We knew people would be unhappy about the delay – and we agonized over whether we should do it or not. Someone has already drawn the parallel on the forums: our earlier games have only really hit a real volume of users after launch. We know it is bad timing, after starting the pre-purchase last week. But the response brought home that the pre-purchase beta phase isn’t going to have 100s of people in it, with a few servers – it is going to have potentially 10s of 1000s of people in it. Which is obviously great news. But it IS a Beta (it isn’t some “marketing/PR Beta” with the game finished 2 months ago) – and the large volume of people WILL throw up odd and weird little bugs that only come to light in bulk testing. Code and QA want the chance to fix that stuff before we actually release the finished product.
So people understand, internally no dates are being pushed back. Everything will still be finished to the same dates as for the original release date. What we are doing is buying ourselves 2 extra weeks of QA and bug-fix time.
We haven’t released dates of the next phases of the Beta testing, but they aren’t far away. We already have the first of the press in the Beta, with a “preview” phase for the press scheduled to run over the next couple of weeks or so. After that, we’ll be ready for the final phase of the beta, with the pre-purchasers getting their hands on the game.
We haven’t taken this decision lightly: moving a release date late in the day is a nightmare. We’ve done it because we feel it will make a difference to the product on launch day – for the better, obviously. Moving a schedule that involves a large (for us) marketing budget, physical production and distribution to the retailers across the glove, as well as disappointing the fans who have waited a long time for this game, isn’t easy. But in this case, we feel it will be worth the pain.
