Lamuness has in fact posted a few times recently. (Once this week, apparently.) But no status updates.
Technically there is a status update thread, but it was last updated in June, and it still lists Raidy 2 and Downhill Night 2 as “Golden Master, shipping soon!”
I think they’d rather leave us to our own devices unless it’s absolutely necessary. It might take a new hire (i.e. someone who hasn’t had to deal with the X-Change 3 or Family Project situations) for communication to resume.
I can’t relate to what happened in the past and for that I could be completely wrong, but I think information for their customers would be a good thing. Right now we are just left to gossip about what is happening and I’d imagine some unease is spreading. We were told a release could come soon and that soon can be said to be Summer 2010. There is only a few more days to announce that copies are being made to reach that unofficial date range. I don’t see much resources being taken away to update us on what a new “soon” is. If they aren’t going to make the release I would think they would know by now. If inserting the script is just that easy to finish it and begin printing copies at the last possible moment I would think it would have been done by now even with bugs in another game.
The good news out of all this is that hopefully when JAST gets STEINS;GATE eventually it’ll be mostly bug-free. Dunno if they’ll want to release a non-ero game but they’d be fools not to make an exception for this one.
Well, the thing is that any gossip and annoyance from lack of communication is unlikely to affect anyone’s purchase plans (and they had Anime Expo and Comic Con to remind people that the games are coming). At the same time, discussing relatively minor delays (several months might be a significant enough issue; one or two probably not) doesn’t earn them any good will either, so posting about it here might be a wash.
That’s what I mean by posting only when it’s absolutely necessary. If there’s a crippling issue with a product that they need to address, they have no choice but to communicate. When a game has gone gold, it’s also time to let everyone know. Ditto for a software patch. All other things can be ignored if they don’t particularly help or hinder the business.
They already know. It’s simply a matter of whether or not they think it’s important to notify us. If not, they’ll just wait until they have concrete announcements to make (gold status, shipping notice, etc.).
I don’t think it’s a matter of resources at all. This bare minimum in communication happens at any company forum (seen it happen where the fanbase is small and especially passionate - i.e. anime, sci-fi TV, PC RPGs like Fallout 1/2) where personal feelings between fans and owner/staff aren’t exactly warm. People simply think the fans are a pain in the ass to deal with, so they avoid talking to them as much as possible.
On the Peach Princess website it says Demonbane is “in production.” When looking at Downhill Night Blaze it says, “In Development.” Am I being too hopeful? If it is in production would that mean they are producing the copies? I just found the word choice weird when we haven’t heard anything from the Nitro+ USA website.
my guess is it means they got it back from nitro+ and are in the final stage before gold
Gold would mean pressing copies.
I’d expect them to pop in and announce if the game went gold. At least updating the sticky thread, if not an actual update on the website.
I can’t really complain much about delays. It’s just that I pre-ordered Demonbane from Rightstuf at the same time as Twin Spica vol. 2, to get free shipping. And I just got Twin Spica vol. 3 in the mail, while the previous volume is held up from being in the same order ^_^" Frustrating.
(since Twin Spica is soooo good.)
This. It’s why I will absolutely never preorder anything without a concrete release date and why I hate hate hate it when things that do have a concrete release date get delayed after preorders open. There is nothing worse than your monthly eroge purchase getting delayed because one company dropped the ball and all of a sudden you’re left without any new eroge for the month.
right stuff is always wrong
my guess is sept 20
I picked last weekend for news and turned out wrong. If I had to call a new date I’d say tomorrow. If they will squeeze the game into summer we’ll probably hear something then hear news of it shipping on the later part of the week of the 20th.
it takes at least month for most games to go from gold to out
i think the least time a game took is like 2 weeks
I bet you the game will be pushed back. It will probably go gold end of september (or october) and get released (october or november).
still hoping downhill night blaze will be released around the holidays.
i just hope it drops soon
I think a development diary format would be good. Set aside every other week/once a month for talking about various aspects of the game once things have progressed a bit. First few can be stuff like how they decided what terms to use in translation, where they are, info about the game (for those uninformed), etc. Because artwork is done (unless they censor stuff), that part is generally not needed to be talked about. However, explaining how they tried to keep the personalities of the characters in English as in Japanese, or had to change them and why is something. Sometimes there are additional things to discuss: censoring, engine issues (especially making things stable that were designed for older OSes)
I doubt Blaze will be done this year.
As for Demonbane … they’ve effectively already pushed it back. I can’t recall them EVER not announcing when a game has gone golden master. And it takes a few weeks from when that happens to when the game comes out. So we’re looking at an October release, in all likelihood, at the earliest anyway. October 2010 is not Summer 2010, so they’ve already slipped.
Unless Demonbane went golden master already and they forgot to announce it here, or on the Demonbane site. I find that hard to believe. (After all, if finishing Demonbane is eating up all their time … when it goes GM, then it’s done, so they wouldn’t be swamped with work anymore.)
Where did the term ‘golden master’ come from anyway? Masters aren’t golden; they’re made of GLASS.
EDIT: Although the master, in this case, is probably not the ACTUAL master, just the disc they’ve burned and sent to the replicators who will make a master from it. And they might use one of those pretty yellow DVDs to do the job.