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Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/15/2019 in all areas

  1. By the end of this month everyone who backed the Xenonauts-2 Kickstarter will have their Steam / GOG keys and going exclusive with Epic wouldn't involve taking them away, so using that logic I'm assuming you wouldn't actually mind us signing an Epic exclusive deal? Everyone would have got what they paid for and no promises to backers would have been broken ... but in reality I think there'd still be a big backlash if we did so. I personally find the whole Epic Store debate quite interesting. In principle I like the idea of Steam having more competition, because whilst overall they've been a huge boon to independent developers, they represent about 90% of our sales and yet our only contact with them is one guy who probably replies to our emails less than half the time. Having a competitor to keep them on their toes and make them more responsive to what users and devs want from them can only be a good thing - but then having games be exclusive to just one platform is kinda annoying as a consumer (although Battle.net / Origin / UPlay / whatever have been doing that for a long time so it's hardly a new phenomenon). Anyway, I suspect Snapshot were offered more than enough money to make the backlash they are facing worthwhile. I think it's a very dangerous thing to break promises to your backers and I can certainly see why people are angry, but everyone has their price and if there was enough money on the table then I could also see how that would be tempting for the dev team.
    4 points
  2. Xenonauts-2 was originally scheduled for launch into Early Access towards the end of this month, but after reviewing our progress and the current state of the game we've decided to push this back by approximately three months (although it could be longer than that) because we simply don't feel the game is ready for Early Access yet. How does this affect you? We've taken a number of steps to ensure that this does not affect our community too much. Let's talk about them first: The first group of people affected by this change are the £18 Kickstarter backers who are not part of the Closed Beta and were due to receive their keys when the game launched into Early Access. We'll simply be sending these people their Steam / GOG keys at the end of this month as promised and inviting them to join the extended Closed Beta, so this change should not affect them at all. The second group of people are those who missed the Kickstarter and want to buy the game. We're strongly considering selling the game through Xsolla until the Early Access launch, and anyone that purchases the game on Xsolla will get immediate access to the Closed Beta on Xsolla and then also receive a Steam / GOG key as soon as we hit Early Access. If you're already part of the Closed Beta nothing will change. We'll continue pushing out updates to the beta on Steam and GOG as before. The reason why we have to do things like this is because (with the exception of one-off events like Kickstarters), Steam will not allow you to sell Steam access to a game until that game is actually on sale on Steam. So we can run the closed beta on Xsolla and then generate Steam keys for all our existing backers as soon as we launch into Early Access, but non-Kickstarter backers can't get access to the Steam / GOG beta until we start selling the game on those services. Why have we chosen to delay the Early Access launch? The point of the Closed Beta is to get the game into a state where it is playable and we're not quite there yet. There's a few big expected features that are missing (e.g. the ability to save in the ground combat) and quite a few of the mechanics are so rough that people are instinctively going to have a negative reaction to them (e.g. the unfinished air combat implementation). This is mostly a problem because of Steam Reviews. We know large sections of the game need more work and we've already got much of that work planned out, we've just not had a chance to do it yet - but if someone picks up the game and writes a bad Steam review on the basis of an air combat implementation that is only 30% finished, that review will stick with us and potentially impact our sales for the entire lifetime of the game ... even if the final air combat system ends up being far better than the one in the first Xenonauts when the game is finished. We're not under any massive financial pressure to rush our launch so it makes sense for us to spend some extra time adding the missing features and polishing the game up first. It's a shame to miss our deadlines but you only have to check the beta build changelogs to see how fast progress has been in the last three or four months, so it's really just a case of a game this complicated being a LOT of work. Assuming all goes to plan with Xsolla I'll be posting up an update here and sending out an update to our mailing list / Kickstarter backers when pre-sales become available, so stay tuned!
    2 points
  3. Reddit is what you make of it. If reddit is a hammer, then is it not better to be a construction worker and get something out of it? Rather than just saying "it's a dumpster fire" and dismissing the value you can sometimes find there? I hope you two stop bickering, I've not seen a playground fight for a good few decades now and your bringing back bad memories :P. I kid, I kid... maybe...
    1 point
  4. I am at work right now, so I cannot currently give this thread the attention it deserves. However, I can see that people are still fighting. I'm not having this any more. Dr Ethan. Please can you open a thread for your Fire in The Hole port on the modding discussion subforum and continue your port and all discussion on that port on that thread. Can everyone who is interested in Dr., Ethan's port please continue discussion on that thread. I also require everyone to immediately cease this disruptive argument between Dr. Ethan and Charon as of this post. Further sanctions WILL be implemented if anyone disobeys this post.
    1 point
  5. That's an interesting link, actually. This is a survey from another developer which breaks down the data in more detail, but says largely the same thing: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/operation-tell-valve-all-the-things-3-0/ What's interesting in that survey is the number of devs who feel that Steam earn their cut has dropped from 39% to 11% in the last year - I guess taking a 30% cut seems very reasonable for what they offer until someone starts offering a similar service taking a 12% cut instead. Note though that 60% of the devs agreed that Steam deserved their cut at some point in the past while they were partners, so I guess that aligns with how I feel ... Steam could do with some competition to get them back to their best, but there were definitely times in the past where their 30% cut was warranted.
    1 point
  6. The Epic store is much better than the steam one, because it fucks the poor developer a whole lot less. Epic take a 12% cut and if you use their unreal engine, you normally owe them a 5% cut but they waive it if you sell your game on their store. 12% means 12%, in otherwords. Steam take a soul crushing 30% cut of every game sale, they make more money off of finished games than most developers do. Their extreme monoploy status, basically means that they strangle the life out of all but the biggest developers, by taking all the money they might have used to expand their offices, hire staff, etc. I have always hated steam for this reason, but it seems swept under the carpet a lot that they take 30% and also do sales which the developer effectively also has to pay for.
    1 point
  7. As a developer myself, I completely agree with you. It's much better having early good reviews and satisfied customers than having people angry due to CTD or because X1 'was superior'. Take the time you need.
    1 point
  8. I don't think we'd be given the chance to have that kind of deal, even if we wanted it - we're not as sexy a game as Phoenix Point, who have already signed a lot of deals with various parties for a lot more money than we have. So I doubt there's any risk of us ever becoming an Epic exclusive!
    1 point
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