Goblin Squad Member
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I don't think you're going to get a hard timeline from the team, but check out their first blog entry. Read into what you think 'when we say "coming soon," we mean "real soon" means, but if you wait a year you might miss out on more than just feedback and development.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't think you're going to get a hard timeline from the team, but check out their first blog entry. Read into what you think 'when we say "coming soon," we mean "real soon" means, but if you wait a year you might miss out on more than just feedback and development.
I'd say unless they are massively misleading us (as in had the engine picked out a team and were already started in the coding phase when they made the announcement), about a year is about the bare minimum it will take for the game to launch in limited beta. As optimistic as I am and as much as I like their concepts, if the game comes out within a year I will be very very shocked.
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Goblin Squad Member
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We'll be proceeding as quickly as possible, but it's definitely going to ship "when it's done" and not before. Our blog entries are intended to give people an early glimpse into our thinking. As time goes on, these entries will become more and more concrete, and you'll be able to see us build the game.
We're going to stay connected to the community the whole time. We're definitely not secretly doing anything.
We're going to stay connected to the community the whole time. We're definitely not secretly doing anything.
Definitely preferable to secretly doing nothing ^^
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Goblin Squad Member
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... but it's definitely going to ship "when it's done" and not before...
Everyone says this, do you actually mean it? Will you go over budget if the game is not ready? Every game to date launches the moment projected box sale revenue is equal to development cost. And every game launches with major problems that are well known, but go un-fixed, and then in the rush to fix the game new bugs are created that throw the game even more out of wack. And then everyone is surprised that only 30% of the players log on on a regular basis, and only 70% still hold an account.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Valkner - We'll ship it as soon as we think it's ready to begin being monetized. What we ship on day one will not resemble the game we're operating 5 years later by any metric. It may not be well polished. It will have bugs. Some features will not work. Some features will not even exist. But we'll believe that it is good enough to get started as a business, and in a state where a process of continuous improvement will resolve the lingering issues rapidly.
This is the trade-off we make to "go fast, get real players in quickly" vs. "go slow, and burn a huge pile of money trying to be perfect before we ship".
If we found ourselves in a situation where the choice was ship or go bankrupt, we'd ship regardless of the condition the game was in. Better to fire a damp squib than fail to even light the fuze.
If we are nearing completion and it's a race to see what happens first, development or bankruptcy, you can be your ass that the team Mark leads will be killing themselves to finish before the money runs out, and the team I lead will be killing ourselves to find more money.
What we won't do is ship a crappy product just because some arbitrary date on a calendar says "ship date". That's the best we can promise - we're going to be a quality driven company, not a schedule driven one. But until we've got so much cash in the bank that financing is no longer an issue, we are at the mercy of our own burn rate.
RyanD
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Goblin Squad Member
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Every game to date launches the moment projected box sale revenue is equal to development cost.
That may be true for console titles and non-MMO PC titles, but I've never seen that used as a metric in the MMO side of the business.
Star Wars certainly didn't cover it's reputed $200 million cost with retail sales. At about ~$40 a box (after distribution costs), they'd have needed more than 5 million customers on launch day, which they certainly didn't have. On the other hand, 5 years ago they could have sold 1 million boxes filled with air and promises because people believe in BioWare so strongly - before they spent any real money on development at all.
Sometimes MMOs ship because strong-willed individuals with control dictate a day and make their teams stick to it via force of will. There's a theory in such companies that being hard about release dates forces developers to get their work done - hard deadlines promote a sense "must be done by" with people who have known tendencies to procrastinate and/or dither over minutiae. These companies fear that if they don't enforce their hard dates, their own staff won't believe them in the future.
Most MMOs ship when the people who build them convince themselves that they can cope with the remaining issues after launch (and there are always remaining issues, no game ships bug free). Sometimes MMOs ship because the work required to coordinate a marketing campaign with the logistics of producing boxes and getting them in stores dictates a release day even if fairly big issues remain - the risk of not turning the servers on outweighs the risk of dealing with the fallout.
RyanD
(PS: Sometimes in the past MMOs shipped because their developers think they're ready, only to discover after release that they were horribly, horribly wrong. Luckily, the genre is mature enough at this point that barring a game built from scratch by folks who had never worked on one before, this is unlikely to be a problem much anymore. But you can look at a game like Earthrise and see how it is still possible even today.)
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Goblin Squad Member
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A lot of us (not just on these forums, I mean that big audience composed of fans of MMOs) have been saying for a while that we'd be willing to pay to play during a quasi-beta phase, as long as there wasn't a character wipe at release. It sounds like PFO is going to be something like this, and I'm thrilled with that.
By the way, I hope y'all have some juicy info for today's blog!
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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A lot of us (not just on these forums, I mean that big audience composed of fans of MMOs) have been saying for a while that we'd be willing to pay to play during a quasi-beta phase, as long as there wasn't a character wipe at release. It sounds like PFO is going to be something like this, and I'm thrilled with that.
By the way, I hope y'all have some juicy info for today's blog!
For that matter, I'd play and contribute during an alpha phase, with the full expectation that characters would be wiped regularly.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Hearing Ryan and Mark make the above comments is definately encouraging. I work for an SaaS Developer (Business Services not Entertainment Vertical but there are alot of parrelels) and I can attest to the fact that virtualy no Developer has the luxuary for sitting as long as they would like in development before releasing a product. Especialy in this economic climate, it just doesn't happen.
What a quality Developer does is have accurate and practical estimates of just how long they can keep a product in Development before they need to release and a realistic understanding of just what they can accomplish in terms of Development during that time frame. A good Developer designs thier product in a modular fashion where they can excise certain systems or modules within thier product without compromising the integrity of the design as a whole (e.g. the modules/functionality are optional add-ons, the core design itself isn't dependant upon them for it's basic functionality... but it's architecture is open enough to support them being "plugged-in" at a future date.). That way they can make the product fit within the time-frame they have availble before release and add-on to it later.
Where Developers typicaly run into problems is where there is a bad disconnect between the executive/business/finance people and the technical team. This can occur when the Finance Team badly underestimates thier ability to obtain financing for the project or the Technical Team badly underestimates what they can practicaly accomplish in a given amount of time with a given amount of resource. It can also occur when the 2 teams just aren't communicating effectively and HONESTLY with each other on a regular basis. This most often occurs when one or more of the teams are just plain inexperienced with these sorts of projects or when there are multiple layers of abstraction/indirection between the two teams (e.g. When one team is a division of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a corporation that's just been taken over by a larger parent corporation and someone along the chain of communication is afraid to pass along an honest and frank assesment of the situation for fear of jeopardizing thier own position or the relationship between the business entities involved).
It sounds like we don't have much to worry about with those concerns here. GW may be a new business entity, but if thier comments here are any indication...it sounds like the principles involved have been down this road more then enough times before to have a good understanding of the hazards that lay ahead. Also, if this board is any indication, I don't think we have much cause to worry about there being much in the way of barriers between the Business and Technical sides of GW from communicating with one another ;)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Where Developers typicaly run into problems is where there is a bad disconnect between the executive/business/finance people and the technical team.
QFT!
We saw this with Warhammer Online where what they told their investors was different than what they told the players was different with the game they actually developed until closed beta (6 months to release) when the fans played the game and were like wtf is this?!
The saddest part is that the ones responsible for this desaster (teh managers) got comfy chairs with EA afterwards while the devs were fired.