Shroud of the Avatar: Payment Plan Extension…Does It Mean the Game is Delayed?
So in the penultimate Update of the Avatar, Portalarium announced an extension to the payment plan deadline:
We have received many requests from community members to extend the monthly payment plan past September 2014, allowing for smaller, more affordable monthly payments. So to help those of you that need a little more time to meet your pledge upgrade goal, we’ve added 5 more months to the plan, extending it to February 2015.
The payment plan option allows a backer to spread the cost of a particular pledge (or pledge upgrade) over a number of months. Up until a couple of weeks ago, the pledge deadline was listed as October of 2014, which would have coincided with the game’s planned release date.
However, I find it rather interesting that this change came quite soon after Starr Long floated the possibility of Shroud of the Avatar not making its planned October release date:
I have a mantra about ship dates: “No one remembers when you shipped but they always remember how you shipped.” With that in mind you should rest assured that we will launch when you tell us the product is ready. That might mean October is not feasible, but let’s focus on making the right product, not the when product.
And now here the payment plan deadline has been extended by five months, to February of 2015. Could it be that Portalarium are preparing to formally announce that Shroud of the Avatar will be delayed in its release? Not that there’s anything wrong with them doing so, necessarily; many Kickstarter projects fail to meet their initially-announced release windows, and usually the delays are for the best anyhow — the development team will, after all, have that much longer to polish and refine the game, no?
No, I trust the team, plainly the announcement is just that, a way for subscribers to fund their pledges over the longer term.
Having said that however, I do believe that adjusting various projects to meet certain new goals will mean delay beyond October 2014; recent polls on the SoTA forums suggest that the investor/pledge/fan is willing to wait, crossing their fingers and employing the ‘game-play is king’ adage and sticking with it.
Like you wrote’ the development team will, after all, have that much longer to polish and refine the game’.
Aka Polish is King 🙂
Glad to see you’re still hanging around after dodging a few vas flams. I agree that delaying the release is a good thing in that it means they’re getting more, and hopefully better, work done. The only thing I worry about is them running out of cash before the game is released, or not having enough income from the game once it is release to keep the studio afloat while working on the second installment. Continuity problems, basically. At last mention the “burn rate” was about $200,000 a month, and they’ve added at least one new hire since then.
Don’t worry, I am light on my feet, not easily put off and it’ll take more than a few fire spells to singe my fur 🙂
Re: Sota’s budget, I do hope that isn’t so, many people have pledged above and beyond their initial purchase and brought many people to the game with them so hopefully the budget remains in the black.