This is unbelievable. Stardock shouldn't even mention Take 2. When it comes down to it, it's Stardock's game, they are responsable. I can't believe I'm being punished for preordering the game.
When I found out the release date was Feb 21, I set aside tonight in my schedule to spend all night playing this game. Instead, I'm reading a message board about how Take 2 didn't think the preorder numbers would be that high, and didn't print enough copies. Not for nothing, my preorder was made in DECEMBER.
I will NEVER buy another Stardock game. I don't want to hear from anyone how Stardock is responding to it's costumers, because if they were, I'd have their game in my hands already.
I hope everyone is writing to all the gaming magazines to let them know what's going on with this. |
What would you have us do?
Let's take a deep breath and look at it from a bigger picture since I assume we're adults here:
The release date for the game was set to be February 21, 2006 many months ago. And due to some logistical/demand issues wide-spread retail availability is was February 22nd-24th (depending on which chain).
In the bigger scheme of things, is this that big of a deal? Does someone else having the game a day earlier hurt anyone?
I agree it's ultimately Stardock's fault. In the sense that we should have put more padding into it. We should have said that the game was going to be available on say March 1 and then surprised everyone when it showed up on store shelves on February 22nd through 24th. It's a lesson noted for the future.
At the end of the day, we simply don't have the clout to force everyone to do exactly what we'd like.
We are given dates. We pass those dates on to you. In this case, the widespread distribution was off by 2 days. Stardock decided how many units to manufacture. We manufactured enough. That's not the issue.
The issue, from what I can tell, is that the expedited units (i.e. when a product is manufactured, you have X units that are rushed out to fit the first day's demands and Y units that are shipped slower/cheaper to deal with the first few weeks demand). President's day combined with a higher than expected demand ate up the X units faster.
Best Buy had the game yesterday. I don't know why they had it but EB/Gamestop did not.
Stardock Makes game, manufactures game, markets game, hands boxes to Take 2 (distributor) who then ships it to retailers. It could even be that the manufacturing people were late a day that aggravated it. We're not sure.
What we do know is this: Weeks from now, nobody is going to care whether a video game came out on February 23rd instead of February 21st.
We're sorry you're upset about it. No one wishes the game was in every store in massive quantity more than I do.
