What happened to "it will be released when its done" approach? I honestly prefer it to rushed games. Take your time devs.

I guess most of forum users would like to see beta3a and beta4. But I'm afraid more people, who rarely come here, just want to play it ASAP. And obviously most of them just want to play a "fresh" game, not a well balanced game. They want big ships, they want big fireworks, and they want to cry "Wooooo it's cool!", and then they turn to their preferred games: StarCraft, WarCraft III, online pokers and so. At least that's what I observed in my local game forums.

And considering the dev guys, they are under the pressure of cost and sales income and all kinds of finacial figures, and maybe some of them even have already turned to next game development. So more beta is obviously a problem of them.

And everyone of us know two important points: 1) we only found one Blizzard in the whole world; and 2) unfortunately IronClad is not Blizzard.

So the only hope is, we can get some updates later, within two months or so. Maybe we can even get some important changes (like Gauss Rail Gun can slow down the enemy, or Guidance becomes an AoE skill).

i play on highest setting and fastest speed and have played EVERY faction and i have NEVER had a mini dump or desync i guess I've just gotten lucky

Something I've always been afraid of was what if they lost money on Rebellion?  That would certainly lead to development getting cut short unfortunately..  I really hope that this isn't the case though.  I mean beyond the fact that it would mean less time for them to be able to justify working on it during the day, I'd feel bad for them for making a great game and not making money off it.  I really hope that isn't the case.  Great games deserve great profits and Sins is a great game.

The same fear of me. And I doubt that they are really being under heavy pressure.

I don't agree. One of the reasons making a good product great is financial success. The biggest obstacle is Sins is always a small-circle game. At least the brand value of IronClad is less attractive comparing with Blizzard.

What makes the thing worst, is that people like big ships, so the devs give them, with tons of new balancing problems and new bugs. Such problem will severely jeopardize the core player community, and lower the game popularity even more. Actually it could be solved easily - just make the Titan only available in campaign and let the normal game more balanced. But, we all know it is impossible...

But I still have confidence on IronClad. They have proved me that they are responsible, and will continue to release patches even after several months. That's one of the important points I use to persuade my friends.

So let's pray we can have new patches in the next two weeks...

I'm not saying that I believe that people should make games for profit.  I'm saying that they should make awesome games because they love it and if it turns out well, they deserve to get money from it.  Content driven development: good.  Profit driven development: bad.

Yes, we all see what EA provided us. I have several friends once been core fans of Need for Speed, they bought every games of NFS they can (just consider the fact that in 1990s, the price of NFS5 in China can provide a family with one month of food). But now, they cursed and abandoned the latest NFS.

But the devs are people, not androids, they have family to feed. They have pressure.

I respect the devs because they offer us a good game with quite low budget. But the only reason I spend my money is because I love the topic and how the game shows us that topic. And that's problem: such a space RTS can hardly become a popular game, so the financial pressure is always there, the devs can never polish their products like Blizzard; but the other side of coin is, such an "unfinished" game will surely scare some potential new players, if not many. The circle has already been small, and each potential loss is severe loss.

I'm not defending the devs; I write these just because I'm a firmware developer, and always has the pressure of quality and schedule and cost, and I think I can understand the devs. But, I'm a fan of Sins, I love it, and hope it to become a great game instead of only a good game. So I really hope the devs can persuade their managements and publishers, to give them at least two weeks more for beta testing.

And I read an article somewhere, which says, most game sales income is within the first week of release.

That's most true for hype-driven console games, where it's all front loaded and then disappears once the hype is gone. Console games also don't tend to have sale prices very often, and they disappear from store shelves due to limited space or when the number of copies pressed simply runs out (a lot of translated Japanese games just disappear because there's no copies left to buy and it's too expensive to make more, so sales are lost).

It's much less true for PC games these days, thanks to the market now being primarily digital. Games don't disappear from Steam. Sales are plentiful and can rekindle interest later (and garner huge revenue). If it takes a while for word of mouth to create an audience for a game, it doesn't matter that much anymore. A game like Recettear blew past expectations, but didn't do it in the first few days. It took some time for word to spread, and once it did then sales shot up.

It's pretty much reversed for iOS games though, because almost everything is based on word of mouth and what your friends are playing there (and reviews, and showing up in the top games lists. There's very few real franchises that get front loaded sales (Angry Birds Space being one that did), stuff like Draw Something sold continuously for weeks as more people learned about it.

If only the world worked as such...unfortunately, it does not

Hence my fear that they might be losing money..