We’ve updated the end of this article with some words from Mark Jacobs.
Last winter, City State Entertainment announced it’d received a big cash investment and put a date on Camelot Unchained’s beta one: July 4th, 2018. At the time, the beta was already three years late, as the studio struggled to find programmers, completely refactored large chunks of its ability system, and ultimately opened up a second studio in Seattle, and I think it’s fair to say that patience has thinned out along the way.
But as we’ve been reporting for the last few weeks, while the team was originally on schedule, GDPR compliance requirements created a huge setback for the beta as key employees worked on dealing with bureaucracy instead of fixing mission-critical bugs. Consequently, as CSE’s Mark Jacobs notes in yesterday’s stream, whether or not the beta actually launches Wednesday is still “too close to call.”
Jacobs tells fans that the studio is down to a list of 40 bugs it’s still crunching on – yes, they’re crunching this weekend – and they’ll be conducting large-scale testing all weekend, which will determine whether beta one is happening on time. (The next mini-test begins right as this post goes live, in fact.)
“The good news is, no matter what happens, whether we make beta one on Wednesday or we miss beta one on Wednesday, the version you get is going to be so much better than many other games have launched with in terms of stability, in terms of bugs,” Jacobs says. “We have no intention of launching beta one with the number of bugs that we had, […] and if we end of delaying, that will continue to be the focus. We have zero plans to add any scope.”
“Our refund percentage is at 3.8% of total pledges. That’s a really small number, especially after 5 years. You know that we are still paying refunds and still have a no questions asked policy. We’re slow, but we always pay off and don’t make people jump through hoops. The last two months we’ve seen a more than doubling of number of new pledges. In June, we’ve received almost 4x the number of donations in January.”
