Erik Rutins
Posts: 37503
Joined: 3/28/2000 From: Vermont, USA Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tevans6220 As an owner of over 30 Matrix titles including DW, I think I can safely say that a lot of what Matrix sells are works in progress. I appreciate your support, but I do have to disagree on "a lot". I see every title that goes out the door and that's is very much the exception rather than the rule. We work very hard to try to make sure a game does not _need_ post-release updates, though realistically some work is always required due to the nature of small-scale PC game development. Of the examples you cite, I absolutely agree that Empires in Arms was released as a "work in progress" and remains one to this date. We made a bad call on the release timing there and we continue to work to update it. Panzer Command: Kharkov was released as a completed game. It needed one update, which was done within a month of release. The second update that you say it is waiting on is not needed by the game. It is instead a gigantic update of additional content and game improvements, equivalent to a new game actually, which we are going to be releasing for free to customers who own Kharkov. I completely disagree that this game needs another update and I see the pending update as a purely positive bonus for customers that own that game. quote:
Call me crazy but I expect something to work when I buy it. Me too. quote:
I understand bugs and glitches arise in software but let's be honest, if this was any other industry besides software Matrix would probably be out of business. If every one of our releases had issues like Empires in Arms did, we would be out of business. We are in business because, fortunately, that is the exception and we do our best to work with our developers to test our releases before we send them out and support them after they are released. quote:
I own DW and I like it. The whole point of this post was just to say that there are two sides to the situation. For every person who is willing to wait days, weeks or months for the bugs to be fixed there is also a person who feels that the problems should have been ironed out before release and he just wants what he paid for. We do understand this. DW released with some severe issues that we simply missed. I hope you will agree that it has improved a lot since release and with about one update per week since release, we are not sitting back here and sipping margaritas. The remaining issues will be resolved very quickly and following on to that will come a series of nice improvements. It's not unusual for a PC game, regardless of the scale of the developer or publisher, to have some issues after release. It is unfortunately, to a large degree, the nature of complex games that have to work on almost infinite hardware/software combinations. We strive to avoid that and will continue to do our best to keep improving our 'at release' quality, but on the flipside post-release support is essential when things slip through and I am very confident that DW will be on everyone's hard drives for a long time to come.
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