Vendetta Curse of Raven's Cry Is Another Sad Linux Game Port

[eidolon]

Michael, you should really start looking into demos before buying these games. Save yourself the time, money, and bandwidth. If the demo doesn't work well then surely the rest of the game won't. I understand not all games have demos, but a lot of them do.

Publishers don't release many demos these days. It doesn't jive well with their hit and run tactics.

Here is one developer's related perspective: "Long Live the Demo, or Why We Can't Have All the Things" (Puppy Games)

In a previous blog post from a few years ago, it was mentioned that only 6% of Puppy Games' sales (from 2010 to 2013) were from demo conversions when unlockable demos were offered.

"And still that’s not the whole story. The thing that most beginning developers – us included – fail to take into account is how the markets change over time. As I said, when we first started, we sold conversions on demos for games that cost $20. We started just at the tail end of a golden era in independent game distribution (typical bad luck, huh). The internet had just revolutionalised developing games and the gatekeepers were just about to move in, along with a flood of other developers who suddenly discovered they could do it too. It is suprising in hindsight that so many developers clung to the $20 price model in the face of what was happening.

Things came to a head in about 2008 or so, when we released Droid Assault. Droid Assault was released to the sound of tumbleweed. No-one was even the least bit interested. It’s a great game (IMHO, haha), but when it was released, nobody wanted to buy it. Customers were already thoroughly in the pockets of Valve and BigFish by then. If you didn’t have a game on a portal, it simply didn’t sell. DA must have shifted literally a few hundred copies. By contrast on Steam, now it’s finally out on Steam that is, it’s shifted thousands of units.

And so we must realise that the market is changing, all the time, imperceptably slowly. Let’s look at those figures I just mentioned above, and instead, let’s look at just the last 12 months:

In the last 12 months we’ve sold 77,224 games, of which just 725 were demo conversions. The demos weren’t suddenly any different. The prices weren’t suddenly any different. Suddenly, after just 2 years, we’re only making less than 1% of our sales via demos. Nothing else changed except the entire rest of the market."

Having quickly checked the number of players on Steam Charts for a handful of demos vs the corresponding full games suggested a similar overall consumer disregard for demos.

[nanonyme]

The studio really doesn't seem to care, at all.
The original was released several months ago, after more delays than Duke Nukem Forever ever had and people who pre-ordered the physical disc are still waiting on their orders (which are also constantly being delayed).

If even the months of bugfixing and the re-release under a different name didn't fix it, it's unlikely to be fixed in two weeks.

Wow, you mean someone actually managed to beat DNF's fifteen years of delays?

[unixfan2001]

Wow, you mean someone actually managed to beat DNF's fifteen years of delays?

Not in that sense, no.
But 3DRealms was wise enough to stop quoting new release dates after the first delay, referring to its release as "When it's done".

Raven's Cry was delayed every other month and the devs always quoted a new release date that was simply too good to be true. The game was delayed four times this year alone.

[bug77]

Here is one developer's related perspective: "Long Live the Demo, or Why We Can't Have All the Things" (Puppy Games)

In a previous blog post from a few years ago, it was mentioned that only 6% of Puppy Games' sales (from 2010 to 2013) were from demo conversions when unlockable demos were offered.

"And still that’s not the whole story. The thing that most beginning developers – us included – fail to take into account is how the markets change over time. As I said, when we first started, we sold conversions on demos for games that cost $20. We started just at the tail end of a golden era in independent game distribution (typical bad luck, huh). The internet had just revolutionalised developing games and the gatekeepers were just about to move in, along with a flood of other developers who suddenly discovered they could do it too. It is suprising in hindsight that so many developers clung to the $20 price model in the face of what was happening.

Things came to a head in about 2008 or so, when we released Droid Assault. Droid Assault was released to the sound of tumbleweed. No-one was even the least bit interested. It’s a great game (IMHO, haha), but when it was released, nobody wanted to buy it. Customers were already thoroughly in the pockets of Valve and BigFish by then. If you didn’t have a game on a portal, it simply didn’t sell. DA must have shifted literally a few hundred copies. By contrast on Steam, now it’s finally out on Steam that is, it’s shifted thousands of units.

And so we must realise that the market is changing, all the time, imperceptably slowly. Let’s look at those figures I just mentioned above, and instead, let’s look at just the last 12 months:

In the last 12 months we’ve sold 77,224 games, of which just 725 were demo conversions. The demos weren’t suddenly any different. The prices weren’t suddenly any different. Suddenly, after just 2 years, we’re only making less than 1% of our sales via demos. Nothing else changed except the entire rest of the market."

Having quickly checked the number of players on Steam Charts for a handful of demos vs the corresponding full games suggested a similar overall consumer disregard for demos.

I don't see the point.

[eidolon]

I don't see the point.

I wouldn't chalk up the decline of the demo over time to hit-and-run tactics. The benefit to having a video game demo just isn't very compelling for many anymore, now even more so given Steam's refund policy.

[Ferdinand]

You have 2 weeks to refund, why return it instantly out of anger, instead of contacting the developer and trying to work it out? It wouldn't be the first example of someone releasing a patch for the benchmarking feature.

feb 1 2015
RAVEN'S CRY - How Isn't This A Porno?
Porn-quality dialog and NPCs that approach perspective in the... weirdest way.

https://youtu.be/B9PBoS790kQ

nov 22 2015
VENDETTA: CURSE OF RAVEN'S CRY - Monkey's Scrotum
One of the worst games of 2015, Raven's Cry, has been officially rereleased with a new name and alleged improvements by Topware. Let's see what got fixed!

https://youtu.be/8S3-ZcxULXM