King9999

@carryboy: Good point about the reviewers. The problem with most fighting game reviews is the people writing them; that's why I don't read reviews. The only editor that I know of who knows anything about fighting games besides Jeff is GameSpot's Maxwell McGee. Max writes a lot of articles about the genre and the devs behind the games, and they're all good reads.

I find that reviews are increasingly more difficult to trust. Polygon's review policy doesn't help things, although I get the reasoning behind it. Polygon made a bad call by reviewing SimCity before it launched; nobody should be reviewing a non-retail version of an online game.

As Alex said, devs should be putting their best effort into their games. Online games should have redundant servers to handle any unexpected load. You don't go out and buy a smoke alarm after the fire's already burned down your house.

Looks like some people missed my point and thought I was defending EA.

I agree. Their review system is dumb, and just reinforces people's mistrust of game reviews in general.

Does that still exist?

I figure it's better to make a good first impression rather than intentionally start fires that you'll eliminate eventually. The issue is only exacerbated when you can't get a refund, so not only do we have to put up with a game that we can't play, the publisher won't demonstrate goodwill by giving back our money. So let EA make that mistake, and hopefully others won't do the same.

It's important to note that he left due to family issues, so let's put speculation to rest.

It was mentioned on the Indiegogo page that the $150k includes the time and resources already spent on the WIP Squigly. Basically, all this means is that it costs even more to create a character.

I took the liberty of bringing this article to Shoryuken.com's attention. It's on their front page now.

Some people here were wondering why more companies weren't more transparent when it comes to disclosing the costs of creating a game. This is just a guess, but I think divulging any details of a game's budget is a violation of an NDA. This industry is NDA-happy, and I figure that a game's budget falls under the agreement as well. Lab Zero can reveal such details probably because they don't answer to a publisher anymore.