- Jun 17, 2018
- 160
- 239
Wholeheartedly agree with this. If this is fully intended as a passion project, constant feature creep and date extensions are going to be a thing and there's nothing anyone, or any complaints, can change about this. Still, dropping these constant dates without being 100% sure they're absolutely happy with what they currently have is an absolute PR fuckfest. The fact they don't really post any previews (let alone regular ones) really doesn't help them either.I still think the primary issue is that they give deadlines at all. It's why most developers won't give hard dates unless they're in the process of beta-testing bugs. Koda needs to take a page from blizzard and adopt 'Soon™.' There literally can't be a delay if there was no deadline to overshoot and miss. Whether or not the long development times are warranted is a different argument.
There's another developer I know (not lewd) who's absolutely fucking terrible with release dates and won't stop naming them in spite of having missed every single one. While he'd probably be pushed into mud being in a similar situation, I haven't really been able to find much negative criticism over this. What definitely helps him is that he's very active on his Discord server, showing what he's doing on a nearly daily basis, whether posting screenshots/GIFs on in-game things or even describing things like talking with his accountants. He seems pretty apologetic on the date-related criticism aimed towards him as well.
I know that seems offtopic, but the point is that being in professional touch with your fanbase and keeping your PR healthy can take you a long way. I'm guessing the Discord doesn't mind and honestly, that's completely fine; neither do I. The problem in the long run is that word of mouth (limited to Discord peoples' too) can only take you so far (hell, I found out about it from 8chan) and when most discussion threads on forums are... whatever this absolute shitshow is, it's going to leave a sour taste with someone hearing about the game for the first time, who may have been on the verge of actually becoming a new patron.