Why would PE not go ahead and release this game to get some money out of the deal?

Burr

Well IMO it's a double edged sword if they did release this at the stage it's at. They could possibly make some money off of it , but would it be worth it to get the servers up and running and keep a staff on it considering the financial problems they've had? But on the other side of it, if it were released as is, people would be all over them for releasing and unfinished product and that would hurt them in the long run with STO coming out.

Originally posted by Burr

Why would PE not go ahead and release this game to get some money out of the deal?

Burr

I was in beta. It was another Vanguard and SOE made it clear that it wasn't going to bail them out, and that PE was on its own.

It was a steaming pile of junk and they didn't have the money or talent to fix it. On top of that, it was a weak concept for an MMO from the very begining.

Other than that, the game was fine.

Plenty of reasons, the game isn't finished yet, shipping it will probably consume a lot of money, upkeep of the servers, etc. i doubt there'll be that much of money left ;)

Roman mythology is a weak concept for a game? I can't understand that. And the game wasn't half bad, not finished yes, but fun. Oh well life goes on

That pretty much makes sense. If they released the game, and it flops, has a lot of bugs, which this one seems to have based on the poster here it ruins a lot more casual players and there perception of PE.

If they don't release only the people that follow many different games get the bad perception.

Burr

It wouldn't take that much more money to finish it. And they would make a lot more when they released it. It really makes no sense

Originally posted by ghoul31

It wouldn't take that much more money to finish it. And they would make a lot more when they released it. It really makes no sense

 

We dont know that. I didnt see it posted anywhere what exactly was the core reason for putting the game on indefinate hiatus, but for all we know it could have been severe coding issues, making it where it would have been near unplayable with large server loads, something that beta testers wouldnt have seen.

Would have costed more money to keep working and release it, and with their publisher pulling support, money was probably just not there anymore...

You have to give PE credit for being smart enough not to release a broken game.  Few developers have the courage to do so.  In the long run it could have damaged PE's reputation so much it would have put the success of STO in jeopardy.

I was in the beta too and I thought the basic idea was great, and when the game didn't crash it was fun.  There just seemed to be too many technical problems to have fixed them with a reasonable rate of return at this point.  They had already laid off most of the content people so only the tech heads were left but the challenged were just too big.  This of course does not bode well for STO since I believe it will use the same engine.

Originally posted by ghoul31

It wouldn't take that much more money to finish it. And they would make a lot more when they released it. It really makes no sense

What?   

Do you have ANY clue how much money it costs to run even a small company for a week?   It's not just employee salaries, it's their health insurance, office rent, supplies, utility bills etcetc. 

And claiming that they would make ANY money on this once it's released is ridiculous.   What about the additional cost of running the game?  There's the captial expensive of servers, housing for them, network costs, personnel to keep them running.

You don't just stick a CD in a drive and a MMORPG magically appears on the Internet.   It takes a lot of money to get one up and even MORE money to keep it running.  

Their decision makes perfect sense.    What doesn't make sense is why nobody realized the huge problems the game must have been having earlier.