GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by BongDC »

Not sure about the legalities, but if goat refused to publish the game regardless of the contract, wouldn't that constitute a breach of contract on goats part?
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Post by Quzar »

I doubt anyone would take issue with this being posted.
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by GyroVorbis »

Grizzlies had 10 levels. They weren't really small levels either, and some of them took some serious time to clear.

I guess it's a matter of opinion, but I really didn't see the content lacking.
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by bramenjam »

GyroVorbis wrote:And it's hard for me to tell. Is Dan still publishing games even? The letter seemed rather vague.
Yes, he is still publishing. He has returned from his communication absense, and has stated that he want to renew his efforts to publishing the games.
BongDC wrote:Not sure about the legalities, but if goat refused to publish the game regardless of the contract, wouldn't that constitute a breach of contract on goats part?
No, there are always 'outs' in a contract. If the Goat store feels the quality is not up to snuff, he's not obliged to publish it. The same thing goes for the developer, if he has legitimate claims concerning malperformance on the Goat's part, he has an out as well.
BongDC wrote:I think if it was possible for the developers to release their games, they should at least provide the binaries in some form, as long as it doesn't break the NDA.
A NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) isn't the same as a contract for publishing. The NDA simply means that the Goat store and the developer will keep their mutual business secret. And if they decide not to continue together, the developer can still do whatever he wants with the game. If they signed a publishing agreement, then the developer can't simply give away the game for free, but should follow the term of the agreement to see if they can agree on an 'out' option.

Anyway, I feel that the Goat store isn't truly to blame for anything. His only real fault is that he has always been too enthousiastic about release dates and getting out information before the game is finished.
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by cube_b3 »

Okay so that settles it!

Same thing happend in Germany NG:DT wasn't satisfied with Last Hope publishers so they set up there own publishing company called HUCAST which deals primarily with publishing Dreamcast games. They have just published DUX developed by HUCAST as well and currently NG:DT are developing there unannounced next game which will be ported to Dreamcast by HUCAST.

We should do the same with Dreamcast USA, those who are contempt with Goat Store do Goat Store, those who aren't move on don't scrap the project. Besides Goat Store isn't that good they couldn't even get Play-Asia to stock their games.
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by Christuserloeser »

If you remember, redspotgames needed three attempts to get the CD pressing factory to produce bootable Dreamcast CDs of Last Hope (much like with GOAT's Inhabitants and Maquipai), thus causing a massive delay. Also HUCAST's approach with DUX is to produce a low price game, while redspotgames distributed Last Hope as a full price shmup. Now I do like my games cheap, but I am not sure if it really would have helped sales if it was sold with a lower price tag. By now it's sold out anyway and waiting for its second print run.

Wind & Water is being sold at a very reasonable €25 Euro price tag though, so maybe the differences between redspotgames and HUCAST in that department weren't as big as we might think. From what I can see, HUCAST is also trying to establish itself as a publisher and distributor for retro games too. :grin:



But now for something completely different - GOAT's Dan Loosen posted the following message at DCEmu.co.uk:
http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/showpo ... ostcount=4
GOAT Dan wrote:I know I'm a little late to reply to this, but I can answer some certain questions if anyone is interested.

I'll also say this much -- while that letter is very much the truth, there are some other issues that have nothing to do with programming itself that came up and caused us to be distracted from the goal of delivering quality games. These distractions if you will were caused by external factors that I can't get into, but were just as damaging if not more so than any problems with the actual programming. Usually, the programming and game issues can be overcome except for in a few cases where the games came to us so fatally flawed and the developers refused to change them that there was no option other than not releasing them.

To be blunt, a big part of the problem was that Gary and I entered into this to do it for one thing and one thing only -- to help the developers create awesome projects. Our naivety unfortunately meant that we gave the developers more trust than a normal business would have in retrospect, although I am still loathe to think about how we could have changed that.

Finally, there was an extremely important cog in the Dreamcast publishing sphere that did more to ensure the quality releases of games from us than perhaps anything else. Unfortunately, we lost that cog in 2007 and along with it went a lot of the enthusiasm Gary and I have for completing projects. This cog, whomever or whatever it may have been, was a huge supporter of what we were doing and kept encouraging us to continue, as well as lending invaluable help in the actual releases.

We still do have some releases that we are hoping will happen in the next year or two, and quite frankly they are some of the best games that we have seen made for the Dreamcast, so I'm excited by the possibility of releasing them still. But, between the loss of an important cog and the cold hard fact that this has to be run as a business, the encouragement to keep releasing new games isn't there as much.

I still want to do this, and I still want it to e great. But I can barely even describe what a rough time we've had since the announcement was made in 2006. If I had it all over to do again, we would have never gone through with that announcement and I apologize if it built up people more than it should have.

Again, I'll try checking back here, so if anyone has any questions please do feel free to ask. I'll answer whatever I can as honestly as I can :)
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by goatdan »

Hey everyone,

First off, huge apology. I just saw this now, as no one had alerted to me getting published here. Greatly sorry, as I don't mind being challenged on what I said, and I'm happy to reply. So, here is a long reply to hopefully answer some questions.

If you have any more, please PM me or email me and I will be happy to write back with as much honesty as I can have.
Quzar wrote:As I read it, he's basically saying "it's all the developer's fault for bringing us crap"?
No, I wasn't trying to say that. And I'll come back to this below...
DCDayDreamer wrote: That's a little harsh Quzar (I have to agree with your point of view though, even if it is brutal in it's honesty), the way I read it is that some of the games had flaws (crap would be a less diplomatic but generally correct assumption I guess), while others just didn't get finished due to developers dropping the projects or putting them aside for whatever reasons.

Just trawling through the GOAT news archive and found this list of games:

Adventure Game 1 [working title]
Age of the Beast: Special Edition
Amnesia: Psychic Spelunker [working title]
Blocks2: Master of Blocks
DCASTLE
Donk
Feet of Fury 2
Fightoon [working title]
Feuer Frei
GOAT Games
R3K [working title]
Yumi: Samurai Warrior

The only games from the list that would appear to be still in development are 'Age of the Beast' and 'Donk'.
Here's the thing. Of the above, for various reasons none of them ended up coming back to me in near finished form, with the exception of two. One of which was due to issues that were never fully resolved, the others were either dropped or developers opted not to work for us for a variety of reasons. The games that did come to us as beta release candidates -- none of which are on the above list -- were simply in both my and Gary's opinions not good games in their current form. And the developers for their part decided to look elsewhere to publish them instead of improve them to a point where they would be marketable which Gary and I were willing to work with them on.

GOAT Games is a different story altogether, and again, I'll come back to that in a few posts...
Personally, I think Dan is to blame (to blame for what exactly I'm not sure of), he was more than a little optimistic expecting what primarily is a homebrew community to develop commercial quality games within a given timeframe, a timeframe it seems, that Dan himself set. Wether it was the delivery promises of the developers, or the high standards Dan set on the projects, we'll probably never know exactly what went wrong with the intended releases at that time.
Yes, and I'll stand up and state this any time. Find me at next year's Midwest Gaming Classic and I'll tell you face to face -- I and we built an expectation that was simply undeliverable. Now, part of that is because Feet of Fury, Inhabitants and Maqiupai were all built on very tight development schedules and released quickly, and I had on rose colored glasses that this could occur for everything. The truth of the matter is, the largest reason for the delay / cancellation of many of these titles is because people moved on -- due to life, due to non-interest, whatever the case may be. And I'm not angry about it.

My failure was that *I should have never announced the titles until they were closer to completion*. That was stupid. And even now, where I can stand here and say that I fully expect another release in the near future, I don't want to talk about it until things are more nailed down. It could still not happen, and I don't want to build up hopes or anything like I did wrongly before. And for that, I greatly apologize.
Sceptical it may be, but I can't help thinking that the Dream ON debacle had a major effect on the GOAT store, it's outlook, and it's intended Dreamcast commercial releases.
While I will say that there is something that did have a major effect on my outlook on publishing Dreamcast commercial releases, and even though I will also say that if we sell out of Inhabitants and Maqiupai, we'll probably still have lost money on them, I can honestly say that the biggest honor of the entire publishing adventure came because of those releases. I can honestly say that it definitely didn't sour us on the process at all.

Maybe someday I'll be able to explain it all, but until there is no chance for us to publish any further games, now is not the time.
Christuserloeser wrote:I was so surprised to hear from GOAT at all, that I didn't really notice, but yeah: it's wrong to blame the developers for what essentially was the lack of communication. - I understand that things usually don't turn out exactly as planned and while he set a deadline for "2006/2007" he also said that his announcement should be taken with care, but in my opinion the main problem was and still is the lack of communication.
Again -- contact me if you want to hear from me. We haven't publicly said much beyond this letter because doing so is what got us into this whole mess.

The problem is that announcing a game where neither the developer or publisher will make enough money for them to ensure it's completion over real jobs, school, or whatever else just doesn't make sense. We were holding off announcements for concrete information (which you can consider a gold or damn near gold copy in hand when the announcement is made) and then you'll hear from us. I had just realized that our great announcement was creating a lot of confusion, so that is why I wrote this.
@Dan: What exactly is still being worked on ? What's with GOAT Games Vol.1 ? Many of the scene's most respected developers contributed to this project - including Sam Steele and Dan Potter. Sam Steele aka c99koder obviously did not receive any feedback whatsoever on his exclusive DCSquares update.
There are at least two games in the portfolio if you will that are still being actively developed, if not more. One of these games is getting very close to having announcements start... maybe in a month or two or three. IF and only IF the developer is ready for it.

GOAT Games goes something like this -- we got all of the submissions, and while some developers kept working on their games, it was almost like herding cats if you will, and the problem was while certain titles were spectacular (and those who developed those titles most definitely did get feedback at the time), we never had a proper menu system figured out, and by the time we finally basically stopped working on it, we hadn't anything but a few spectacular titles from the people working on it.

I'll say this here publicly and I'll be happy to back it up fully. If anyone wants to develop a menu system for GOAT Games and is serious about making it into a release, contact me personally NOT ON THIS THREAD and we'll talk. I would *love* to reboot this project. DCSquares is an amazing title, and Dziokozit is laugh out loud awesome. It can be done, but I need someone willing to really step up for the challenge.
And yeah, it's safe to assume that the DreamOn debacle had quite an impact on GOAT's plans. I also remember some DreamOn Contest entries that were never released.
That isn't true? There were I think four or five DreamOn Contest Entries. There was one winner and one runner up, which was Inhabitants and Maqiupai. Those were the two that were supposed to get published. The other games were not supposed to be commercial releases unless they kept working on them, and I believe no one did.
From the sounds of it, GOAT did receive some rough beta builds that were rejected (and some of which in turn got canceled), but I hope not without considering that the quality might still improve in most if not every aspects... ?
We work very closely with the developers to improve quality and get the absolute best games that we can from people. I think if you talk with anyone who has a published title with us, you'd hear that. Heck, I personally wrote the story for the second more difficult playthrough of Cool Herders, and both Gary and I playtest games like crazy.

You'll just have to believe me that the builds that we got were called "done" by the developer or developers, and they were definitely not done. When we suggested improvements, the developer told us to take it or they would go elsewhere. We opted not to publish the game or games, and to date no one else has either and I doubt you'll see them. They simply were not very good.
Quzar wrote:Actually that was my non-harsh version. Like you I originally turned it around too, with someone else doing it I can be confident I'm not JUST insane. It's extremely easy to blame the developers because a good deal of them are under NDAs for some of the information that gets disseminated (exact ties to sega, end of GD, some other secret things that I just don't know of). There is nothing to stop a flat out lie with no devs able to refute it (I'm not saying that IS what is happening).
The NDA that any developers are under wouldn't stop them from saying I was lying if I was. I'm not.

Sadly, the NDA came about thanks to some of the other sticky garbage that went on after we released the names of these 12 titles. Unless I'm mistaken, and I don't think I am (my records aren't handy), we were and am not under any sort of NDA with the four commercial releases. They became a necessary evil later thanks to stupid stuff that went on, which is what I don't want to discuss, as it would do absolutely no one any good.
FWIW I believe a lot of the 'devs suck' position, as I was going to be on Dream ON, but pulled out when the deadline was given (of course the deadline I was given was way way before the actual deadline of never). But at the same time, over at screamcast we were all working towards getting Toxic Waste/Grizzlies finished in time, then lost communication with Dan for some time and after some time it simply disintegrated.
To be fair, devs do not suck. At no time did I ever think that anyone who worked with us was unfair or stupid. Some third parties may have been, but the developers themselves just wanted to express themselves creatively. Some of them overpromised, but it was ultimately my fault for standing up and announcing the games when I darn well should have known not too.

As for communication, I don't know why that would have occurred. My email address is pretty well known, and I am also relatively known for checking my email multiple times a day. If I don't get back to someone who has written me twice and it has been more than a week, there is something wrong. And I am public enough through both the MGC and GOAT Store that you should be able to find another way to contact me, and I'll be happy to work out any communication issues.

Sometimes I will say that I am a little slow at checking out things that were sent to me, as I like to play enough to get a good opinion and feel of the titles before writing back anything uninformed, and if I have to be honest, I do too much in life with not enough time. Which is why I'm writing this past midnight even though I have to wake up early to go to a show tomorrow with the GOAT Store on one of my days off from my 'real job' this week.
Oh, and the "Adventure Game 1" was most likely (it's possible that this was unrelated) a game Dan apparently had started on in 98/99 as a ""Myst-like" adventure game -- sort of a point-and-click adventure with a strong storyline". He was looking for one of the goat games devs to pick it up and make it for the DC.
You did combine three here.

R3K was the title Gary and I started in 1996(?)ish, and gave full plans for publishing to a developer who was spectacular but wanted to do something more. A beta build of this exists which is phenomenal (although it does not score or do much yet, the basis is definitely there). I lost touch with the developer however, and the game was far from completion.

Amnesia: Psychic Spelunker was the game that I wanted to do and would still like to some day for something. A lot of ideas are written down for it. A developer had said they would do the engine for it when they completed a different project. It was never started beyond tons of notes and some graphic stuff that I know of.

Adventure Game 1 was the game that S+F stated that they would be doing. They told me before then that they weren't sure if they could do it, but I stupidly announced it anyway. My fault.
Christuserloeser wrote:...NDA? GOAT's ties to SEGA ? End of GD ? - I remember MetaFox and Dan Loosen talking about that... Never made any sense whatsoever.
I should have never talked about any of that stuff other than an NDA, because there really isn't too much to say about it.
It's really sad to hear that. I've been talking with Roel at SenileTeam a while back, and it seemed that they lost contact with Dan too.
I have talked with SenileTeam on and off. What I didn't do -- and maybe I should have or maybe what I did was fine -- what I didn't do was constantly email people and ask for updates. I think some people may have taken that as a loss of interest by me, which would be too bad although sadly, understandable. I just didn't do that because I felt it was their projects, and I didn't want to force them into anything they didn't want to do.

Some people need the extra push, and if you were any of the developers that wanted me to do that I apologize for not providing that.
No, that'd be Amnesia: Psychic Spelunker afaik. "Adventure Game 1" was a game that S+F Software were working on. S+F went on "indefinite hiatus" (S. Thompson) in 2007, their last sign of life was the following footage of their GOAT Games Vol.1 contribution Vexorex posted at Youtube in June that year:
Unless I'm mistaken, the game that S+F was going to do for GOAT Games was a helicopter game (can't remember the game offhand). I never remember seeing Vexorex ever. The helicopter game was cut (by S+F) from the GOAT Games line up due to lack of time to finish it.
GyroVorbis wrote:I have played his "build" of Grizzlies. It's a commercial quality game. It supported 4 players and had 10(?) levels. It felt like a finished product, and it was ready for whatever publishing, imo. That's really sad that it probably won't ever see the light of day.
I wonder if there was some sort of massive miscommunication here with part of the team regarding Grizzlies, as I specifically had someone write me (who had been involved with the project) write me and tell me that it would not be completed. If that is wrong, I'm more than happy to explore options with doing something with it.
Manoel wrote:All I can say is I don't have anything to blame Dan for. From the top of my head, I don't remember him lying or stretching the truth at any time. All I remember is that he tried a lot to help us.

I've lost communication with him for a while too, but it didn't affect my work. We could have made the whole game without talking to Dan, and then contacting him just to get the publishing work done. The schedule he gave us was very flexible and wasn't a problem.

If anything, I believe it was me who made Dan's work difficult, not the opposite.
You did nothing to make my work difficult. Seeing what you were able to do was nothing short of pure genius. I still would have to say it was the most technologically impressive demo that I ever saw for the system, and it had some real possibilities. I don't remember any loss in communication, I do remember though not emailing except for maybe once every three months or so just to check in. Thanks for the kind words, but again -- I'd do it all again with a moment's notice to help you achieve what you did.
Quzar wrote:I didn't say that he did lie, he never did to me or anyone else in the goat games thing (well, with the exception of things like deadlines that got pushed, but that's not really lying) that I know of.
To be fair to myself, I set the deadlines based on things others had told me and unfortunately had absolutely zero way to enforce them. Some groups got stuff to me right away. Others didn't, and the only choice was to push.... and push... and push the deadlines.

I wish I had the talent to program the 'cast and help out, but sadly I don't. I had to rely on others who weren't doing this full time to get things together, and with GOAT Games like I said -- it ended up like herding cats, as it was like trying to beg 8 or so different teams into getting stuff done at the same time. It simply didn't work.
When I say lost communication, I mean, "we've got the game ready, when can we send it to you for testing on the compilation".... "hello?". After a certain time with group projects the group falls apart without anything to do, and that's basically what happened with grizzlies, the game was ready, it was supposed to be published so it was never publically released, publisher disappeared so devs waited, and now the deal is pretty much dead.
Something wrong happened here, as the last build I had of Grizzlies was *no where* near complete, and I was told from someone involved (or who I thought was involved) that it wasn't going to be complete. I apologize greatly for any problem here, as this simply shouldn't have happened and I have no idea how it did.
Sweater Fish wrote:
BongDC wrote:It's always better to delay a release then to make people happy by releasing on time and it being uber crap.
But is it better to "delay" it indefinitely than to release something mostly completed tight but still use a bit more polish (as all games could to some degree)?

There's a blurry edge here and I think that's what Dan was dancing around on. To me it seems clear that he lost interest in the whole Dreamcast publishing concept (most likely for very good reasons) and so was able to find reasons for delaying games that otherwise could have been published or to ignore developers rather than working with them through the last push.
I wasn't trying to dance around that. Like I said, we didn't delay anything that was even close to publishable. We delayed a build or builds of a game or games (sorry for being vague, I have to hear) that were simply b-a-d. If we chose not to pick up a title, the developer could have taken it anywhere, and we told them we would be happy for them to do that. None of the games we turned down were ever published.

And we created long laundry lists of issues with them that needed addressing, and were flat out refused. These weren't small things, like "Could use a better introduction graphic" but huge things like "Game freezes if you press left on the menu screen."
What I'd like to know is what chaces there are for some of these abandoned games to get released eventually in some form? Wouldn't you guys rather see your games available to the community as binaries rather than letting them be forgotten? Especially things like Grizzlies or the GOAT Games comp that seem to have been mostly finished.
After this, if I don't hear from anyone who might be interested about doing up a menu for GOAT Games, I will personally ask the developers if they would be willing to release their games, as well as offering them something in lieu of actually having the game published. I've been meaning to try contacting that group again as a last ditch effort, I just need to get the email list off a computer that is temporarily in pieces as I shift a room around.
BongDC wrote:True, i think if it was possible for the developers to release their games, they should atleast provide the binaries in some form, as long as it doesn't break the NDA.
Doing so would not break the NDA. Actually, I don't believe GOAT Games is under NDA, although that is also on the other computer.
Quzar wrote:I think the biggest problem is that for the devs to release it would mean to effectively stop the goat game from ever happening. Since the project still, unless I'm missing something in this letter or any other thing, has not been officially cancelled, any of the devs choosing to release their game anyways would be 'to blame' for stopping goat games from being published.
I would definitely not blame anyone for releasing their code (except for myself), although I wouldn't mind making one last minute attempt at it. The games do deserve that.
GyroVorbis wrote:edit: But I will say that I purchased Feet of Fury, Inhabitants, and Maqiupai, and Grizzlies is definitely not going to get rejected for "quality" reasons if you guys still wanted to go through with the Goat Store.
Actually, at one point I remember pushing the Grizzlies team to potentially move to a straight individual release, although again, someone who I believe was associated with the project turned that down. If there is a complete version, I would be more than happy to take a look. From what I did get to play of it, I thought it was a GREAT game.
And it's hard for me to tell. Is Dan still publishing games even? The letter seemed rather vague.
The answer is yes and no. There is a lot more to it than this, but here's the gist... There are certain titles that were being worked on that I would still love to get published. For new stuff, I would need to talk with the developers before promising anything. I only feel comfortable working within certain parameters, and at this point due to circumstances, I can only do so much to make things happen.

As for publishing more games, if the game that I was playing a beta version of earlier tonight doesn't get released, I'm going to be spittin' mad, as it is spectacularly fun.

...

Wow, that was a lot of typing.

If there are any questions, please do contact me. I'm going to try PMing most people who replied in this thread over the next few days too, just to make sure I do clean up the loose ends. Sorry for not seeing this earlier!
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by goatdan »

Oh geez, missed some...
BongDC wrote:Not sure about the legalities, but if goat refused to publish the game regardless of the contract, wouldn't that constitute a breach of contract on goats part?
NDA stands for 'Non-Disclosure Agreement' and it basically says if I tell you something integral to our business, that you don't go running off and share it with someone else that could potentially damage us. For instance, let's say I told you something wacky like Sega was funding the project to help people remember the Sega brand, but they don't want anyone to know. (Hopefully obviously, totally untrue.) If you went to a different person and said, "Hey -- Sega is giving them money to talk up their brand!" and the other person put it online, then suddenly we lose the funding because of it... that is the sort of thing it is supposed to stop. It isn't a contract for the release of the game, which is separate.

And again, the Sega example above was completely false, although I'll admit I wish it was true.
bramenjam wrote:A NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) isn't the same as a contract for publishing. The NDA simply means that the Goat store and the developer will keep their mutual business secret. And if they decide not to continue together, the developer can still do whatever he wants with the game. If they signed a publishing agreement, then the developer can't simply give away the game for free, but should follow the term of the agreement to see if they can agree on an 'out' option.
Heh, that's exactly what I just said and is dead accurate.
Anyway, I feel that the Goat store isn't truly to blame for anything. His only real fault is that he has always been too enthousiastic about release dates and getting out information before the game is finished.
And again, you're absolutely right.
BILAL_XIA wrote:We should do the same with Dreamcast USA, those who are contempt with Goat Store do Goat Store, those who aren't move on don't scrap the project. Besides Goat Store isn't that good they couldn't even get Play-Asia to stock their games.
Agreed. Well, except the last part. When all of our games were published, Play-Asia was there, but we worked hand in hand with Lik-Sang developing a partnership with them that did some amazing stuff for us both. Unfortunately, they went out of business. People would be very surprised to hear the number of copies of Feet of Fury alone which were moved through them (which, unfortunately, I am not at liberty to discuss), but I can all but say that I think we did a good job, as I know for a fact that Feet of Fury outsold some not-so-popular Sega-pressed games.
Christuserloeser quotes me wrote:I know I'm a little late to reply to this, but I can answer some certain questions if anyone is interested.

I'll also say this much -- while that letter is very much the truth, there are some other issues that have nothing to do with programming itself that came up and caused us to be distracted from the goal of delivering quality games. These distractions if you will were caused by external factors that I can't get into, but were just as damaging if not more so than any problems with the actual programming. Usually, the programming and game issues can be overcome except for in a few cases where the games came to us so fatally flawed and the developers refused to change them that there was no option other than not releasing them.

To be blunt, a big part of the problem was that Gary and I entered into this to do it for one thing and one thing only -- to help the developers create awesome projects. Our naivety unfortunately meant that we gave the developers more trust than a normal business would have in retrospect, although I am still loathe to think about how we could have changed that.
To clarify this, I was trying to say that in a normal course of business, at the beginning a project would have been announced and a timetable would have been set with bonuses and penalties for making your project dates. With how we did things, this simply wasn't feasible. How could I punish a developer for missing a deadline? It wasn't like people would be making $25,000 from the release of the game, so there was no way to really pull this off. And again, it leads back to the core problem -- the announcement I made (and pushed many developers into) which created a deadline around the titles. That was simply unfair and stupid, and led to basically *every other problem* we have had, with the exception of one...
Finally, there was an extremely important cog in the Dreamcast publishing sphere that did more to ensure the quality releases of games from us than perhaps anything else. Unfortunately, we lost that cog in 2007 and along with it went a lot of the enthusiasm Gary and I have for completing projects. This cog, whomever or whatever it may have been, was a huge supporter of what we were doing and kept encouraging us to continue, as well as lending invaluable help in the actual releases.

We still do have some releases that we are hoping will happen in the next year or two, and quite frankly they are some of the best games that we have seen made for the Dreamcast, so I'm excited by the possibility of releasing them still. But, between the loss of an important cog and the cold hard fact that this has to be run as a business, the encouragement to keep releasing new games isn't there as much.

I still want to do this, and I still want it to e great. But I can barely even describe what a rough time we've had since the announcement was made in 2006. If I had it all over to do again, we would have never gone through with that announcement and I apologize if it built up people more than it should have.

Again, I'll try checking back here, so if anyone has any questions please do feel free to ask. I'll answer whatever I can as honestly as I can :)
That is all just worth seeing and saying again. Since the 2006 announcement, we came into the craziest set of circumstances that had nothing to do with any game developer or games themselves, and were all external factors. I had to make some decisions that were completely unfair for me to make due to various things going on that were related to this whole ordeal.

At about the same time, we lost what I referred to above as a cog, but what may have better been referred to as a guiding light moved on from us due to some also tragic circumstances.

The two of those things combined -- which had nothing to do with the games themselves -- made it so that the prospect of publishing games was much more difficult, and was also one of the most disappointing and mentally draining periods of my life.

However, this all matters little to the fact that we are just as excited to hopefully publish some things in the future that will carry the torch of what came before and lift it up even higher, as some completely amazing stuff has and is continuing to go on for this system that we all still love. The circumstances we went through made me and Gary both want to throw up our hands and forget the whole thing had happened, but these developers and the projects that are still ongoing are more than enough to make the whole thing worth it.

...and we're going to do our absolute damnedest to make a huge impression and get the word out about anything that we've got done when they are ready to go.

I for one can't wait.
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by cube_b3 »

So I guess the "atleast 2 game in development" are Rush Rush Rally Racing [R3] & Donk Samurai Duck.
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

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I won't say right now, as I don't have anything gold or darn close to gold in my hands to be ready to start promoting it. All I will say is that people may be very surprised to find out what we have, if it ever gets to the point that we can announce them :)
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by cube_b3 »

Just remember when you do get around to releasing them, make a bundle.

I know a few people who are intrested in buying those games but the price tag isn't to attractive, a bundle of all 4 giving even 20% off would be a great idea.
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

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goatdan wrote:I won't say right now, as I don't have anything gold or darn close to gold in my hands to be ready to start promoting it. All I will say is that people may be very surprised to find out what we have, if it ever gets to the point that we can announce them :)
And, as you may have seen today, the first of these two nearly completed Dreamcast games has been announced! Irides is going through final bug check and is available for pre-order through the GOAT Store web site right now! Check it out!

http://www.goatstore.com/

Within the next few weeks, I hope to have even more to say. There are some great announcements with Irides that have yet to be said too!
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by DCDayDreamer »

goatdan wrote:Within the next few weeks, I hope to have even more to say. There are some great announcements with Irides that have yet to be said too!
It's about time you came out of the shadows with some news :wink: .
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by impetus »

Very cool news, Dan!
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by cube_b3 »

I need goat publishing bundles!

Also try and add pictures for the Dreamcast stuff you are selling their is barely any description and when you don't even have a picture, it just means that the buyers are going to stay at eBay.
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by goatdan »

We're working on and will be doing product pictures for everything in the future. As for descriptions, they aren't huge but we've found that most collectors already know the game that they want, and don't even read the descriptions on the pages, so we didn't want to make them any longer. That, and it took weeks of time to get those all in there as is.

The people who buy on eBay are generally those just looking to play the games, not caring the condition they are in or anything else. We're trying to provide a place where they can be assured of a certain quality to the game, and a certain condition when they receive it. It's a bit of a different place to aim for, but I definitely appreciate the suggestion and within the next couple months I would expect to see swarms of item pictures start showing up :)
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by cube_b3 »

Don't forget the inde game bundles.

I understand that I don't need descriptions however when there isn't even a picture, description is a good substitute but since we will get the pictures problem solved.

No disrespect Dan but I diagree with your interpretation of eBay, since I have bought 40 Dreamcast games within the last 2 months alone from eBay several of which were present in your store only diffrences were the pirces for most were cheaper and I saw a pictures of every game.

Here is a quick example
Goat Store is selling Power Stone Disc Only for 45$
eBay Power Seller 100% feedback is selling it on buy it now for 28$ complete with box and manuals.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ORIGINAL-POWER-STON ... 286.c0.m14

I use eBay as a cheaper alternate to Gamestop/Gamecrazy and almost everyone I know who uses it, uses it in the same way.

I do all my contemporary games shopping such as 360/Wii on eBay as well, always buying brand new or sometimes like new games.

Significantly cheaper than any other store, free shipping and no GST.
If you are willing to invest the time and energy.

Goat store is a great little online store but eBay is eBay.
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by goatdan »

BILAL_XIA wrote:Don't forget the inde game bundles.
It's very hard to do public bundles for a variety of reasons. I can suggest signing up as a member, as when we do things like that they are almost always member exclusive things...
I understand that I don't need descriptions however when there isn't even a picture, description is a good substitute but since we will get the pictures problem solved.
You are the first person that I've heard say they want longer descriptions. And while the no photos thing is something we are going to improve, the fact is when you have over 20,000 items, it takes a while to take pictures of them all and it does add some other levels of complexity to it all. Like I said, I strongly believe that most people looking for a game know that title and don't need the picture, but we are working on getting them in there anyway, but it won't be for a while. It took me probably 500 hours (no kidding) to write all the descriptions that are up there of the items, so I have no intention of making them longer, sorry.
No disrespect Dan but I diagree with your interpretation of eBay, since I have bought 40 Dreamcast games within the last 2 months alone from eBay several of which were present in your store only diffrences were the pirces for most were cheaper and I saw a pictures of every game.

No disrespect taken, however

Here is a quick example
Goat Store is selling Power Stone Disc Only for 45$
eBay Power Seller 100% feedback is selling it on buy it now for 28$ complete with box and manuals.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ORIGINAL-POWER-STON ... 286.c0.m14

I use eBay as a cheaper alternate to Gamestop/Gamecrazy and almost everyone I know who uses it, uses it in the same way.
No, that's actually a perfect example of what we feel is the difference -- you picked Power Stone, which if you look is listed on our site as Power Stone [All*Stars]. In other words, that is the Sega All*Stars packaging version of the game. Power Stone in the Sega All*Stars packaging may very well be the rarest full retail release (skipping over Sonic Adventure LE since that wasn't actually regular retail) for the console in the US. That's why the price is that high. Looking at eBay quickly, there is not one seller with an open or closed auction that was selling a copy of Power Stone in the All*Stars packaging. About half of the pictures are stock, so they might have been, but who knows?

I just checked our backend, and the last time we had a regular copy of Power Stone in stock, with good box and good instructions it sold for $16. In which case, even after you paid shipping, you would save about $7.00 from the auction you linked too. However, there have been a few auctions that closed for a buck or two cheaper than $21 that included shipping.

There is a similar example with NFL 2K. We have it for $0.50 disc only or $1.00 complete... Or $8.00 for the complete Not For Resale version that came only with the Sega Sports consoles and is considerably harder to find. We have all three examples in stock, and if you were looking for the variation you can ensure you'll get it. As I've collected a full Dreamcast collection (with all variations), I can say that it has been very difficult to find anyone who knows anything about the variations or labels them correctly.

We've built the store off of catering to people who collect, and to many of them variations are very important. Based on what you've said, at this point at least variations are not important to you (which is totally fine), so buying from a store that stocks a ton of variations like we do may mean that certain games are more expensive, even sometimes FAR more expensive than eBay or elsewhere. We try to make the lower variations equal the lower costs on other sites though.

...also, most eBay sellers don't have 20,000+ items in stock, so if you're looking get a huge variety of stuff, there is a very good chance that we will be the cheaper alternative if you purchase them all at the same time.

:) I'm not saying we're perfect by any means, but there is a method to our madness ;)
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by cube_b3 »

I am already registered and am intrested in all the Goat published games but I didn't buy them back in the day cause I wasn't in America now that I am I could use a Goat Publishing Bundle, I hope I am not the only one.

To celebrate the release of Irides you could take a page out of RedSpotGames book and make a Goat Publishing Dreamcast bundled with Goat Publishing games I would consider buying the lot even if it was priced at 150$.

Bundles do sell more than solo items when I hit ebay, I always end up buying a Dreamcast with the games I am intrested that is why I have 8 Dreamcasts, over 20 controllers, uncountable VMU's and a lot of handy accessories like microphones and keyboards.

It is fun to get more for less even when you don't need all of it my last auction at ebay included Marvel Vs Capcom 2, Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike, Capcom Vs Snk. I got it for 100$ free shipping each game here can be sold individually at ebay for a maximum of 50$ and then the DC can be sold for 20$.
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I don't really need the longer descriptions they would just be a nich touch and 500 hours isn't all that long given that you have 20,000+ inventory it boils down to only a few minutes per item (I am not doing math just approximating).

I know what I want, I know the name and everything but I am a very cautious buyer because it is hard earned money being wasted on games as it is (videogame collectors are a niche very few people understand the value of owning multiple units of Dreamcast and accessories), so even though I know what I want, I need to see it before I buy it make sure it is actually that thing.

I am sure there are several like me hopefully we'll have the pictures up and I plan on giving you atleast 200$ this fall :D.
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Very impressive Danny, very impressive indeed. You have definetly boosted GOAT's image in my eyes.

However just for the sake of argument/amusement as a collector of Dreamcast games I would love to have an All Star release of Power Stone in my collection. I always prefer an all star release over the white/black label releases however when dealing with hardcore collectors that you are targeting we won't buy anything that isn't complete.

If I had a chance to get a white label complete powerstone for 16$ and an all-stars powerstone for 45$, given the collector I am and the collectors I am associated with we'd be going for the white label anyday however if you had a complete powerstone allstars then it would be a different story.
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Re: GOAT Publishing: An Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community

Post by goatdan »

BILAL_XIA wrote:I am already registered and am intrested in all the Goat published games but I didn't buy them back in the day cause I wasn't in America now that I am I could use a Goat Publishing Bundle, I hope I am not the only one.

To celebrate the release of Irides you could take a page out of RedSpotGames book and make a Goat Publishing Dreamcast bundled with Goat Publishing games I would consider buying the lot even if it was priced at 150$.
We've actually done very similar things in the past, so I wouldn't be surprised to see something like that happen. However, unlike the other groups that have released Dreamcast items, we also happen to be one of the largest Dreamcast dealers online (type 'Dreamcast store' in Google and see who pops up first ;) ) so it gives us more freedom to work with various packages. We'll see how it all shakes out later :)
I don't really need the longer descriptions they would just be a nich touch and 500 hours isn't all that long given that you have 20,000+ inventory it boils down to only a few minutes per item (I am not doing math just approximating).
While that is true when it is looked at that way, the truth is the GOAT Store is not my full time job. It is something I do for fun because I enjoy the gaming scene a lot. Gary and I manage to both hold regular full time jobs, as well as run the GOAT Store and organize the yearly Midwest Gaming Classic. And publish a few random Dreamcast games too! So, if I did this 40 hours a week, I'd be all about adding tons of stuff. But with a regular 40 hour / week job, 10 hours of commuting to that job (*sigh*), and making packages at least a couple times a week for a couple hours a time, my time gets pretty limited pretty quickly, unfortunately.
I know what I want, I know the name and everything but I am a very cautious buyer because it is hard earned money being wasted on games as it is (videogame collectors are a niche very few people understand the value of owning multiple units of Dreamcast and accessories), so even though I know what I want, I need to see it before I buy it make sure it is actually that thing.

I am sure there are several like me hopefully we'll have the pictures up and I plan on giving you atleast 200$ this fall :D.
Nope, and that's very true and we totally recognize that. Gary and I have been doing a lot of talking about this recently as we add and upgrade things with the site, and I would go as far as to say that I would expect the upgrades to be done with the Dreamcast items before everything else because of a few reasons, namely I own a full collection of all variations, so we can take all the pictures of everything and get them in there. And it is our most popular category... which reminds me, we've got over $2000 in DC shipments alone coming in the next few weeks :)
However just for the sake of argument/amusement as a collector of Dreamcast games I would love to have an All Star release of Power Stone in my collection. I always prefer an all star release over the white/black label releases however when dealing with hardcore collectors that you are targeting we won't buy anything that isn't complete.

If I had a chance to get a white label complete powerstone for 16$ and an all-stars powerstone for 45$, given the collector I am and the collectors I am associated with we'd be going for the white label anyday however if you had a complete powerstone allstars then it would be a different story.
While I totally know what you're saying, part of the reason for it is that we have found with the Sega All*Stars releases (I also prefer them personally, always bought them when I could) is that stores like GameStop in the US would separate the disc apart from the case and would just synch up whatever in whatever when they sold stuff. So, we actually got this particular copy in a 'normal' release of Power Stone and de-coupled it from it. Anyway, this makes it somewhat likely that you might end up with an All Stars case but the wrong disc for the inside. Also, I believe although I have not completely confirmed this that not all discs for certain releases had the Sega All Stars logo on them -- in other words if Power Stone had a run of 1000 All Stars label variations, they might have used 500 regular copies of Power Stone they had sitting around, and then only pressed 500 more of the All Stars variation to stick in the final ones.

Because of these factors, it makes the All*Stars disc variation of Power Stone very, very rare. When I was hunting for it, it took me over two months of looking everywhere to find one, and it took me FAR overpaying a package on eBay just to get it. And while it is nice to have the full package (I do now!), I would have gladly paid $45 before that point to even partially complete it. We've never had it in stock yet, but if I had a complete copy I would assume it would be priced at an even higher price point, probably around $70 -- with really rare games like this, it's very hard to determine a really fair price. Having said that, I would have gladly paid $70 for my copy... as it was, I think I paid about $100 for it!

Remember -- Gary and I were and are collectors first, and we started the GOAT Store because it was darn near impossible to understand exactly what we were paying for from places and what we would receive exactly, and we wanted to have people understand exactly what they were selling. Not everything works for everyone, but we have all the options. And, I have to say that I would venture to guess that I have one of the largest Dreamcast collections in the world including a bunch of weird and lucky things I've run across throughout my collecting... So, for the most part, we do know what we're talking about and can back it up. If I couldn't, then I shouldn't be in business!

Also, in the near future (I literally had emailed Gary with this yesterday), expect to see new Dreamcast categories on our site featuring import games, demo discs and collectibles! Like I said, it's all getting better, and we're doing a massive transformation of the site that started now about 5 months ago that we're about halfway through, but we're really happy with where it is going!
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