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To be honest, I really understand your concern and the list you've made is nothing but real. As the owner of the studio and part of the developers' team and also part of the PlayWay group I will try to describe the production process to you with hope that it will clear the situation.
We all are indie developers. We are not Ubisoft, Rockstar Games, CD Projekt nor Blizzard. This is our start, we have past with the games but we are not a corporation. Each studio, each developer has its own tactics, production strategy etc. PlayWay is giving us an opportunity to release our game with professional publishing support. Our idea for the game is one thing but expectations are the 2nd, very important thing. When the game comes to the steam and we show it to players we start getting expectations. Production process is very complex and it has huge amount of elements that have to be connected together. We speak with the community, we are in touch with people that would like to play our game - if necessary, we change the content to match the expectations. As I said before, we are Indie Developers, we do not have army of programmers, we are people with passion and we are making each game for the first time, the game has to be good and original, we are inventing things and we can only predict how long the production of each will take. it's not another FIFA or FarCry when most things are done and production process is known to all creators. In most cases it's brand new title and we need to fight with deadlines. We don't want to give you incomplete game. When it comes to the release date and we perform our internal tests and the results are not satisfying for us... we postpone. We are gamers like you, really. We hate uncompleted games being released, we do not like when someone is telling us one thing and giving another. We want to be proud of our product not ashamed.
Hence the release dates are being postponed. Creating "fake hype" is not our will. Release date of the Witcher also has been moved. Making a game is hard, complex and very surprising process. If you prefer playing indie games which are innovative instead of playing the same title each year just with different number you need to face the struggle of the release date being changed. It's a part of this craft. And once again, a perfect quote of Shigeru Miyamoto; "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."
Thank you for understanding and your patience :)
Rejected Games
For example wither 3 got delayed lot of times and end result was very good. You can only imagine if they released it on first release date how bad of a reception it would got and probably not won the game of the year either. Then there are lot of rushed games and well not many turned out good.
One other thing was that i saw a indie dev talk about their first game and he told as it is their first game they had no idea how much work it requires after they done the core game and were not expecting it to take so long to add in content to the game itself. So giving out a release date is just estimated time they think it will be done and of course if you guess wrong it has to be delayed if you want to sell a good finished product what they imagined the game to be when finished.
Patience is the key to games in my opinion and there are a lot of games you can grab and play while waiting for the one you are excited about.
Thank you so much for your reply, you spent a lot of time to write this and I'm glad for that. Actually I don't blame anyone, I've been following these games for almost more than 1 year, so I decided to make a list, and I was surprised after looking at that list. I know creating a game isn't easy, and even it's more harder for a small company. But I really love those small game comparing to "FIFA" or "Call Of Duty", specially EA I hate most. They release a half game, then release the other part as DLC. -_- I am and I will wait for all of these game, and I won't remove any game from my wishlist, but as a user/gamer/customer, I just want to request one thing. PLEASE don't give a exact date until you are double. triple sure about your game. I am a big fan of simulation game and I don't miss any of these game, but it hurts when your favorite game keeps delaying again and again. I understand dev doesn't want to release an UN-finished game, and even I don't like this. But it'll be better if developer uses "Coming Soon" rather than an exact date. May be you heard about a game named "Bum Simulator", this game delayed by three times and there was an exact release date every time. Now 1 week ago, they changed it to "Coming Soon". I don't support this, as a developer, do you support this? They just release a mini trailer after every month, what is the point of this? My post is not for PlayWay, it's for all publisher/developer, as they should set a release date when they are fully confident about their game. Even Witcher 3, they shouldn't set a release date early.
I already said that I love simulation/indie games more than those high level COD/BF/FIFA/PUBG game. So you should know how it feels when your favorite upcoming game is getting delayed always.
I apologize if I said something wrong or hurt you. But I wanted to say these things and now I'm happy at least.
(Sorry for my English, as it's my 2nd language)
You said nothing wrong. The point of view you have is also important to us. We do not make games for us, we make them for gamers so when gamers are frustrated we want to know the reasons. I also fully understand your point. The thing that I need to say is; release date is not the thing developer wants to share at any stage until he's sure (the developer) that the game is ready. We are obligated to predict the date of the release due to various reasons. And there are a lot of them. Stock market, investors, budget planing, people constantly asking for the approximate date etc. etc. This date has to be set and without it we will be asked for it at many stages. It's just better to say anything than say "coming soon" due to a lot of reasons that at the end looks better with the date set. So... we set the date at the beginning of the production, we try to make it but due to complexity of the production it happens that we need to move the date. It's hard for us but we do it. Then we don't want to disappoint our community so we don't want to say "coming soon". So we set the date once again, rethinking everything twice. And once again, during the testing process, community communication we could make a decision that the game should be done different way or maybe it should be more bigger than expected. So we have to decide - meet the deadline, get cash and forget or... Or make a fair deal and make the game good as it should be. But we don't want to fail our community again so there comes the "coming soon" as we fail ourselves and players two times already so we are sure now that we need our time, not exactly fixed, to make the game good. This is what I can say from my perspective. As I said before, we are gamers also, but we learned so much about the process of the production that right now I am much more frustrated at games being served too early just because there is a deadline fixed than on moving the date couple of times. For example - No Man's Sky was the game that was forced to be released. They should have postponed but they didn't. They should have done "coming soon", finish it and give the community the game everyone is waiting for. On such examples we want to learn and their mistake can be now avoided. There is no perfect solution though, hence I am writing this to you and I will be explaining our decisions to the community to make it all clear and make their frustration a little smaller :)
Thanks!
This makes me feel better, actually. If a developer and/or publisher has the primary concern of making gamers happy then it seems less likely that those making the game will jump ship and cut a deal with Epic Games Store.
As many others, I prefer to wait a bit longer and then get something that works, instead of all the rushed releases we see today.
@Valariar: Thx for taking your time and giving such a complete answer!
Our auditors can give us an estimation of how long our financials will take each year based on historic data mostly centred around how many invoices you've captured. Still, this is only an estimation and doesn't always work out, even when you have a well oiled machine.
Our lawyers can give us an estimation of how long contracts will take based on the fact that they do so many and mostly already have templates they build out from. Still, this is only an estimation and very often takes longer due to the complexities of corporate law.
The above two occupations work in industries that are so old, so well defined and so linear that there's "almost" no room for delays.
Development isn't anything like this, the industry reinvents itself every 5 years and the industry as a whole is really only about 20 years old. There's almost nothing to draw a history on because you never know how many lines of code you're going to need, you never know when something will go awry and you lose days, sometimes even weeks overcoming a singular challenge. Have enough challenges and you'll undoubtedly end up with delays.
The more languages are optimised and frameworks expanded, the more complex we build our projects so you're constantly stuffing more and more into each new project.
Our new flagship system was supposed to be released mid 2018. It was a 75% rewrite of the previous version taking advantage of the new features in HTML 5, etc. We thought 1.5 years would be more than enough as the previous version took 3 years and we had an excellent spec. Then the date got pushed to November 2018, then March 2019, it's now May 2019 and while it's just about ready, we may need to push yet one more month while we get it just perfect.
We refuse to compromise and know that releasing a bad version is going to destroy the goodwill we've built up with our customers. Everyone whines when timelines are pushed, but at the end of the day, when I see clients faces light up when they finally get to touch our products makes it all worth while.
Like Bum Simulator, they gave us an exact release date almost more than 1 year ago, showed us multiple trailer, then changed release date 3 times. Why? Can't they say "Coming Soon" like now they are saying until they are completely sure about this game? "Coming soon" doesn't hurt us, keep changing the release date hurts.
It's easy to wait for a "Coming Soon" game for more than 5 years, but not easy to see new release date every time. Hope you got my point. I'm not against anyone, I'm against 'Coming Soon" tag.
Been looking forward to this game, will buy on release.