Elemental Forums
And how do the good people at Stardock, those whose with their hard work toiled hour after hour pouring their passion into the product, feel about the upcoming release?
As one involved in the beta, knowing only the neutered version available, I say, "fear only the accolades, for they will cast a long shadow at just before and after the noon hour!"
- Othello
Every time I visit the Forums of a recently released game, I always wonder how the developers handle all the complaining and ignorant behavior that so many people exibit when they don't like this or that or something doesn't work exactly yhe way they think it should.
The Stardock forums are not NEARLY as bad like that as most other company's forums, but I still sometimes wonder how these guys that work so hard making games for us manage to keep wanting to do that after all the flak people blast them with...
After seeing what the Blizzard guys went through, I think we're pretty prepared for anything. I mean, Starcraft II, IMO, is about as perfect of a release you can get. I.e. unlimited budget, unlimited time to do exactly what they want with the result being an outstanding game.
I'm not even sure how I'd improve on Starcraft 2.
By contrast, I have a list a mile long on things I want to add to Elemental over the next few years.
yea the problem is where to get 100milions for elemental 
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/starcraft2/news.html?sid=6269369
How about producing a (well written) campaign that is actually long enough to be considered a story? Instead we're charged $60 for 1/3 of a story. Of course the game is extremely polished, the individual races are fun & distinct and the multiplayer aspect is excellent.
We had about 3% of the Starcraft 2 budget to work with and that figure counts the engine budget.
3 mil is a good number too for a tbs game
just i have the feeling that the engine took alot of it 
and you already almost broke even on it...? 
Assuming you make $30 a profit per game you sell... you've sold a LOT more preorders than I thought you would.
Once back in the wild wild west of gaming, keeping the code tight and general development under budget determined many a persons project bonus..
they have a bigger profit if you buy only digital edition
I hear that, they can pretty much do anything and take as long as they want doing it too. I think developers get a thick skin after a while, and pretty much ignore any non-constructive complaints about their video games. I used to work in the engineering field and you get complaints all the time about this and that, eventually even I got a thick skin and usually just responded with a "uh... huh".
It's funny as my opinion of Starcraft 2 is quite different from Frogboys.
All that money and they could'nt even include basic chat rooms ?
Starcraft 2 multiplayer is a lonley place , because of that I never play.
The old bnet (think warcraft 3 style), I would login, hang out , chat with strangers make new friends. Somtimes not even play. and somtimes I would play for hours.
It's this wanna be like xbox live and and/or facebook friends crap that I ca'nt stand.
The only way to meet new players is to do it in game and when I'm playing , I'm not chatting.
It would have been almost efforless to put basic chat in ( at least tech wise).
Ahh well...at least they are planning on putting it in now. Waiting till then to play.
Not all software development is the same, but I think it all depends on how much time and effort you put into what you've done. At a certain point, you can come to love and hate aspects of your software. Fortunately, I work for customers that have to contractually agree to what they want in their product release, but irregardless of that, if you've created something that works well, has appeal, and you're satisfied with it you'll be happy. You'll always catch little things you can make work better or something that should be re-done, but you spend all your time fixing something that you have no idea how they found it in the first place. "Well, don't do that. You want me to write validations for all the stupid things people might do on accident? Okay, I'll change that message, too. Really, rename all the columns now?"
I think by now Stardock has learned that not 100% of customers will be happy with 100% of the features, functionality, game play, and graphics, but they seem to pretty well have me figured out.
Fixed that for you. 
Could you give us a couple of yards of that mile long list?
- Othello
Uh... If they are breaking even they haven't made a profit on any of them yet.
I think we're conflating margin and profit right now - it's just language...
The Starcraft 2 campaign, 29 missions with 26 possible at one go, is about as long as the combined campaigns in Starcraft (30 missions) or the combined campaigns in Brood War (28 missions). How is it not long enough? What you really seem to be complaining about is that you didn't get a Zerg or Protoss campaign, just a Terran one.
He is talking about the story, not the amount of missions in the campaign.
I loved the campaign, it was a lot of fun, but it was far from being a complete story.
Exactly. I thought the missions were great fun too. But only a very few actually progressed the story in any meaningful way. [spoilers] About 1/4 of the missions are devoted to making money and collecting obscure alien artifacts. The player has no idea why he is doing so other than for the fact that other people want them too. The other 1/4 of the missions are spent saving people and pissing off Mengsk.
I don't really care that there were no Zerg or Protoss campaigns, the game just needed a more developed story (especially after having to pay $10 more than every other PC game on the market).
For comparison, how was GC2 profitability at launch- about even , still heavily in the red?
$3 mil for EWOM , I thought your budget was half that to be honest. Does that include projected future support or just what has been spent?
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