Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Hell stays hot. Lions not lying down with lambs. Grimoire fails to launch again.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 11, 2017

Somehow I believed that with the countdown and the big announcement “7-7-2017” visual in the game description and everything, maybe Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar would actually launch this time. For reals. After 23 years. I have friends who have played the “superdemo,” so I know something exists.

But seriously, release has been imminent on this thing since at least 1998, so… yeah. Back to the vaporware pile. I’d like to believe that this was simply a bump or and misfire and we’ll see the full game appear in a couple of days… But seriously, folks. ย This wouldn’t be the first missed date, and it’s been years. Decades, even.

So… we’ll see.

Oh, and to really help bring the history home here… Filip Pepe posted this gem from 1997 as a reminder. Let’s see… in 1997, I was barely 3 years out of college and in into my first job as a video game developer.

Now … clearly the developer is putting all his eggs in one basket, has a perfectionist streak, and is banking on this one title to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Maybe that will work out for him. Maybe it’s an ingenious marketing plan. But I sure don’t think I could do that. The winning strategy I keep seeing is simply to remain prolific (a big problem with me) and create regular, frequent products of sufficient quality. Yeah, it’s a slower-burn way to go, and on the vanishingly small chance that a single product hits a home-run, it might limit the chance that it’s a runaway hit. Or not… (thinking of Minecraft… that had nothing to help it become the runaway hit it became. )

But do you really want to spend decades trying to become a one-hit wonder?

But if you look at history… the “masterpieces” most remembered of the great artists of history were almost always samples of a much, much larger body of work. We tend to forget that these masters were ultra-prolific, pretend those masterpieces were all they ever created, and selectively ignore everything else they produced over their career.

 

 

 


Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 4 Comments to Read



  • Modran said,

    Something like a survival bias ๐Ÿ™‚ ?

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    A little bit. ๐Ÿ˜‰

  • The Old Farmer said,

    RPGWatch was having a bit of fun at Grimoire’s expense in the last month or so relating to its missed release dates in the past. Honestly though now is probably the worst time in the last 20 years to mess around with a release because of the Glut of Indie games in the same category and gamer cynicism.
    The BS tolerance on Steam is also pretty low now too and reviewers can shred a game pretty fast and then others dog pile in to destroy its ratings too.
    And lets not forget the 2h refund limit / free demo.

  • Flintstone said,

    This guy built some kind of apocalypse bunker, I’m certain money’s not an issue and Grimoire’s a vanity project for him to prove he can “create a better Wizardry game than Sir-Tech” – now that this game is 23 years and counting, I don’t think there’s any price point that would turn a profit anyway.

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