Yeah. And according to someone close to it, out of the initial sales, $20/pop went out to the publisher/developer: ten bucks a pop.
Still, you figure 30k initial sales, that's 300,000 for CRS. That's a drop in the bucket.
I left after sometime after release, after being invited to by the then head of the testers. I had published detailed information on exactly what was wrong with the 9mm parabellum rounds, and exactly under what conditions they flew backwards.
They may have read my reports, but they sure didn't tell me. The only thing I heard was "there might be a problem with the 9mm parabellum, but we haven't seen enough evidence."
WEll, I gave them evidence. For months, I gave them evidence.
Finally, they posted osmething to their public site, saying "We found there was a problem with the bullet drag that made them fly backwards under certain conditions."
Uh.... That's what I've been saying for the last two months. I even described those conditions to a level that they were repeatable by anybody falling a certain regime.
But nobody bothered to respond.
After spending more time than I cared doing this, I got a response that was effectively a slap in the face.
I raised a stink, and I must confess, they iimproved their comms with the beta testers. But I was invited to leave..
So I did.
Nearly a year later, I thought about giving them another try. The good people (and honestly, in spite of my issues they're good people, got laid off. Come to think of it, Playnet even owes me money (seventy-five bucks) they've never bothered to acknowledge personally. Heck, I didn't even get a message when they went bankrupt.
Still, I remembered some fine moments in a church tower, slaughtering krauts with my lee-enfield.
So I tried to download.
I'm sorry, IL-2 is different. If you don't download the patch, you still have a working and entertaining product. With WW2Ol, if yopou don't have the patch (which is a 100mb obligatory download), you don't play.
With a 56k, that's something around 6 hours.
I tried several times. Including this afternoon. My PC locked up at 89%. Sure, I could download some bit of spyware that allowed me to resume, but just for WW2OL? Anything less than 64 Megs I can download at the library and dump into my pen drive.
Sorry, I like the folks; it's a great idea; but the implemetation poor. And you still can't bail out of a burning tank?