原文如下 英文好的網友 可否大概講一下
這推英文在說什麼
posted: 01:35 pm by: Laurie
Tim Gerritsen of Human Head Studios has posted an indepth "RUNE 2 Status" report:
First off, thank you to everyone who posted here or wrote in to us asking for Rune 2. With the release of the UT2003 demo, the interest in a Rune sequel seems to have definitely picked up. It's amazing that it has now been two years since the original Rune was released. Can you believe it's been that long? We thank each and every one of you who purchased and play the game. Your support, interest and continuing play have made the effort we put into the game worthwhile.
To date, Rune has sold over 270,000 copies world wide (about half and half in US and Europe, with additional copies selling in Australia, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Brazil, Mexico and Russia as well). Mac sales were around 5,000 of these while Linux sales were less than 1,000. The PS2 version sold over 150,000 units, with 100,000 being sold in the US and the rest sold in Europe (not bad for what is essentially a port). All of these figures are based on previously recorded and reported figures by Take Two. Through the vagaries of the publisher/developer system, this wasn't enough copies of the game for Human Head to earn back the advances (we received advances for both the PC version and PS2 version) and make a profit (the advances have to be earned back at our royalty earnings rate before we see a profit and developers are the last mouth to be fed in the sales chain as it is), but it is certainly strong enough for the game to be considered for a sequel.
With the successful release of the RPG by Atlas, and the upcoming toy line coming from Radioactive Clown (they are coming- probably in time for Christmas- and they look fantastic), Rune has remained a viable property and publishers we've talked to are aware of this.
As game developers, we live with our projects for as much as 24 months (or more), and when a project is released, it is the culmination of a lot of hard work and constant stress. After doing Rune, Rune HOV, and Rune PS2, we had spent the better part of 3.5 years on Rune and to be blunt, we were burned out on it. Add to that the fact that we had no royalties coming in and a need to keep our people gainfully employed and the drive to get to work on something new became imperative. At that time, sales figures weren't tallied yet, and even if we did convince a publisher to do a sequel immediately, we were too burned out to have given a sequel the proper attention it would have deserved. Though we knew we wanted to do a sequel to Rune, we were quite frankly, ready to move on, so we decided to table Rune for the time being, and come back to it when we were refreshed and ready.
Now, a little over a year after the release of Rune PS2, both of our internal teams are knee deep in very exciting projects that have not yet been announced. We can't wait to spill the beans and let the world know what we're up to, but the time is not yet right. In a market where hype can run rampant, we've made the decision, with the support of our publishers, to not discuss or reveal these projects until we are ready to show actual game art, actual game play and when we are able to make a realistic estimate of the actual release date. I can tell you that these projects are extremely exciting for us, but that neither of them is Rune 2.
We intend to revisit Rune, possibly after our current projects have been completed. Members of the original Rune team have been reading the various Rune 2 posts here, and we are reading the various ideas, wants and desires with great interest. Internally, excitement for doing Rune 2 is growing, and we're discussing a number of options, but we don't want to do Rune 2 until we know for sure that we can do it right. This means:
- We want to make sure that the financial support is there up front- so that we can include all the features we want to have and have the time to make them work without having to worry about cutting features to make an arbitrary schedule.
-We want to make sure that the tech is capable of the direction we want to take the game. The original Rune included a number of tech innovations. We based the game on the Unreal Tournament tech, but even using that as a basis, we still added a considerable amount of completely new code. The tech for the sequel should be up to the task of everything we want to do with it.
-We want to let you, the fans, know about the sequel so that we can incorporate the features the majority of you want to see. You're already doing that now, here on RuneGame, and we'd like to see that continue. We'll definitely be watching.
We know many of you would like to see Rune 2 happen as soon as possible, and the fact that we're not ready to unleash it upon the world as soon as possible is disappointing news. However, we hope that when you hear about the projects we are working on you'll be equally excited.
Until then, keep yours eyes and ears open for the day when we finally announce that Rune 2 is on the way.
錯過這一次 在等兩年
我好興奮呀 :evil:
