1623

Still too much for a beta

1624

depends on your amount of disposable income, how curious you are and if you want to support the kerberos guys.

1625

Mmmh I might pick this up after all. Perhaps.

1626

$19.99 on Steam as a daily deal today. Almost a beta worthy price . . .

1627

That’s fifteen dollars too high. Guess I’ll wait til the next sale when it’ll hit five bucks.

1628

It’s incredibly irresponsible of them to push their product as a featured deal on a completed game when they admit that it’s still not ready to be a retail product.

1629

Yeah, I’m surprised they are doing this and surprised Valve is going along with it. They already violated the good faith of consumers by releasing a woeful product. Now they are just compounding the earlier sin with this sale.

1630

It’s like lasing a stick of dynamite!

1631

Yeah I’m not sure what their angle here is. If they wanted to good faith this ish they should probably keep it off the sale page and have a prominent warning.

1632

From what I gather on the official boards Kerberos is making it sound like they have no control over anything and are passing everything off on Paradox. The release date, etc. There have also been people who’ve claimed that Steam has full control over price (and what the publisher/developer gets), but I’m not convinced of that.

1633

And that may even be true, which means the “they” in question is Paradox. But, really, this should be being sold without a disclaimer at all, let alone put on sale.

1634

Paradox isn’t EA, so I have a hard time believing that myself. I mean, can you think of any developers who have complained about them as a pub?

Considering just how open they are to criticism and debate on their forums and how many indies have signed on with them, it’s hard to believe that they’d be disengaged from their third party dev teams.

1635

There is a dev post (last post on the linked page) on the Kerberos boards specifically saying they had no control over the release date or pricing.

There are many benefits to working with a publisher, but as the developer you lose control of some important issues. On SotS II, for example, we do NOT control the following things:

– the date of product releases.

– the sites of distribution, localization or sale of the products, or how it bundled with its own expansions.

– the base price of the game and its DLC’s.

– the marketing, promotion, or major announcements: when the public is first told a game is in development, when a game has “gone gold”, when a game will be released, at what trade shows or events the game will be represented or promoted, etc. The Kerberos fanboys sure are willing to use statements like this to defend Kerberos, which is how I came across this older post (i.e. last week) in the first place.

– refunds, discounts, sale prices or dates when the game will be available for lower prices

These issues are all controlled by the publisher, Paradox Interactive, or by individual distributors which run their own business as they see fit.

That could be technically true in the sense that Paradox may have final say. I think its a big misleading to suggest, as the post does, that Kerberos has no say in anything and imply they are just innocent bystanders in this whole thing.

1636

Call me crazy, but wouldn’t a targeted release date be part of the initial contract… so… you know, they have a goal?

1637

Exactly. This whole thing reminds me a lot of Troika’s excuses for the state ToEE was released in. Claimed they were forced to release by the publisher, Atari, when later it turned out they’d been given extensions beyond what they had originally agreed to. Of course they had additional excuses for that. My point being that if you sign a contract, don’t blame the other side when you can’t live up to what you agreed to in writing.

1638

All this being said, I haven’t seen Paradox contradict anything they’re saying. If a company you’re working with is maligning you, it seems incumbent upon you to set the record straight if it needs straightening. Then again, whoever handles marketing at Paradox may have bigger fish to fry with the fallout from the release.

As far as Valve vs. Paradox vs. Kerberos setting the price for a Steam sale, the one contingent I’m pretty sure has zero say on that particular issue is Kerberos. Why would they? Not being independent, they’re the widget makers and not the widget sellers.

Anyway, I’d say that $19.99 is probably a decent beta price for this thing as it stands IFF you believe it’s going to shape up into a very good game. I do, but I’m an optimist when it comes to these things.

1639

Paradox early on said the release was a “joint” decision, so its not like they haven’t said anything. That they have ultimate decision power on that doesn’t mean that they were not telling the truth when they said that. All along its been pretty clear that what likely happened was that Paradox cut off funding, probably after at least one extension, and that Kerberos didn’t have an alternate source to keep working on the game without that support. Meaning the release date was probably a joint decision to face reality and hope for the best with the idea that initial sales would fund remaining development.

You can argue that Paradox should have sunk more money into this, but we aren’t in a position to know if that made any business sense. So while we can wish things were different, in the end I can’t really blame anyone but Kerberos for the state the game was released in. They agreed to a release date and didn’t manage their project in a way to make that happen.

1640

Oh, don’t get me wrong - I’m not defending Kerberos, and I’d put the lion’s share of the blame at their feet for the whole mess. It just seems like a rush to judgement on the parts that we can only speculate about.

1641

I don’t know if Paradox should have sunk more money into the game, and to be honest I still haven’t played it, but I don’t think there’s any excuse for releasing an obviously broken game. If you don’t want to pay to finish the game, you should probably cancel it. I know I would’ve been disappointed if they’d done that, and maybe it will turn into a great game down the line, but it certainly isn’t fair for the people who paid full price at release, and I don’t think any amount of excuses from either Paradox or Kerberos justifies it.

1642

Good point, Nikolaj. In a hindsight being 20/20 kind of thing, if they’d simply said a month out that it wasn’t ready but they would honor refunds to those who wanted them and then an open beta (okay, open alpha) to those who wanted to stick around in exchange for both funding and actually helping in some small way with further development, I’d imagine the response would have been drastically different. What went down, however, was most certainly not fair to the consumer.