Dale, we've discussed this before.  We don't welcome trolling.

EB:

http://www.ebgames.com/browse/search.aspx?N=0&Ntk=TitleKeyword&Ntx=mode+matchallpartial&Ntt=Elemental

Not only will they be stocking Elemental in store but they are stocking the Limited Edition as well.

Well its basically an independent gaming company PC game.

Consoles are big now in days and get the most attention. Seems the only PC games that also get attention seem to be big budget ones. Basically Blizzard or EA games.

If this game scores well and get good reviews it should sell decently.

Just b/c WOW sells millions, doesnt mean there are millions of HC PC gamers out there.

I think Elemental has the disadvantage, or advantage depending on how you look at it, of having to base it's success on how good the game is for it's target audience. A lot of these other games, put out by big company with huge marketing budget could peddle crap or recycled content and their rabid fanbase (reviewers included) will eat it up regardless to the tune of millions.  Personally, I am hoping Elemental will be a little more broad in appeal than GalCiv, which by no means implies I think it was a bad game, because I don't. And I think if the game reaches out far enough, it could be like Civ, selling and active years later.

For what it's worth, Elemental has sufficient pre-orders such that it'll break even on August 24th.

The latest PC Gamer has a two page ad for EWOM at the front of the magazine.  

I don't think EWOM's going to have any trouble selling at all.  Now with Stardock's great reputation.

Do you know anything about Elemental in Canada?

That's actually pretty damn cool, if I may say so. You guys have never really commented on preorder numbers, so it's nice to have a ballpark figure like this

I'll be getting this game as soon as it releases. It's the only 2010 game i have been looking forward to

Look. I'm biased. But I've been making games for a long time.

I lot of the people who buy our games are like me. We grew up on Ultima IV, we loved MoM, we loved Xcom.  Some people would play those games and not like them. That's fine. There's lots of games that cater to that huge demographic.

Elemental is for us.

I've got years.  I'm not working on any games other than Elemental for a long while. It is that good.

Completely agree. I wouldn't worry about Dale's EB comment. He probably wasn't trolling. Most likely he just had the unfortunate luck of running into a EB employee that didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, which pretty much describes MOST EB employees I've ever know. Half of them are kids who are just there to get a pay check and don't care a lick about games.

Dale ALWAYS plugs Steam. He's just looking for a reaction.

The reality is, and let's be real, Elemental is going to be the fantasy TBS game for awhile.  I'll probably break down and buy Civ V from Steam at some point (after a lot of SC2) but realistically, you could make Ultima IV with Elemental and share it with others seamlessly. I don't see anyone else offering that.

We'll have to revisit the whole beta program thing after this since people were really expecting some sort of demo to comment on tweaking rather than participating in a real beta like the techies of the old days understood. But we've gotten so much good feedback. I think people are going to freak out at the final version. It doesn't just play differently. It's visually very different. And that was the whole point of the beta.

I didn't think it was trolling either. There is a reason I try not to order from EB/GS if at all possible, and it's not only because they do a double take every time I, a woman <gasp>, order or ask for a game that isn't Sims related (and I like the Sims actually).

For whatever it's worth, my suggestion would be to combine the two. The first couple months should be a real beta, because a lot of people--myself included--enjoy giving feedback and seeing an impact on the game, and I imagine is more useful to you as a developer. Then make the schedule such that the game is "done" somewhere around a month or two before the release date, and during those two months the beta is more like a demo, getting stuff balanced and polished and whatnot, similar to the SC2 beta.

Ahh, that explains it a little more. I didn't/don't have any ideas about his posting history.

I'd have to say I agree with Elemental being THE Fantasy TBS of our time. With all the possibilities you've given us there's almost no limit to what can be done with it provided the modder or modders in question have the proper tools and know-how. I think Elemental will Reign in the Fantasy TBS genre for many years to come even with all the inevitable clones that are going to be made. Also I'd guarantee now that NONE of those "clones" that will be made will offer us the flexibility of Elemental's tools.

You know what's worse than being a girl looking to buy video games? Being a guy and getting to the store to buy the game you want and there's some teenage chick behind the counter that can't even find the name of the game you want listed in the computer. If you ask me, anyone who works in a "specialty store" like one that sells video games or electronics needs to know as much about that "specialty" as possible. Unfortunately the people in charge of hiring these kinds of employees are only hiring them because they're hot, young, and stupid, hence they think they'll get some booty by hiring the know nothing girl to work there.

Don't get me wrong, there's just as many "know nothing" Guys that work at these places too, but, more often than not it's the girls that work there that don't know what they're doing. The guys tend to take a little more interest in gaming but I think that barrier is breaking down more and more as time passes. There are plenty of girl gamers out there, my wife is one, but it's still a mostly male dominated form of entertainment from a consumer standpoint.

I'd mostly agree with kyogre. The bulk of the beta should be what it was. But, given the scope of a game like Elemental, I do think it would be beneficial to give the testers about a month of a non-changing game, so we can play the hell out of it and comment on issues we really couldn't (pacing in late game huge maps, etc). The content here should be final or near-final, so we can get an accurate representation of the game.

It's great to get the mechanics functionality down through the beta we had, but it'd also help the game to have had a couple hundred active testers just have their way with the game for a while to discover issues that weren't obvious with an ever-changing game.

The problem is that a place like EB or Gamestop is actually a lousy place to work. It's mostly about used games and pre-orders. They don't pay very well. While you could get someone who knows and loves their games to work there and do a good job, the best employees are going to wind up in higher paying jobs (because talent tends to rise over time).

Hell, before they closed I was in a Game Crazy in the US and asked if they had any memory cards for the Wii, to play a Gamecube game. He looked in the computer and said no. So I was looking at the games for sale and guess what I found? Turns out he didn't know what to look for.

You can apply the same thing to numerous specialty stores. The good ones have people who either know the stuff naturally or get training. The rest are just low paid whoever they can find to move product and don't get training. You get what you pay for in employees, and gender has nothing to do with it.

If EB in the US is carrying it (and they appear to be), most likely they'll be able to get it in Canada too. The ones near me won't have any unless you pre-order though, because that's just how they are with anything that isn't projected to be a million unit seller. Last I checked Future Shop didn't have a listing for it at all, which is kind of surprising given that their PC game selection isn't bad.

Yeah, this is the important thing. The problem isn't with the beta as it ran, except that there was no phase where the full game was assembled and things like pacing & balance could be looked at.

I agree with having two stages with future betas - a proper beta, then a go at the content that is final or near-final, so more of the pacing, balancing issues etc. can be worked out.

Frogboy, what do you think?

Best regards,
Steven.

The EB Games I went to did not even have it in their system.

Most beta's don't have you beta test the "final" version...

You know what we mean. The Starcraft 2 beta was basically 5 months (or however long it was) of balance testing and polishing. The game itself was pretty much "done," it was just tweaking. The same can be said of most beta's nowadays. Of course they don't give you the final version, that would be silly. But the game mechanics are pretty much locked in, they have most of the final art assets, and typically don't differ much from the version of the game that is released.

Most the MMOs do. Settlers 7 did. From personal experience, I can say I've played a lot of games that pretty much had everything in it the final game did.

I agree with you're whole reply Except the last sentence. I'm not trying to sound sexist, but sex Does have Something to do with it. I've ran into more female employees in video game stores that didn't know what they were doing than I have male employees who didn't know what they were doing. It's a simple Statistical Fact. There are female gamers, sure, but not as many as there are male gamers. When you take the entire gaming population, which lets face it is a whole shit load of people, and then take just the gamers that work at video game stores, there will be more guys than there will be girls. If you'd like to test this fact, travel to every video game store you can find and find the hottest chick in the place and ask her for an obscure PC title and see what happens. Down here in Florida the game stores are all slap full of chicks that are lucky they can tell the difference between a Xbox360 game and a PS3 game. It's just simple numbers.

All my Software Etc/GS clerks are male and know little about the games. Is this the part where I am supposed to say sex DOES have something to do with it?