Not gone gold yet???

[weakciv]

there is "Gone Gold" which is where the game has been sent to make copies
Then there is "Gold Sales" which is a specific level of sales. (not sure of hte number though)

 

[Undertaker798]

Thats the one


whenever tht happens they sumway strangely drop the price, which i think is kinda wierd

 

[warpstorm]

That's because, for most games, the sales drop to a trickle after the first couple of months. At some point after the first obligatory expansion, they make a bundle that includes the games and expansion and sell this as "Insert Game title Here" Gold. This is a last ditch effort to get a few bucks off of the game. By this time, it isn't moving at all. They usually don't make a lot of money off of the Gold Edition, but then again, it doesn't cost much to repackage (often without manuals).

 

[DarthCycle]

I am sure it would be hell of a crunch time at Firaxis right now because the game has already pushed above 2 weeks of the original release date! I hope they pull it off nicely because developer never want to release a game unpolished, it is mostly the greed of publishers that results in a bug filled product.

You might be closer to truth than you think. Civ4 is made by Firaxis, published by Take 2 games which is in turn a subsidiary of Take 2 Interactive. Take 2 financial next (financial) quarter ends when? October.

So by releasing Civ4 at the end of October, they add those sales figures to their quartely revenues, hence projecting a slightly better financial picture to their stockholders. This is by no mean something unique for Take 2 but the whole publishing industry.

And they probably need it with all the heat they got from the problem (mostly PR though) with GTA San Andrea. But for public companies, PR is very important. Good company image usually reflect in a healthy stock price.

 

[warpstorm]

It's even worse than that. Take2's fiscal year (not just the quarter) ends in October.

 

[DarthCycle]

Oh no ...

 

[mistat137]

Yeah, that definately lowers the likelihood that the game will be polished (relatively big free) when it is released. How many horror stories about PC games that are rushed out to meet some absurd publisher date have we all heard? I would seriously bet money now that the game will be bug-ridden and definately not balanced. You can gamble on more bizarre things after all.

Once again, it won't matter because they've already raked in a ton of money, and all the publisher sees is that they can release patches for the game after it comes out to appease angry Civ4 buyers.

 

[Sullla]

Will Civ4 have some bugs on release? Undoubtedly - with a game of this size and complexity, no one could possibly catch everything. But I don't think we'll see any gross balancing problems on release (despite much speculation to the contrary). There's supposedly been a crack team of players testing this thing for months now - I think there's a good chance they've managed to catch those kind of things.