Blaze:
People who purchased TotalGaming.net had the game on August 10.
People who pre-ordered the game electronically (i.e. pre-orders before June 1) were able to download the game yesterday.
August 10 is just the day the game began shipping. Which is true. Now it's just a matter of the game getting shipped to the people who have pre-ordered the game or are getting it at the store.
Since you haven't purchased the game or TotalGaming.net, I don't see why you are complaining or making these assertions. How would you know what TotalGaming.net users have and don't have? TotalGaming.net subscribers had the game yesterday to download.
If anything, the release demonstrates the value of TotalGaming.net.
I understand. What I was trying to say is that you COULD buy it on August 10 and download it electronically on August 10 -- via TotalGaming.net
subscription. That was the what I thought was the thrust of your post.
You wrote:
And we totally agree with you that the concept behind TotalGaming.net as a subscription service is to allow users to just press a button and be able to get the game. That was what I was responding to: The game was available right on time on TotalGaming.net.
Buying the game individually, by contrast, is more along the lines of the traditional purchase model. You already have Galactic Civilizations so you could have upgraded to TotalGaming.net for $50 I believe if you'd wanted. Stand alone games are a bit more complicated to deal with but since we, like you, had expected to have boxes shipping out on August 10 to you guys we had to kind of hustle to make the game available for download for pre-order customers which we've done today.
Don't get me wrong, we really appreciate your support (the limitations of written communication make it harder to show intent). I just wanted to make sure it was clear that on August 10, the game was available right on the dot on TotalGaming.net for subscribers.
There's a good side-effect to all this btw, the version that is on there is 1.01 instead of 1.0 which has updated multiplayer code and some other nice tweaks.