To everyone who has purchased (or is considering purchasing) CONSORTIUM...

Hello everyone,

I thought it was best I write this note directly, as a follow-up to the Announcement we made just after launch .

The past five weeks has been an utter blur of 12+ hour days and 7 days/week, for most of our small team and were still here, we're still listening, and were not going anywhere!  Since people have appreciated our upfront nature thus far, I thought another honest appraisal on where were at would be welcome at this stage.

Lets start by talking a little about our team.  People have been asking a lot lately just how small is our small team, so let me set the record straight.  While we don't necessarily *like* pointing this fact out, the core CONSORTIUM development team that was principally responsible for producing this video-game consists of exactly one programmer, one designer/scripter, one writer, one 3D artist, one animator/art director, and one choreographer/3D artist.  That is SIX people who have worked full-time for two and a half years to make this game a reality. 

We worked through extremely challenging circumstances throughout production, largely due to the highly experimental nature of our game's design.  I am proud and confident in saying that each and every one of us is a rock star.  That is, in terms of the immensely heavy workload we've all taken on, fueled by the shared belief in our vision of a truly original interactive experience unlike anything else out there.

We (happily) pushed ourselves to the brink of total exhaustion in pursuit of the dream of realizing our own independent creative vision utterly untainted by external factors and influences which (unfortunately) tend to drive the creativity behind so many commercial 3D videogames in this day and age. 

Without wanting to repeat our post-launch announcement too much, we still openly acknowledge our honest mistake of launching a game that was actually in late beta and should have instead launched as an "Early Access" title.  In many ways, everything comes down to that one mistake on our part.  We realize that is damaged the initial impressions that people had of CONSORTIUM.  But we have soldiered on.

Throughout all of January, we fixed a very large number of bugs and issues, along with polishing and refining many aspects of the experience to increase and maintain the "immersion factor" for any single play-through.  We have been extremely open about what we have fixed and improved, with posts listing all the fixes we have made.  We have also been open, honest and as helpful as possible with you all via the CONSORTIUM Steam discussion forums and through the many emails weve received from you.  At the same time weve been quite humbled by the general positivity from these correspondences and how incredibly helpful and understanding youve been.  We cant thank you enough as this has certainly helped keep the company fires burning!

However, all that being said, YES, we humbly acknowledge that there are still some issues (especially performance related) which we shipped with and which still continue to plague some of your builds.  While today's update fixes some of these issues, we will continue to work to solve all remaining problems, some of which have proven to be very challenging for a variety of unforeseen reasons.

As expressed above, we have but a fraction of the percentage of the manpower of most typical commercial game development studios.  All we can do is ask that you please trust us.  We want everyone to be able to experience CONSORTIUM the way it is meant to be experienced, and we wont rest until everyone who has purchased the game (and are above minimum spec) can do just that.  It is also important to realize that the turnaround time of said fixes will be slower than what you're used to getting from a PC game developer funded by a large publisher. 

So, the bottom line moving forward is this:  If you have a machine which falls within the minimum-recommended specs, then rest assured the game you purchased WILL be able to run reasonably well on your machine.  Quite literally nothing frustrates us more than gamers with a good gaming machine buying our game and not being able to play it properly.  Despite the daunting nature of the millions of different software/hardware configurations out there, we will find solutions to all major issues that remain for you as fast as we are able to. 

This is a promise!

Gregory MacMartin

C.E.O. & Designer/Scripter @ iDGi

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