Earlier this week, Friday to be exact, Kerebos Productions released their much anticipated sequel to “Sword of the Stars”, “Sword of the Stars II”. The game was originally distributed on Steam: however, this ended up being a (so it was claimed) a ‘beta version’ which indeed did not work. Later that night, Kerebos uploaded the ‘real version’, which ended up being a version that a) did not work as promised and b) did not appear to be feature complete for the price of a 40,- a pop. Fans on Steam raged over this as: witness the threads (“Serious problems at Kerberos”, “A new letter from Kerberos”, “5 hours??” and “Patch incoming shortly”).
In summary: it appears that Kerberos could not meet the expectations of releasing a full product. I can’t get over it how the product was hyped and (at the end) a not-working game was released at the full price. Shoddy and genuinely unprofessional. I don’t know what really happened at that company (exodus of developers perhaps?) but releasing beta software and then playing the victim card doesn’t make me want to play their video games.
Earlier I bought FIFA 2012 (no, really) after pondering if I could live with EA’s new Digital content delivery mechanism called ‘Origins’. Origins is still beta, I believe and at the moment, I wouldn’t even dare to compare it with Steam. However, competition is good: Steam has now been at it for what… 8 or so years and hopefully this will keep the Valve team on their toes. What about FIFA 2012? It is fun to play and I don’t really have trouble running it on my 3 year old Duo Core 2 laptop. I do find it annoying that in this age, software companies have decided that their software should only run when there’s an online connection. Shame.