How do you feel about the open beta release?
I don't think this is a good question. Lots of people asked similar things back when Goko was first coming out, and there's not a good way for Donald to answer it. Though not directly, these people are his business partners. It would be bad business and unprofessional to criticize them.
Well yes and no. Sometimes people want me to say bad things about a publisher for them, and well man, who would I rather be friends with, some guy on BGG or the publisher, think think.
I am not actually any kind of a partner with MF. I license the game to RGG, they have whatever deal with, man, whoever they have a deal with, I don't know if that deal is even direct with MF. Still it behooves me to behave in a way a disinterested third party would think was reasonable.
At the same time I would just as soon everyone knew I was going to be honest. It's an advantage sometimes, it pays off when you-the-company want someone honest. If it hurts you other times well you can decide for yourself if that leaves interacting with me worth it or not.
FFG's contract forbids you from speaking ill of either your game with them or them, for the duration. I didn't talk much about Infiltration because I didn't want to feel like I was being dishonest via omission. They were sad about that but well. If you want me to promote my game with you you have to let me be honest. Now that the contract has expired, I haven't posted some tell-all or anything; I know they still don't want me bad-mouthing them. And well. Everyone always thinks they know best, that they know better than you, whether you're the game designer or whoever; it's no surprise that FFG thought they knew better than me. I knew going into the deal that they would change the game and there would be nothing that I could do. And they made changes I didn't like but to their credit included game variants that get a ways back towards the original. I would still work with them again, depending on the project. And I mean, they may have that clause in their contract, but they seem pretty honest. They don't make a Dominion rip-off, look at that.
So anyway, this company that I'm only indirectly doing business with, they might as well know that I will be honest. I have been pretty supportive so far I think? I mean we are talking about a game that I expected to be looking good in 2011 or 2012.
One thing you can consider is that it's all risk to them; Dominion has to be successful enough to rake in cash, or they have just thrown away money on it. The take so far does not remotely cover the man-hours. So I mean 1) if some of their available man-hours are going to other projects instead, that's why, they need to stay afloat while they pursue this, and 2) they sure are going to try to get a hit out of it. If they fail to fix things and it sucks then they made a really poor investment. So you can take a completely pragmatic, everyone is selfish take on this, and what you come up with is, they are going to try to make online Dominion fantastic. The worst I can say is, they will be trying to make it fantastic for normal people rather than hardcore players.
Anyway on to sudgy's question. For sure I personally would have just turned off the store and kept the beta small-scale until it was in better shape. There are really basic things not working or not working well, and there's no point adding people until you are outpacing the ability of your testers to find things to fix. Not having revenue from it meanwhile sounds bad but I don't think we're talking about much revenue. And you don't want bad PR from a more public unfinished program.