I think and hope it will be released before that.

They didn't make it up as a joke. They made it up to attract orders.

Yeh of course they did, a game placed at 62nd in their pc games pre-order chart gets special attention or they actually got some updated information...

If you want to believe that, Dano, it's fine with me. Just don't claim that it is "the only logical conclusion to draw". It isn't. They've been touting for preorders on the basis of dubious release dates before, so why should it be any different now?

Because they actually bothered emailing and not just changing the dates as per usual.

Money is money, no matter if it's from a pilot-freak or an orc-slayer.

Well you go ahead and believe it's sly marketing ploy all you want, my money is on someone actually having given them some updated information.

why.
It took years to get that far - now it's only a few month away.
np.

but feel free to take a wild guess too.

It all depends on what they mean when they say "manufacturer".

If they mean the publisher then their dates could be accurate, as a publisher would have to be selected by the Maddox team with all that goes along with such a decision. Finalising the selection of a publisher means that the publisher would demand to know when it's going to be finished to account for all the shipping arrangements, possible promotion drives, etc, so this gives it all a certain credence.
Even then, there is quite a lot of room to go both ways as on one hand lots of games get delayed by publisher decisions, on the other one they could be providing a worst case scenario timeframe and it happens to be shipped much earlier in the end.

If they mean the developer, then their date could simply mean "we saw Oleg Maddox's recent post in the Friday update, he says they're close so let's take a guess and post a revised date".

My personal conclusion? I don't think the data is as in depth as i would like in order to consider it concrete evidence.
If they said "company X emailed us and gave us this release date" then we'd be talking business, but it's obvious that they can't reveal the name of the publisher yet (and the Maddox team is doing the same).

The only reason to withhold such information is if the deal is not yet 100% finalized, in order to avoid causing an upheaval in the community if a publisher change happens to take place. I'm not saying they are making stuff up or not, because i'm not in the position to know. For all we know they could be right, but they sure aren't giving me much reason to believe them just yet.

Short version: nothing's changed yet, at least for me.

My idea: Oleg and 1:C just *don't know* the release date. It's the Occam's Razor. Either they know the date, and the recent post of Oleg is just a pile of lies (for which I couldn't see a valid reason), and hence he's a liar (which I cannot believe since I greatly respect this man), or he was telling the plain truth:

1. We (Oleg) don't know how long will it take to debug the software
2. We (1:C and OM) haven't finalized yet the release schedule with the publisher

Everything very simple, indeed.