where they are often on many other online stores and there's very little coordination on pricing. We did not have the internal bandwidth to monitor external pricing and we are not generally notified by these developers if the price changes elsewhere. These issues then create a dual problem - first we can be seen as overpricing these games and second if we can't support them as well as our exclusive games, at the same time we become just another distributor. Neither of those is really where we want to be. We realized this internally and made changes to make sure we did not disappoint developers or customers, but unfortunately we do not turn on a dime, we're a bit more of a ship now that takes a while to change course. These releases unfortunately got caught in the middle. There were two more complicating factors as well. First on Achtung Panzer we've been trying unsuccessfully to adapt their updates, which are quite unique, to our update process. Communication issues have compounded the challenge there, but ultimately it's been an issue of bandwidth. Their updates work fine with our release, but the installation process is complicated and our customers cannot access them or be notified about them through the normal means. We have access to release additional expansions/DLCs for this release, but we wanted to sort out the updating before that happened, so it has remained in limbo. I apologize for that. We recently increased our production bandwidth and this is still on our radar and I expect it to be fully addressed this year. Second on Unity of Command. We received news of an update and expansion to that right before the end of our production schedule for the year in 2012. We had a very full schedule and had a large backlog of updates to work on and release for our exclusive games by the time we heard about this. If we'd known about it earlier, we could have scheduled for it better but when it comes to distribution releases we don't work as closely with the developers and things like this often happen. Unfortunately, we had to decide what we could do with the time we had left before Christmas as we could not do everything. We decided to focus on getting the pending exclusive releases and updates out as to do otherwise would be unfair to our exclusive developers. We released Unity of Command: Red Turn and the new update as soon as we could in the new year. Apologies for that as well. On the positive side, with our additional production bandwidth, if the same thing happened this year we would not have had to make that choice, we could do both. Going forward, we intend to support the distribution releases we already have in our catalog, but we do not plan to add any new ones (though an exception is always possible if it makes sense, but only if we can support it as we do an exclusive release). Regards, - Erik
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