by GordonWalton a day ago in forum News & Announcements in 02/27/15 - Distribution/hosting Outside Of North America For Crowfall
Mostly really good feedback in this thread, thanks!
I'd like to call out that it would have been very easy for us to make casual promises, or even vague hints and none of these issues would have arisen. That's not our style. We will remain candid even when it costs us early backers. As stewards of your entertainment experience, we must be trustworthy and that means honest, even when it is to our detriment. We hope that this stance matters to our ongoing community.
I realize many companies in our space are not very customer oriented, and often you must throw fits and threaten them to get any reaction. We're not those guys. We know these issues are emotional and extremely personal to your playing experience. We want to dialog and learn from you; but we can't do that unless you engage with us in civil conversation.
I'll make some clarifications and ask some questions.
1) >"Almost half of the kickstarting money came from Europe" (I'd love to get a pointer to this stat, KS gives us no info on backers until the end of the campaign)
2) We've heard the feedback we need a stretch goal that matters to the overseas audiences, and our PayPal won't go up without it
3) We know most of the major MMO publishing players in the European and Asian markets and can easily contact them (some of them we'll see next week at GDC). What's disappointing is that there are no positive reports coming from you on any of these companies. Hopefully people can share something positive.
4) How are the smaller MMO companies referenced here putting in servers in Europe doing? Not liking the game, is not the same thing as not liking their service capabilities.
5) I put a server for UO in Australia once (that game was very sensitive to latency). UO was the first game to have a worldwide community where every person could play in every other country's shards. The Australia server ended up not being viable for a series of reasons, but it was a valuable learning experience! The internet has massively improved since then but there is also tremendously more traffic.
6) Putting a server into Europe, and then actually servicing European customers means we are doing business in the EU and that has it's own set of costs, regulatory requirements and business complexities which are probably unclear to most customers. We are not afraid of this, but we understand enough about what is involved to not jump in unprepared, or under-funded. Given the feedback here so far, we are going to need to freshen up our knowledge on operating in the EU.
7) All of this is moot unless there is a large enough group of customers who want our experience in Europe. We'll have to find a way to measure that one way or the other.
Again, we'd love our ArtCraft service to be worldwide if we could make that happen(except China, no one gets to do China from the outside). But that is a huge undertaking, something we'll have to grow into.
Thank you all for engaging in the conversation around these issues.
