Mentalepsy: You're entitled to be annoyed at the release timeline. I want Shadow Magic, too, but to claim that the end-of-beta downtime has clearly caused a delay of several months in the Age of Wonders series when it was only announced two weeks ago today is jumping to a rather unwarranted conclusion.
It is an unwarranted conclusion. That's why I didn't come to it. My conclusion was that the PR stunt, by knocking out a release Tuesday, would delay Shadow Magic for weeks. It did.
I said that the PR stunt, PLUS GOG's 1-2 titles a week release policy could extend the delay into months. Baldur's Gate and Planescape bumped it back another week. "Who is Dr M" presages some title next Tuesday that is not AoW 2. It very well could be a month or more past the Impulse release that GOG finally deigns to release Shadow Magic.
Why do the GOG loyal have to put up with delay after delay while the Impulse customers are enjoying the game right now? Because GOG has a monopoly on its niche and can do whatever it wants.
That's what really rankles about this PR stunt. Here we are sticking up for GOG for 2 years as the little David against Steam's Goliath and they turn around and cut the servers without warning and leave an "Oops, we went out of business!" message because they know they can take their customers for granted. Where else are we going to go?
Hopefully competition from gamersgate will put an end to this.
Mentalepsy: "Coming soon" generally means "coming in 2-4 weeks." You know that.
They already released AoW1 and their normal release schedule with trilogies is one after the other. There was nothing outrageous about expecting Shadow Magic the following Thursday.