Incidentally, I came across a couple things I found interesting...
First off, Marco Minoli, Slitherine's marketing director, wrote up this short
piece about DW2:
Distant Worlds beginning
When the first Distant Worlds launched in 2010 Slitherine was a different place. It was the first big title we were releasing after the acquisition of Matrix Games, and it was launched on our site only. CodeForce was a one-man team with almost no external help; everything was done in-house: engine, graphics, design, story. Everything.
A passion, not a work
As a marketing person, everything I do is about communicating someone else's vision, the fruit of someone else's heart and mind, and turning it into product. And that is the real challenge because the creators of these games don't see what they do as a "product." More often than not, they don't even see it as work. It's a passion, and it's dedication, excitement, intensity, joy, and rage. It's more an emotion than a product, but it's a very personal one, something that's impossible to translate into words or images. There is so much intangible behind a game like this that seeing it out there, played and enjoyed and rated by others, feels unreal for those who have made it.
Twelve years later
After twelve years, though, Distant Worlds belongs to the players as much as it belongs to its creators: Elliott Gibbs and Erik Rutins. This is why we decided to pick "The Galaxy is Alive" as a tagline for the game. It's been alive for a long time now, and it's now taking new life with this launch. It's the biggest thing we've ever released in our history, and seeing thousands of players spending countless hours in the game is a privilege for everyone who's worked on it. We've reached the top of the charts, added tens of thousands of wishlists, made it to the homepages over every single 3d party store around the globe. And yet, this is only the beginning of an incredible journey.
The future
While the CodeForce team loses sleep trying to fix the inevitable launch bugs, we're all working hard to plan the title's future. Once the dust settles for the outside world, Elliott and Erik will return to their drawing board and reignite their creator mode, turn ideas into code, code into sweat and emotions and pass it over to us.
There will be a lot more screaming and shouting, more planning and brainstorming, but we're going to make sure that we keep breathing new life into the galaxy. You will only have to enjoy it.
I get the sense this is a combination of spin-doctoring and/or ass-covering, but I'm puzzled as to what end, since (as far as I can tell) the article is currently only accessible via the company's emailed newsletter. I'm similarly curious as to who the article is aimed at, since I'm guessing most folks who are already signed up to receive the newsletter generally understand how Slittherine operates, and are therefore going to be more patient and/or forgiving with DW2's various launch issues.
Second, Marco made some interesting comments in connection with DW2 during Thursday's Tea Time video:
In it, he talks about how the game is, by far, the biggest and -- overall -- most successful launch in Slitherine's history; and proceeds to rattle off a bunch of numbers highlighting that fact.
A little later on, however, he announces Slitherine is delaying the launch of their Starship Troopers game...in order to put it through a final -- and much larger -- beta pool/process, so they can better test how well the game runs on different hardware configurations. He directly admits this is in response to DW2's launch, and how going forward, Slitherine plans to be more thorough & methodical about testing for these sorts of problems before releasing their games (presumably & especially their larger titles).
It'll interesting to see how this affects development of their other games going forward, but perhaps it's just as well that Distant Worlds 2 is turning out to be a wake-up call for them.
