Delay in release...

[Dreamor]

First time I've been able to get onto FH today, but thought I'd copy the post that was put on by our Dev's earlier today

It’s been about three years since we originally started thinking about making Jumpgate Evolution and in those three years many of you have been following the game’s progress quite closely. You’ve watched the project grow and gain momentum as it has become what it is today. Getting the game complete and into your hands is the point we’re really eager to get to and we strive each week to get to where we can share our adventures in space together.

One of the things we’ve always promised is that we would not release an unfinished product, nor would we subject players to a sub-par experience. The worst situation for a developer is that our game does not meet the expectations of our fans. This is constantly weighed against the need and desire to release the game and let our dedicated community play the game as soon as possible. I know that many of you have seen the targeted June release date and that has generated significant excitement. As with all game development projects, we constantly have to evaluate the quality of the product against anticipation. The question always asked among ourselves, does what we have meet the expectations of the players? Is what we have a good game?

With that, let me be up front about the current state of the game from where we stand. Jumpgate Evolution is nearly feature complete, but since entering the Friends & Family phase of testing we’ve been able to bring new eyes onto the game and get solid, crucial feedback from actual players and fans. Based on these results, it is clear that the product needs more time to meet its objectives. As an example, we have received and read lots of feedback regarding the instanced and public PvP systems. The feedback has been vital in helping us polish and improve this core feature of the game. We take a lot of time in digesting and considering what people say and take feedback seriously. Given that situation I can tell you that we would rather delay the release, than let you down by releasing an unfinished product. We will continue development past June while extending the test schedules and respond to the results of those tests.

Nowadays, Massively Multiplayer Online Games have a highly competitive market and a less-than-stellar release can be the end of a title before it starts. Our passion for this game means we want to release it in a state that is complete. You have raised the bar for us and we feel a great responsibility to reach that bar and exceed it. The only thing worse than waiting is being rewarded with a product that does not live up to its potential. We’ve always had one goal while developing this game which we’ve stated over and over. That goal is to make a great, and most of all fun, space combat game. Until we, and you, are happy that the game fully meets all of those requirements we won’t release it.

We understand news of this delay is disappointing. The good news is that our immediate goal is to get the game ready for larger groups of people as we get into wider testing. This means that more people will have more time to give us the vital feedback we will need to improve the game. Once we've established our road map for the next few months we'll share with you when the revised release date is.

Thanks for your patience and continued support.

See you in space!

Scott Brown.

Trust me when I say this is for the best and that the game will be all the better for release

 

[Merket]

small "update" to this. interesting with some actual beta numbers.

Jumpgate Evolution: why it was delayed, how it looks now - Ars Technica

 

[old.Osy]

Duke Nukem was also released when it was done.

*runs*

Now seriously, if they weren't happy with it, that's fine, better to have an ironed product.

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

On the release of any MMO, the people bringing the product to market have precisely one chance to impress people. Polished is better than Make-Do.

Within that 'One Chance', there is probably a 4-8 hour window where the player will decide if they are impressed enough or not to continue over all, with subsequent gameplay over the first month affecting that.

Ooh Ahh factor is a massive must. I approve of treating that factor as an important factor.

 

[Ctuchik]

On the release of any MMO, the people bringing the product to market have precisely one chance to impress people. Polished is better than Make-Do.

Within that 'One Chance', there is probably a 4-8 hour window where the player will decide if they are impressed enough or not to continue over all, with subsequent gameplay over the first month affecting that.

Ooh Ahh factor is a massive must. I approve of treating that factor as an important factor.

thats really not true tho. WoW failed worse then AoC did and at release and look at that game now, 11+ million subs.

but i think thats because WoW is a nobrain game that lets addons play the game for the players rather then the players doing it.

wonder how big WoW would end up being if they banned all addons

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

thats really not true tho. WoW failed worse then AoC did and at release and look at that game now, 11+ million subs.

Heh... no.

Compared to the rest of the market at the time, WoW was super-polished. I was in it from closed beta. The people that noticed most of the flaws after launch were those that power-pushed their way to cap level really fast then discovered the issues with game content while most people were ambling their way up the levels.

This type of player is not the bulk of the game-playing population. While never stunningly original, WoW scored with an excellent intuitive, highly customisable interface, and had a very high fun factor. Plenty to do, plenty of fluff and it would run on a ZX80.

Nowadays, with WoW in its more polished state, all games, like it or not, are compared to WoW and its harder to impress on that first time out of the box.
There is also a much more competitive market. Many people make their decision based on beta access, without even trying the full launch version, which isn't entirely fair but is a definate perception. Look at the furor surrounding something as trivial as GOA's problems at WAR open beta launch.

The bar has been raised and WoW plays an important factor in that regardless of how people want to play it down for whatever reason. A game doesn't have to 'beat' WoW, it just has to deliver in terms of reasonable stability and good quality starter content. After that initial period it then has to follow through, but the developers have a very short breathing space to address delayed/larger issues (which is where Warhammer devs failed big time, but thats another story).

AoC was nowhere near WoW in terms of content or stability at initial release. It is exceedingly misleading to try and compare the two. It wins on 'pretty' factor of course.

Very few games recover from a poor launch. Holding back, if a company can afford to do it, is absolutely the way to do it.

 

[Bahumat]

Someone at work used to play the first Jumpgate. He was sent an email saying if he kept his account open, he'd be guaranteed a Jumpgate Evolution Beta key. That was about a year ago or something. He thinks they have probably delayed it to squeeze out some more money from people. I take it with a pinch of salt, but it does make you worry when people only keep their subs open (and dont actually play) in the hope of getting this beta key.

 

[Ctuchik]

Heh... no.

Compared to the rest of the market at the time, WoW was super-polished.

so you think that those Error #134 to 258 every 20 minutes were evidence of a polished game? not to mention the random BSOD's or corrupted game data wich required a complete reinstall because the file that got corrupted were to big for the repair tool to fix (and still cant fix)

wich took them the better part of the first year to actually get rid of to a point where it was tolerable.

yes, without those crashes the game would have been concidered polished, but now those were there so you really cant say it was.

and dont come blaming addons here because i didnt use any what so ever for the first 2 years

 

[Ctuchik]

Someone at work used to play the first Jumpgate. He was sent an email saying if he kept his account open, he'd be guaranteed a Jumpgate Evolution Beta key. That was about a year ago or something. He thinks they have probably delayed it to squeeze out some more money from people. I take it with a pinch of salt, but it does make you worry when people only keep their subs open (and dont actually play) in the hope of getting this beta key.

its what i do with my NCsoft games i keep the ones i see failing open so i can get beta and preorder keys for their next games

 

[Dreamor]

WoW isn't the holy grail everyone makes it out to be, there PVP system still isn't perfect and it took them a long time for anything reasonable to appear, they patched and patched again until they got something that worked. The other thing is WoW was in Development a long time, Blizz even admit that now for them to make a MMO it would take years, because people have been asking for another MMO (Diablo/Starcraft Online or similar.) One thing Blizz do well is add extra content, but if you played WoW @ Beta and release it was merely a shell compared to what it is now. Agree its only natural games are compared to WoW, but in the Asian Market... WoW is nothing, its barely on there radar. NHN and CCR have bigger games in Korea/China/Japan than WoW has globally. In fact NHN are such a huge contender for Blizz in Asia they outsource a lot of there translations and server support to them.

JGC Sub's, its really up to NetDevil. Codemasters has almost no say over what they do to keep the revenue stream running but I doubt its 100% to 'squeeze' money out of people, Gazillion (who bought NetDevil) are huge and not shy of flashing there money about (heck, they bought the teams Segways to move around the buildings... crazy.) The Beta for this hasn't started (its in Friends and Family/late Alpha) so tell your friend to check closer the beta time for an email on access, if nothing your welcome to PM me and I can check.

 

[Old Nicodemus]

No game has been perfect at release in the MMO market. What Roo says about the first impression though is extremely important. WoW, while not perfect, was none the less a much more polished product than WAR or EvE were. The one thing that WoW did do well though was release a game that worked and was fun and then added things to it. Yes some people had problems with BSOD and error messages but that was mainly due to gfx card related problems. I never had a problem with gfx card related problems until I played WAR where I suffered horribly along with many others. So that argument can be used for any game. Yes it might be shoddy programming for gfx cards but with the number of different trpes of gfx cards out there you will inveriably have problems.

Now the real king of content output would the be EQ, WoW does a goodly amount of content additions but they tend to be at irregular intervals. EQ on the other hand have content updates very regularly. This would be something that all other games could and should learn from. I know that more does not often mean better, but the latest WoW content updates have been very lackluster in comparison.

Back to the original subject though, I rather prefer that a game is delayed a bit to flesh it out and make it complete. AoC was delayed for a while yet was still unfinished. WAR could actually have done with 6 months more proper beta testing so that release would have been a lot better product than it currently is. EvE suffered from also having to release and still use it's first 6 months as proper beta testing.

The thing that annoys players more than anything else is to pay to test something, and that is a first impression that kills a game for people.

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

so you think that those Error #134 to 258 every 20 minutes were evidence of a polished game? not to mention the random BSOD's or corrupted game data wich required a complete reinstall because the file that got corrupted were to big for the repair tool to fix (and still cant fix)

wich took them the better part of the first year to actually get rid of to a point where it was tolerable.

yes, without those crashes the game would have been concidered polished, but now those were there so you really cant say it was.

and dont come blaming addons here because i didnt use any what so ever for the first 2 years

Dude, install games on PCs, not your Breville toaster
It was comparitively polished. Sure, I agree some users had issues. I do remember some bizarreness... but it wasn't the norm. Very few people I know had major problems running WoW from launch.

----

I also agree that WoW is not the be-all-and-end-all and it must get very tiremsome for other MMO companies to endlessly read/hear about WoW. I believe WoW started to die with WotLK though its so huge in the marketplace the outcome of that will not be seen for some time to come. I believe WoW's day to be over but it will take a long time to completely die off back to just hard core players and Koreans.

Regardless. When you drop an MMO on the market currently, WoW is where most of the customer base is lurking and need to be lured away from with shiny spangliness. Eve has hard core players but not much in the way of a casual base - it is not a casual-friendly game (played it long enough to know) and the rest of the market seems to be spread out amongst some fairly average (or flawed) games.

Where Jumpgate fits in is entirely up to the Devs and how ruthless the company is willing to be about bringing it properly to market.

I still firmly believe that the opening hours of the game are completely crucial. I mentioned this at WAR launch but it was probably lost in amongst the massive amount of ranting about beta keys and such.

Oddly enough, after the first month, most people didn't renew. Just maybe, there's something in what I'm saying.

Going on tour with Captain Obvious for a moment...

Ergonomic well designed interface is a must. Blizzard (and other companies) cheat by making it customisable but at its heart, WoW has an excellent interface. I dumped Star Wars Galaxies like a hot rock because the interface I felt was appalling. It was so off-putting to me I had no interest in exploring the game. If it clunks dump it or shout at lazy devs until they do something about it. Crack that whip.

Shiny. The shiny factor is an asbolute must. There must be Oooh and Aaah. Put it in at the start, not in the end game that maybe 10% of the population might see.

Humour. Blizzard dropped in bucketloads. Where I disagree with what they did is the way it undermined the feel of the game world. Humour can be gritty or silly, its up to the Jumpgate designers to decide. This is a cheap and easy way to get people on your side.

Music and sound. This, I cannot overstate enough and is a real bugbear of mine. Music is the subconcious driver that influences mood and as such can have a huge influence on the player's experience in the first few hours. Find the best music thats been created for the game and put it in the opening segments of the game. Be ruthless. If Joe Session has made 30 hours of music for the game put the best bits in the first part of the game. Make sure the theme tune is awesome. See Eve Apocrypha for details on how to do this. No, I didn't say copy it
Most games have tooth-gnashingly average music. WAR has mostly dreadful music. WoW has good music here and there. Eve has generally excellent music (and is actually the only MMO I know of where people will by choice at times listen to the in-game stuff rather than their MP3 collection).


<re-reads his post>

Bit more than I intended to write (no change there). I've been on the lookout for a decent sci fi MMO for years. Eve didn't cut it and I gave it long enough.

Hmm, lunchbreak at work. Ah well, back to the grind.

 

[Dreamor]

I don't disagree with you Roo, I just think (for a lot of MMOs) there has always been this... "release it, patch it after" mentality and its something I know the bosses up top would love to do, but thankfully we have a very understanding and clued up Director who aims for 10/10 and not content with a 6/10 game, which happens so very often... even outside of our department.

The nature of the beast is, that MMOs have to add extra content to keep people paying for the game, but at the same time its almost impossible to repeat every action a player does, so patches get made almost before any general release happens, which is kind of bad in itself. There are tonnes and tonnes of patches that go on behind the scenes that nobody knows about, its a sorry state for any publisher/developer to be in.

Still, I believe the JGE delay was a must, it needed to be done and I generally think people will be more thankful for it.

Oh and on the subject of games companys are a lot envy for Blizzard, the smaller user based ones are... but WoW hasn't got the active accounts it says, trust me when I say we've seen the stats and LOTRO is 2nd to WoW... and for us to get that we aren't that far behind Blizz... any graphs you've seen with like 10-15 million accounts, thats created and includes trial stuff... means nothing when you talk about revenue.

 

[Ctuchik]

I don't disagree with you Roo, I just think (for a lot of MMOs) there has always been this... "release it, patch it after" mentality and its something I know the bosses up top would love to do, but thankfully we have a very understanding and clued up Director who aims for 10/10 and not content with a 6/10 game, which happens so very often... even outside of our department.

but the problem is that you will probably never end up with a 10/10 game, no matter how hard you try.

atleast not within a feasable timeframe. there ARE other sci-fi mmo's comming out in the near future, and being second in any such competition will always hurt, 10/10 game or not.

sure, if theres actual game breaking bugs that needs to be sorted then by all means go nuts. but if were talking typo corrections and the likes then its probably more counterproductive to hold back the release.

make it as good as possible but dont delay because you have the cash to do so. to many good games have pushed their release to many times and found a good portion of their potential playarbase end up in another game.

if nothing else theres always the option of content patches if you really wanna add something, and that is also a good source of cheese points from the subscribers if they think its "free expansions"

but anyway, dont delay the release "just because" as it generally isnt really doing much good in the end. i mean, the hype can't go on forever

 

[Ctuchik]

I believe WoW started to die with WotLK though its so huge in the marketplace the outcome of that will not be seen for some time to come. I believe WoW's day to be over but it will take a long time to completely die off back to just hard core players and Koreans.

oh yes, WoW is absolutely on the way down. vanilla WoW was awesome, TBC added some cool stuff but most of it were boring grinds and WOTLK totally killed what challenge were left. and i expect their next expansion to do even worse unless they actually see it comming.

although this still look disturbingly healthy

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html