GOAT Store’s Dan Loosen posted an Open Letter to the Dreamcast Community at GOAT Store Publishing. Here’s an excerpt covering the key issues:
In 2003, the first GOAT Store Publishing title, Feet of Fury created by Cryptic Allusion, was released. Following this release, and after a huge series of legal wranglings, GOAT Store Publishing released three more titles in 2005: Inhabitants, Maqiupai and Cool Herders.
All of these games were developed and released with strict guidelines in place and the quality of the games speak to what these developers were able to accomplish with limited resources. This success was noticed by a multitude of people both fans of the Dreamcast and beyond. Some developers were contacted by large companies and offered projects from them to consider for mainstream systems. The International Game Developers Association asked me to write an article detailing the games and how they were made, and invited me to do guest speaking at some of their meetings discussing what we did, why we did it, and what the plans were for the future.
The future side of the equation was perhaps the most interesting. In 2006, we announced 12 titles that were in development which we hoped to release within the year. However, despite our optimistic view, the work done by our independent developers is not like a large firm where developers clock in and out for the workday; our independent developers are just that and work, usually at their home, on their own schedule. We do not have any way to ensure that a game is completed or released and external factors in many cases shifted the attention of the developers away from what they had planned.
In other cases, occasionally developers would bring us games that had fatal flaws — the gameplay was’nt developed well, the game didn’t feel ‘complete’, the controls didn’t work — whatever it was, we decided with our first release that if we didn’t have 100% faith in the games we were releasing, we wouldn’t publish games just to dupe the public into purchasing a game that wasn’t exceptional. Even though this has limited releases, we genuinely believe all of our releases have all been held to a high standard of design and gameplay.
Speaking to the future, we will continue to uphold our high standards of level of design and gameplay ensuring each release is truly fun and enjoyable. With that in mind, I can’t sit here and promise that we will have ten, twelve, five or even one more game ever come out. However, we do have a number of projects which are still in development by top notch developers right now and it is our hope the developers will be able to finish the games so they can be released. Going forward, we have learned that until games are ready to go to the presses not to talk too much about them. I only hope we will have the opportunity to tell you all about the wonderful things these developers were able to accomplish on this unique console. […]
Dan Loosen
Read the entire letter here: http://www.goatstore.com/publishing/ind … article=34
– Among the games still in development could be Cryptic Allusion’s Donk, patbier and poche’s Dynamite Dreams and Senile Team’s Rush Rush Rally Racing.