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Farsight's Steam programmer made mention of the Steam issues on the pinballarcadefans forum, so unless we've joined forces to promote an irrelevant conspiracy, you can be sure that the problems did actually occur. And without final testing and all hands available to fix if a major problem occurs afterwards, we're not going to push a patch remotely.
If you total up all the Steam table sales, figure that nearly half of the sales were at 50% off, take out all the royalties and licensing that go to Microsoft, Valve, Marvel, etc., you'll see that it doesn't really buy a lot of extra help, especially when you first subtract the pre-launch development costs of the Steam version. Especially since anyone we hire, we try to keep for the long term, making us more cautious about how quickly we add staff. In this business, fortunes can change very rapidly and sales have lots of peaks and valleys, making it very hard to predict how many people you will be able to employ just a few months down the road.
There's a web of trade-offs between table prices, number of tables produced, post-launch support, number of platforms, etc. We'd like to have people to work on everything that needs making and fixing all the time, but people simply wouldn't be willing to pay what it would cost to support that kind of business. We're doing the best we can - really. And even with these annoying problems, I think our support still compares pretty well to other companies in the same league.
If you total up all the Steam table sales, figure that nearly half of the sales were at 50% off, take out all the royalties and licensing that go to Microsoft, Valve, Marvel, etc., you'll see that it doesn't really buy a lot of extra help, especially when you first subtract the pre-launch development costs of the Steam version. Especially since anyone we hire, we try to keep for the long term, making us more cautious about how quickly we add staff. In this business, fortunes can change very rapidly and sales have lots of peaks and valleys, making it very hard to predict how many people you will be able to employ just a few months down the road.
There's a web of trade-offs between table prices, number of tables produced, post-launch support, number of platforms, etc. We'd like to have people to work on everything that needs making and fixing all the time, but people simply wouldn't be willing to pay what it would cost to support that kind of business. We're doing the best we can - really. And even with these annoying problems, I think our support still compares pretty well to other companies in the same league.
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