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As for the who Breed issue, it is quite simple. Most of you are just posting pure speculation and silliness laden conjecture.

If Brat claim that they submitted a build which CVD did not ship, there is a 90% chance that they are right. Why? Because, well, I've been through that TWICE myself. Once in 1996 with Take Two and again in late 2003 with Dreamcatcher - both of which ended in an out-of-court settlement. In the case of Dreamcatcher, had I allowed them to ship the build they had, it would have timed out eventually because it was a Release Candidate build that was never slated for release. And they (though, due to the lawsuit it became evident that the heads of the company had no idea about this) KNEW this because ALL my game builds apart from the final Gold CDROM, are DRM protected due to various leaks of in development games, sent out to the media etc..

In the case of Take Two - I was a tad inexperienced (being my very first game) back then - so they had a build to ship, which they did and without my knowledge. It cost them in the end, because when it comes to my IP, nobody and I do mean nobody, gets to piss around with it. Thats why owning your own stuff, not relying on publishers for your primary income etc etc, is the #1 asset in being an indie developer.

And I do know a bit (due to NDAs, not the whole story) about what happened with Breed, though I am not at liberty to discuss it. Also, the person who wrote the original storyline, is actually an active and respected member of the BC community - not some fly-by-night operator.

Publishers do crap like this ALL the time. Some you get to hear about, and some you don't. And most devs can't do a damn thing about it. I'm not one of those. Games are late. Developers have seemingly NO concept of timely delivery in most cases. But the fact remains, there are remedies for this. Shipping a game in an unplayable or less than stellar fashion, is NOT considered a valid remedy because at the end of the day, once the practice becomes an epidemic (as it seemingly has in the past few years), gamers get to suffer and more and more games get pirated. Why? Because gamers have absolutely NO incentive to trust publishers. I'm a gamer who happens to be a game developer - not a game developer who seemingly dropped into the gaming scene for a paycheck, so I get to see both sides, everyday.

Goddamn publishers. Eventually, most of them WIL go out of business. The last fews years is just the beginning. And in the end, the last few left standing, will get their act in gear and quit pissing around like this. It is inevitable.

To see how stuff like what Brat described, happens, here is what I posted over at GG


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One way that this happens (e.g. in the case of Atari, Dreamcatcher etc), is that if the game is running late, they tend to go with the last build they signed off on. Where payment related milestones are concerned (e.g. Atari, CDV etc), a build they sign off on, gets a milestone payment. During that sign off, the publisher (through its producer) knows whats wrong with the game, whats pending etc etc.

So when the hammer to ship comes down, they don't go back and ask the dev for another build. Why? Because that sparks another round of testing etc and that in itself - depending on the size of the publisher - gets to be a long drawn out process. And in most game dev stints, a build which fixes and adds new items, usually - and this is like 90% of the time - breaks something else, introduces new bugs/issues etc etc. So, thats the risk of going with a new untested build. Some publishers do obtain the most recent build and box it. Others just play it a little safer and go with the last signed off build, since they probably know what state its in.

During the ship period, there can be up to a month of more delay - especially if the people doing the manuals, CD art etc, are asleep on the job. If those assets are already created, going Gold takes can be as quick and painless as inside of a week. Production takes another week or so. This all amounts to about two weeks from the Gold decision to the retail shelf. And assuming the devs haven't all gone on vacation after they were advised (assuming they were advised) that the publisher was shipping what they had in hand, they continue working on the game as if it hadn't even shipped. This is why you have patches appearing even before the game hits the retail shelf in wide release or around the same time.

Soooooo, when Brat say that they have a different build than CDV, this is entirely 100% plausible.

Now, why CDV would take it upon themselves to ship a build that is nowhere as clean as the version Brat has, could either be because of what I describe above or because they felt that the tinkering they had done in their [CDV] version, was somewhere better (!) than what the devs had previously submitted.

The fact is that, they appeared to have shipped a broken game and have taken no steps to remedy this.
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