Saturday, 11th July 2009
Rise Of Flight: Vision Statement, 2 Planes For Free
Posted at 02:14 GMT by Gremlin
On the Rise Of Flight Developers Blog there is a new entry made by neoqb General Manager Roman Ivanov and RoF Producer Albert Zhiltzov explaining some of the background and recent troubles during introduction of the sim to the market as well as giving a vision for the future. Some snippets:
There comes a time during the development of a product like this where you must make a decision to release it to the public or further delay it. Such a decision is always hard and you have to balance your business concerns with your personal concerns, knowing that there is always going to be something about the product that will disappoint someone, somewhere. We eventually decided that the fun of flying ROF outweighed the bugs and we went to market. We fully realize that some of you were disappointed with some shortcomings or design decisions we made and we apologize of you were not happy with your purchase. We also know that a great many of you are very pleased with your purchase of ROF and we deeply appreciate your enthusiasm for the product and love to hear that you are having fun with it. To those that were disappointed, we want to assure you that we will do all we can to improve the product as fast as we can to hopefully change your mind at some point in the future.
As you are all aware, the ROF design includes a different way of activating, managing and launching (AML) your game than what most flight-simmers are used to. Again, we apologize to those that do not agree with our design, but we would like you to know that we chose this design as a solution to other less desirable options available to us as a developer. Although some in the community do not like our AML design, we hope that the way in which it is utilized in the coming months and years will demonstrate the positive and useful aspects of it and over time our AML design will become an almost transparent part of your ROF experience.
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Honestly speaking, developing this product has cost us millions of rubles, dollars and Euros and we need to have a strategy for sustaining ourselves over the next few years if we are to continue our work. Even though we are a “small” developer we still have a good size staff full of coders, modelers, artists and support staff. To be able to continue to develop our engine and produce more quality products for the community we require a steady revenue stream. We concluded that for our niche product to survive we needed a new approach. Flight-simulations are a dying genre in PC gaming and the reasons are pretty obvious to the community. Our approach is not meant to offend, nor is it rooted in greed, it is simply a survival strategy. We hope you understand, even if you disagree with this approach.
Further in the blog there is a plan laid out for the near future and the biggest surprise is that all American and Eurpean users will get the two planes Nieuport 28 and Albatros D.V for free starting as of today.
Next week the Nieuport 17 can be purchased at a price of 7.62 US-$ or 5.45 Euro. Also a S.E.5 (or is it rather a S.E.5a?) and the Pfalz D.III are currently in beta test. Isn't the S.E.5 a beauty?
