Such a brilliant marketing strategy, sounds like something I would come up with.

Seriously though, one cannot quantify the effects of consumers having good will toward a company. This type of thing tends to not only garner good will but make you stand out in the sea of developers, many of which are controlled by huge publishers who tend to act as if gamers owed them something. (Entitled publishers if you will )

Exactly the position I found myself in, back on January 25!  I had been a Stardock customer for 5 years, but hesitated for a long time to buy FE; notwithstanding that I routinely lurked in the forums, to see how things were progressing.  I am glad that I finally decided to pre-order, when I did.  Being able to play, provide opinions and feedback, and watch how FE is evolving, is  definitely  fun!

Welcome to our growing community of Beta-testers !!       

The trolls know Xia is back active on the forums so they are staying away...

Ya know as much as I bitched, moaned, and complained about Elemental:War of Magic it does not compare to other bad releases lately. Sure it had bugs which caused constant crashes, but autosaving every turn kinda evened that out, just sucked reloading. Multiplayer was not available, big deal, marketing shows only 10%-30% of strategy gamers even use multiplayer for most strategy games. Even though it had major problems and crappy graphics you still wanted to play it. Through it all Stardock kept their chin up and took FULL responsibility for the games problems. I was one of those who got a refund without any hassle, even bought a new copy six months later.

However since then other companies have had bad releases of non-subscription games that make EWoM's problems seem trivial. If the game has a subscription you can expect quality control simply because it is the subscription, not the game sale sales that makes the money. You release a buggy subscrition game you wont have sunbscriptions the following month. without a subscription it seems most games release an unfinished product to "keep on schedule" with the "fix it later with a patch" attitude.

Stronghold 3 - A complete and utter disappointment. Hard to beleive the same company made the first two it was so bad. Somehow they "lost technology" when they made this version. Walls did not build properly you would have big gaps, the height advantage of walls and towers were gone. Who the hell wants to play a game about castles when the walls and towers dont work? Without working walls and towers it NEVER should have been released. Firefly made an attempt to be responsible, but the it was a futile gesture considering the wall and towers flaw. Forced Gamestop to give a refund for it after half dozen emails.

Heores of Might and Magic VI - I will never touch another Ubisoft product after this rip off. Impulse (Gamestop version) had bad version. My first two hours of owning it I spent in tech support forums trying to find a fix for the Nvidia card problem they had, who the hell makes a game incompatible with Nvidia cards? Dumbasses.  Then I ended up with a demo version despite paying full price. UbiSoft customer service was non-existant. I patiently waited a month for a patch, despite seeing multiple cases of the same problems in their forums. I asked Gamestop for a refund, they refused, claimed they needed UbiSofts permisison to give a refund. If they company couldnt be responsible enough to patch the game or answer support rquests, snowball;s chanc ein hell they going to answer an email regarding a refund. Gamestop refused a second time for a refund, I switched back to Steam with my game purchases. Went to my bank filed a dispute form with Mastercard and forced a refund.

Final Fantasy XIV - I did not experience it myself but I read about it. Square Enix lost years on their bad release. It took almost a year to release a new version for the PC, and will be like another year before console versions come out. however they took some responsibility and waived subscriptions until it was fixed.

Star Wars The Old republic - $60 for a NON-collectors edition subscription game. Um, go @#$% yourself. Maybe if it was  a collectors edition I could see tha tprice. I refuse to pay that much for a basic version of a game that requires a subscription considering the average going rate is about $30-40 (unless you are Trion with the $5 Rift.) That price of $60 says they have no confidence in the games success so they going to gouge as much as possible from the loyals fans. Less than two months later I have already seen "specials" for about $40.

At any rate from what I have played of the unfinished FE beta the stability is a little bit less than equal of EWoM is currently. The gameplay has been streamlined and has improved. Kinda disappointed to see the dynasties go though. Even it its current unfinished state it is still more of a working game than the first two examples.

Keep up the good work and I hope you will not have to take responsibility for another bad release. I doubt you will have to. I think you learned your lesson from the last one.

I bought Elemental because I believed in Stardock. Brad Wardell has not let me down, and he's not going to give us up. He is never going to tell a lie or hurt you.

*sigh* Rickrolling myself here...

Brad is my personal savior.

Frogboy may be king of the stupid (trademark), but us stupidfolks will be having a blast with FE. Its really going in a direction I like.

I liked one the of the comments the first article said.

Stardock does well because its fans (including me) trust it implicitly. My trust faltered after I pre-ordered WOM's special edition, and the game was not what I expected, and I'll admit some doubt still remains in my mind. But that trust will be restored if FE delivers. I buy Stardock games because they make me feel good about myself. I'm supporting a small-name developer that believes in making quality over profit, and whose CEO likes the games he makes, and posts on the forum about them. Hence, I bought Stardock games full-price (not waiting for price drops), and I even preordered WOM.

Stardock makes niche games that are refreshing to us gamers, tired of the mass-market FPS's that are oh-so-common today. Considering Stardock will retain customers for a decade due to this decision, giving away a free game is minor.

I don't have any issues with Elemental. I Pre-Ordered it and enjoyed it from the start. It had a few issues (Like Crashing) and the AI needed some work, but the game was always fun. It's current rev. is a good game. 18 years ago I was going through the same issues with "Master of Magic", The AI was terrible, it kept crashing, and patches needed to be ordered by mail, but the game was ambitious and fun. I look forward to FE and thank the developers for tackling this difficult genre.

This.

Lets look at other companies reputations and what they do with it. hE who should not be nAmed ruins their reputation.. so what do they do to fix it? They buy out a studio who has a good rep with people.. and rename all their studios after it. Not long after said purchase.. the studio that once was worshiped is quickly losing its consumer goodwill and will continue to.. not necessarily in direct relation to the actual developers actions but most likely constraints put on them by the now parent Publisher.

Or lets look at steam.. (Disclosure: I can't stand steam but thats not the point here)

Part of the reason Steam is what it is , is that a lot of people have enormous goodwill toward valve. A great example is that origin is no different really than steam as far as the TOS and EULA. Yet many people who willingly accepted Valves conditions are much less likely to accept origins due to the consumer view on the company who runs it. Now personally neither company has enough of my trust for me to agree to the crazy TOS. But many people feel that Valve is a good guy.. while those who run origin are not. So one can pretty much expect that while Origin may do okay.. it certainly has no chance of competing with steam in the long term. Less because of the actual service and more because of consumers general sentiment toward each services parent company.

Stardock spent alot of its goodwill in the Sale of Impulse and the release of EWOM. It certainly needed to do something to bolster consumer sentiment given that smaller companies live and die on it. While large companies can afford to give consumers the middle finger and continually do, that particular attitude serves to accentuate any consumer centric move by any company in the industry. I mean lets be honest here.. if stardock was owned by hE who should not be nAmed we woulda had 5 or 10 DLC packs for E:WOM and then it would have been buried or the patches would have been sold as Expansions given the amount of core changes there were in them, the devs split up and sent to other studios and/or fired and stardock would be renamed Bioware Michigan.

TLDR: The gaming industry is going in a direction that alienates consumers and any move opposite of that accentuates a difference between stardock and larger companies.

Me too.  I was fully aware that there were issues at the time that I bought it.  I have absolutely no regrets.

I have said before that most games these days are a 3 chapter book with each other chapter sold separately, and self destructs if you ever don't agree to new terms no matter what - the book just burns itself to ashes in your hands.  Also, the book knows when you read it, how often you read it, and reports to the author every activity you do, it follows you around and gets angry when you read other books.  Orwellian policies are common, and requiring constant internet renders a game unplayable in bad weather situations, or for many other reasons i might not have internet.

The one thing i hold against Stardock is requiring constant internet connection, knowing if my net ever fails me or if i am without it, this product becomes unusable immediately.  I find it disturbing, actually.

However, i am glad Stardock is affiliating FE with WOM because everyone on the internet will figure out the relation within one google search anyway, so hiding from the past doesn't work.  Instead they are admitting a fatally bad release, which is very uncommon in this industry - ethical practices are rare these days, and by this association they gain the credibility of standing by "what they did" rather than "standing behind our successes, ignoring our failures".

This method, i believe will help garner brand loyalty - and it didn't hurt to bring in Derek Paxton from FFH - that correlation alone for example, was enough to get me in.

Like Galactic Civilizations, Fallen Enchantress won't have any copy protection whatsoever on release.

All we'll have is a serial number so that it can get tied to your account so that you can re-download it from us anywhere any time.