Play.com release date change.
 

Email from play.com this morning:

from whats been said on the forum over the last few months thats kind of when i was thinking it would be released hope we get an official announcement soon.:)

i wouldnt call 25th feb 2011 "very soon" (as oleg stated this week), that's about 6 months away

hopefully they got it wrong and just added a block of time to the release date to keep the peasants from revolting and asking for their money back

that date makes sense. we still haven't seen a website or any mention of a publisher. wish it was sooner though.

The thing is that lots of sites were telling that they know the release date and even taking pre-orders all these years, but so far none was close to truth. Why do you thing this one will be an exception? :)

That date sounds about right to me. Although i had previously predicted march 2011, still it means that Zapatista will have to eat my shorts... YEHAAA :grin::grin:

I'm pretty sure that play.com knows better than Oleg, who just a few days ago posted, that no releasedate was fixed.

So many people with amnesia and non-functional short-term memory. :rolleyes:

YEEHAAAAA, hang on feuerfalke, I think you might be dining on my shorts too, didn't we have a bet once? :grin:

Lots of people said almost the same about all the different dates they had seen in all these years. :grin:

The fact that Play have stated that they've changed it due to information from the manufacturer could possibly hint that the publisher has updated them. Read between the lines ;)

Yeah, or just the opposite: Since there is no news, yet. It's more likely it will come 3 months later, so they just chose a later date.


You could as well roll a dice or kill a sheep or ask a deck of cards and see if they're right or wrong. Until there is no official word, it's just wild guessing.


@tree_uk:
Fascinating. I'd say that's an intriguing case of selective amnesia. ;)

since I offered to share the "shorts-dinner" in case we lose, I think it's only fair if I can send in 50% of my shorts too. lol


6month seems pretty short to me for all the stuff that still has to be done:

- bugfixing and testing
- set up the whole marketing campaign

The goal is probably Xmas, we'll see if they can make it.

I hope play.com would guess 4.10 release date :P

Me too. :grin:

Why would play.com want to guess the 4.10 patch release date? This won't earn them any trade. On the other hand, 'announcing' the SoW:BoB release date, even if only based on a guess, will gain them free publicity and advance orders.

Given the way they can't even get the name right, I suspect they know less about it than most of the regulars on this forum...

It's been said a thousand times on these boards and Ubi that these sites that are pre-selling SoW have NO IDEA what they are talking about. They are guessing, just like us, that's why every time they post a release date (yes, every one over the last 6 years) people say "that sounds about right". It sounds right cause they are guessing based on the same info we have, forum posts and oleg interviews. These people are unscrupulous as it is to take pre-order money for a game that has been in development for so long, do you really think these guys are above lying to you to get it?

LOL - well put.

The funny thing is, that these post occur almost punctual every two months.

"Please, please, tell me something! I promise I believe you!!!"

When it is postponed:

"Cool, cool, that's it!1!!Shift1" [Clicking preorder]



The opposite happens with official information

"Please, please tell is something. But honestly we won't believe you anyway!"

When it's postponed:

"See? I told you it's vaporware!"

To be honest Play.com's game release predictions have been about as consistant as Oleg's. :grin::grin:

hehehe, it´s always close isn´t it?

Think most of you have missed the point here, play has, as you all point out, in the past made wild guesses and adjusted the release date numerous times, however they have never once in all that time emailed anybody with a pre-order to tell tham that the manufacturer has given them updated information as they have just done so with SoW. I seriously doubt that they've made it up as a joke and as such the only logical conclusion to draw is that somebody somewhere in the publisher's employ has updated them.

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.

Does Play charges the credit card immediately after pre-ordering or only after the product gets shipped?
Thanks.

they dont charge your card until its posted

All that tells me Dano is they have a new marketing director or some other such staff change. For all we know every pre-order for the last year that they have adjusted the release date for has had that same form email sent out, but SoW hasn't been adjusted since they changed their policies. They have no information, hell, they can't even get the NAME of the damn game right, Il2 is and will be nowhere in the title of this game, they have FAKE box art up on their page, the email is 100% form letter. There is nothing to see here and frankly I wouldn't believe a damn thing play.com says based solely on their very questionable pre-order practices.

Gamestracker says Nov 1st 2010.

IGN says TBA 2010.

Gamershell still says Nov 2006.

Tothegame.com says it's cancelled.

GamesRadar says 2007.

Gamefaqs has two dates posted, 2006 and 6/01/2009.

Do you see where I'm going? No one knows and anyone who claims to know is probably a liar.

Gamestracker also says it's Ubi. ;)

omg.

Well I think. Oleg wants it released before the official end of BoB, 31 October.

And maybe he also wants his announce to come true, that thousands will be playing by October.

And Oleg also said in last friday's update thread that he himself wouldn't release a game with quite many bugs, but it is up to the publisher.

---> So he's out of the woods.


After-release-patching is standard today so why should Oleg do different.

I've no doubt he'd like that too, but seriously doubt it considering a publisher hasn't even been announced yet.


No he's not and he knows it. His name will still be attached to it.

I'm sure he's not any different in that regard, but I doubt that will be a consideration in moving up the release date. Post-release support has always been the norm with 1:C.

There are various scales of post release support. Completely disregarding content enhancement patches and focusing on fixes, some games are almost unplayable out of the box and there's a patch out on release day, others are the same but the patches take longer and some games while not perfect are at least playable straight after installation.

I think they are aiming for the third scenario, releasing without game-breaking bugs but maybe a few minor ones that can be easily patched. Of course, this takes more work to achieve. IL2 was similar in that regard in that while post release support was very good, it was mainly about content additions and tweaks instead of correcting fundamental flaws, as there weren't any game breaking issues on the first release version.

To be honest, i think that having a playable SoW at X date is better than having an unplayable or frustrating SoW at "X-2 weeks" date. I sure would like to have it on my hard drive as we speak, but if any game is suffering from game breaking bugs that detract from the experience the novely factor wears off quite fast and i end up not playing it anyway because i'm waiting for the fixes, hence no use of having something that doesn't work for any other reason apart from the ability to watch all the fancy stuff in motion for a couple of days. In that sense, having a game that doesn't work well enough is like not having the game at all and i feel that the Maddox team realises this and try to release with as few bugs as possible, hence the extra delays if we take the complexity of the project into account.

It would be good to have some concrete information to lay the speculation to rest, but most important for me is to have a title that works within 90% of what's advertised straight out of the box.

Well, I think: Oleg actually wanted it ready 2006. lol

30 days for bugfixing and marketing/distribution set-up? ROFL!!!

The latter is probably going to take more than 8 weeks.


1. because he's neither Microsoft nor Apple
2. He can't take the potential damage
3. The publisher can't take it either

You are going to Roll On the Floor Laughing for more than 8 weeks???




:-)

It's not even funny.

Just think of all things the publisher has to take care of.
As far as I know that not only includes distribution, but also production of marketing material and the production(hardware copy) of the game itself.

In fact I thought about my post while getting cigarettes, and, unless a lot the stuff is already printed, I think it takes more than 12 weeks.
Imho several hundred man-hours on the publisher(-s?) side.
And the publisher is not going to waste all of his resources for one upcoming game.
After all, this is just a freakin' FLIGHT SIM.
How many % of the consumers can you reach with it?
I know not one(!) person in my personal "environment"*(other than my squad) involved in flight sims, well, maybe the one guy I met 15 years ago...

The flight simmers are, percentage wise, only a 1digit niche in the market.

I'm sure OM is aware of this, and BoB is only the spearhead of a new generation of Battle Sims.
(A tank sim would already double your potential consumer)