DCDayDreamer wrote:The way I see it (from my ignorant perspective of course), there is information out there, that information (no matter how sporadic) might possibly be a millstone around the neck for GOAT, and GOAT Store Publishing in particular. Take a look at the
Radium site for example, the announcement about the GOAT release is still there.
I'm not trying to say that there's a really great way of dealing with this, but I do think that with some sort of acknowledgment a possible resolution could come about. There really isn't any need to go into personal details as to why a particular game didn't surface, perhaps just a simple 'cancelled' would work, but I'd be more inclined to expand on that a little bit, such as 'cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances' or something along those lines.
First off, for the record I didn't call
you ignorant, I called your statement of 'picking something and promoting it' to be ignorant of how much we do promote on a regular basis.
Anyway, with regards to this the problem is that we don't own Radium-Game, and didn't make that announcement. In fact, this is the announcement I was referring to earlier where they announced the game was coming out and then told us they had posted it. We tried getting in contact with them multiple times over this, and got nada about it.
And I do agree with what you're saying about the millstone, I intend on having information on the GSP site that explains what happened to the games that we didn't release so that people know. In relatively general terms, but still something there. It's not like we can hide from it. Although I don't intend to define it much more than that, unless the developer themselves want to. Truthfully, *every* game was canceled due to unforeseen circumstances of one type or another, and the last thing I want to do is announce that a game was canceled "Due to quality concerns" or something like that, and potentially hurt a developer.
I'm okay with discussing Radium openly like this only because of how far both Gary and I feel we were getting taken for a ride there -- and how the release itself was even announced without our knowledge. That's crossing some sort of line, and I feel like if they are saying we're doing it, I can then say the real reason we're not.
Seriously though, what is important, is the people who believed in GOAT Store Publishing, the ones that expected delivery at some point after the announcements. With no delivery and GOAT being silent for some time, people just lost faith I guess.
No, I totally get this. And, I assume that at one point you believed in our ability to do this too. I'm just as sorry as anyone else that we couldn't. We were silent only because we were in this very weird place of not having much of anything to say -- games were for the most part still being worked on, but we didn't have much interesting to post on them. I didn't want to make a bunch of news posts about the games as they got canceled, and unfortunately due to how everything shook out, we didn't have any real positive news either.
There's a bit of contradiction here, the open letter from 2008 did have some information in it (albeit a bit random).
The open letter didn't really go down that well, here's a quote from it:
The future side of the equation was perhaps the most interesting. In 2006, we announced 12 titles that were in development which we hoped to release within the year. However, despite our optimistic view, the work done by our independent developers is not like a large firm where developers clock in and out for the workday; our independent developers are just that and work, usually at their home, on their own schedule. We do not have any way to ensure that a game is completed or released and external factors in many cases shifted the attention of the developers away from what they had planned.
In other cases, occasionally developers would bring us games that had fatal flaws -- the gameplay was'nt developed well, the game didn't feel 'complete', the controls didn't work -- whatever it was, we decided with our first release that if we didn't have 100% faith in the games we were releasing, we wouldn't publish games just to dupe the public into purchasing a game that wasn't exceptional. Even though this has limited releases, we genuinely believe all of our releases have all been held to a high standard of design and gameplay.
You'll probably take this as an insult again, but here goes anyway.
I really think you shouldn't have worded the letter like that, you clearly lay the blame on the developers for the cancellation of the titles. Whilst it may be true that for certain reasons the developers stopped working on the projects, on the surface you've randomly criticized the games (and the developers themselves). This leads me back to my first reply above about how acknowledgment of the project(s) at GOAT Store Publishing (without any personal details) might work. There is of course two sides to acknowledgment, a cancelled game could be viewed as 'it's probably crap because it didn't get published', but on the other hand it could viewed as 'it must have had something about it or they wouldn't have announced it'.
No, I don't take this as an insult at all. The reason that the letter was worded like this was specifically because of the strange relationship that we suddenly had with Karma Games with the Radium ordeal, after they announced that we were publishing the game themselves (before, I might add, a contract had even been really discussed). They actually had about 10 games they wanted to publish -- but when we brought them the concerns about the game quality, they walked away. I didn't want them to suddenly crop back up and say that we were lying about the development.
In other cases, I saw nearly complete copies of titles, and we came up with a list of little things that weren't quite right, and we sent them back, and the developers basically told us that if we didn't want to publish it as is, they would find someone else. Never in those cases were the things that we found major, but they were issues that the game had that were either serious hindrances to gameplay or were things that brought everything to a halt.
Another example of this that I feel comfortable in talking with is with Inhabitants, we had an issue where if you played the game for more than an hour straight, the tiles would get all garbled. For the longest time, no one could find the issue. S+F originally came to us and just said that they were comfortable being done with it and saying, "Don't play it more than an hour at a time." We weren't. They found and fixed the issue, and everyone was much happier with the results.
I won't deny in any way that the open letter didn't go over as well to the community as we had hoped, but I also never heard from any developers who were working on a title for us that felt that they were slighted by us in it. 90% of the games never got to the point for us to see issues.
There is also one thing that I forgot to mention earlier, there are certain circles that go through hell and high water to track down cancelled games (beta versions etc.), although the indie game collectors are fewer, it might be something to think about. I'm not suggesting downloads from GOAT by the way, but if the information is there (game title and developer is enough) it might generate a bit of interest for the site. Who knows?, if a developer suddenly got an email about their game via information from GOAT, it might make the developer's day.
I *do* intend to have the information in the FAQs on the new GOAT Store Publishing site about any and all canceled games, and my intention is to name the title and developer. I also intend to state that these were projects we had been working on, but for whatever reason we do not feel at this time we will be releasing, although that may change.
What do I want from you? hmmm, let me see now...
How about a signed copy of Feet of Fury?
I wouldn't have posted about the re-launch of Goat Store Publishing at DCEvo if I didn't accept GOAT (not that DCEvo gets many visitors these days, so don't expect hordes of hits from there).
I don't know how many signed copies I have left
Seriously though, I really do appreciate the help and the criticism when it is done in a way like this where I can reply openly to it. It's why I'm here.
I learned a LONG time ago that in business, it is always better to be silent and let other people post things about what you're up to. I'm here because I'm still a fan.
I understand where you are coming from with respecting the developers, but the DCASTLE announcement is a part of GOAT Store's history, it certainly wouldn't hurt to drop Heinrich an email to see his opinion on the matter.
Well, perhaps I'll see what I can do in the near future.
Well, in a nutshell, the historical facts so far are GOAT pioneered Dreamcast independent commercial games and continued with releases up to 2009.
Yes, although we didn't deliver more often then we did. That's the goal that we're hoping to change in the future.
More than one chance?, surely you must realize by now I'm not typing all these replies just to increase my post count.
Maybe it's time I started head-butting the wall here?.
No, I'm glad you are -- but you had before said you were walking away, and your anger made me believe that it didn't really matter what I said that you were just going to believe that I was a buffoon. I hope you don't -- I don't feel that way about you or anyone else posting in the thread.