Though I'm not defending the delays we've put up with.
You should compare iOS to android, and then iPad to other models like the nexuses, galaxies, etc...
I was mostly disappointed to see the tweet from Trent Oster last month that said they haven't been working on android for a year, which meant they hadn't even started it by the original rough release date
Your links are more or less saying the same thing as mine when they refer to Q2 2013 and provide additional information about Q3 2013. One of these studies say that there is a complete change from Q2 2013 where Apple had 60 % share. As I said, Beamdog was working to release BGEE at that time and it's only when BG2EE was well into development that this shift occured. Nothing new to me, and it doesn't change the figures regarding Beamdog rationale when starting the work.
In France, where I live, we have a lot of Android tablets available for prices starting below 100 €. Many of them have very low processing or graphic power, probably not sufficient to play Baldur's Gate, considering that iPad 2 already is too slow. Many of these tablets do not even have Android Play available, so they are not targets for BGEE. It seems it's even worse in other countries in the world, like China, where Android is gaining a lot of market share. If you look at the sum of the major manufacturers on Android mentioned in one of the studies, the sum of them are now just above Apple at Q3 2013. In terms of market perspectives, the existing base of iPad is still an incentive to release BG2EE on iPad before Android, in my opinion, especially when you start developping somewhere around Q4 2012 or Q1 2013.
I won't comment on promises about an Android release since I was not really interested until recently.
According to this study, Android sales on tablets just started to surpass Apple. So the Android user base for tablets is still far fewer than iPad's. Considering the game development started about two years ago (or about a year ago for BG2EE), the priority given to iPad is obvious from a business point of view. If you just consider overall Android / iThing sales, the shift occured earlier, so the markets sales comparison without splitting phones and tablets may not be sufficient to understand their decision.
I'm not in a hurry to buy an Android tablet and I'll wait until the requirements are published to make my decision. Now that tablets using Intel processors are sold by major manufacturors, I'm wondering if they will be compatible with software not written in Java, as is certainly the case for BGEE/BG2EE.
In a nut shell iPads have been a shrinking market over the last 12 months, and continuing to be a niche product for a small percentage of the population. Android continues to grow and dominate.
The android version of BG:EE has been in development for 14 months supposedly, plenty of time to actually see what's happening in the market.
According to Trent in may Android was the main focus of the company, again in January he also said it was at least a month away. Basically a lie each time he opens his mouth. Clearly the main focus was to release BG2:EE, on every platform apart from Linux, before android actually gets thought about.
This is why we are frothing about yet another delay and broken word. When all we see is the rush for the iheard to give them part 2 of a game we can't even play part 1. At the end of the day iheard have had the game for almost a year. Can't you see why we are a bit cross about this?
I've been eagerly awaiting the EE's for Android since 2012 as well, I have an hour and a half commute each way daily, so it would be ideal to fill in the time.
But, with Overhaul being a small company, I could see that they would have to prioritise revenue first.
The issue with nailing down numbers of devices is that for Android, only devices that can access the Google Play store actually count. They claim 900,000,000 devices activated since they started, and 1.5 million activated daily. However, looking at the publicly available figures, a (very?) large percentage of those devices cannot access the Google Play store.
Another thing to consider is that although Android has the larger market share of devices, Apple has the market share of app revenue. Currently, people who own iDevices are more willing to pay for apps.
$20 is reaching the highend on either app store, so it's fair to say that it would be a safer bet to ship on iOS first to get the revenue coming in so that work can continue on the lower revenue platforms.
Having said that, it is stretching the bounds of believability that it takes over a year to port to Android from a PC/iOS build. Plenty of companies manage to release multiplatform games in less time than that. Content development is what usually takes up the lions share of dev time and in the EE's case, the content was already done. The Infinity engine must really be a mess of spaghetti for it to have taken this long. =p
Please do not fail in holy-war instead of polemic. regarding Google Play and China tablets, over 99% of new China brands (read as "not a nobrand") have an access to Google Play. regarding iPad please take in account that a lot of people buy iPad because it is a luxury brand and maximum what they play is a HD remakes of 8-16bit games, indy or cut the rope etc.
Regarding xmas fail, Do not give a promise when you can do it. You can't by a loyalty, for example see a games flowers for Blizzard games, Blizzard can sell any crap if they decide to, but they will not, I suppose they know that they can do it only once.
I'm continue to play a PC version now increasing a chance that I will buy an android version after a 2-3 years pause when you will run out of money and sell rights to someone else more responsible.
My main problem is Overhaul's management of expectations. I can accept - even if I disagree, the low priority of android. But they constantly mention too early dates without making clear how uncertain they are. Dont say "we are going for release before christmas" if you arent close to making that deadline (seems that way at least). Rather say: "If everything goes smoothly we *might* be able to release by christmas" or "there is a slim chance" - would make these news much more bearable on my part.
The main point of anger here is not the delay, per se, but rather the complete failure for OH to reasonably manage expectation. Someone must have figured out relatively early on into the porting process that it was going to require an engine rewrite - fine. TELL US. Tell us it won't be out for years, so we can get on with things, and be properly excited when it does come out.
Don't tell us 'coming soon!' the entire time, and hint at us with 'any time now's
I think they managed expectations pretty well, actually. The site always said "Coming Soon!" but if you were following the Android updates even a little bit (I haven't been scouring for news, just reading what I've happened upon), they've been very, very honest about delays and how it wasn't really happening all that soon.
I don't know anything about development, but isn't it possible that they prioritized iPad over Android, not because of the popularity of the platform, but because of the uniformity? I see issues in the Play Store all the time that are for a single device or another, whereas all apps in the Apple store work on iDevices.
Okay, since I'm seeing some people talking about there being very little update on progress for Android, I went through and found a number of tweets about Android throughout the entire year. Below are those tweets. I'm sure another topic already deals with these tweets in some form or another, but apparently few others have seen them.
As a mean average, there are over five tweets per month. This also disregards tweets that are not really informative. You can find them all listed here.
What this whole thing boils down to is performance, that is "performance on a wide variety of devices." Not just three devices.
Second, some devices that use a different GPU cannot handle some of the new code that they re-wrote just for Android's APK format.
Third, for Android, there are three texture formats as opposed to the single format on iOS. More texture formats likely means reduced performance that they would then have to balance.
Fourth, there is a difference in how the file system reads between iOS and Android, so saying that they favour iPad because of popularity is not really a reason. Android requires more work in re-writing 15 year old code—that cannot be stressed enough that it is 15 year old code they are re-writing and not just starting from scratch or using third-party software such as Unity or some framework—and so it takes longer to do that work.
Last, but not least, if the iPad version is buggy then it means there's a very good chance that the Android version will be buggy. Any bugs reported for iPad will likely delay the Android release so that they can sort them out prior to releasing it. After all, would you rather have a game that you cannot complete because you demanded that it be rushed?
Thanks for tracking all those down. I'm pretty much of the view that any frustration felt by end-users is magnified at least ten times by the Dev team - especially by @PhillipDaigle it seems. This confirms that.
I think I broke the page. It takes at least a minute to load for me now.
I've edited in spoiler tags because otherwise that just looks obnoxious. Even with the spoiler tags it apparently still sends requests to twitter... Oh well...
I absolutely detest Apple products, but there is a very good reason developers prioritize games for iOS despite android's larger market share. I used to complain about this inequity all the time, but it turns out that Android users are extremely conservative with app purchases as opposed to their iOS counterparts: they don't spend nearly as much money on apps. I know we're all willing to shell out for it, but that doesn't mean the android community is (statistically speaking).
That aside, I have generally erred on the side of understanding when Beamdog hits a rough patch, but the number of times people have had their hopes dashed here was unnecessary. I was going to get this for Christmas- if the port to android is really saddled with this many perilous twists and turns, I would suggest not promising anything until the game is 100% ready.
For clarification, Christmas was always a hope, not a promise. We could avoid even hoping, but to be perfectly honest this community doesn't do well with messages like "it will be done when it's done and we can't say more than that."
I know that because every time someone says that they get accused of pussyfooting. So we were hopeful that we would be ready for Christmas and it didn't pan out. No promises were broken here.
Does that mean we aren't absolutely devastated about the delay? Of course not. But please understand the difference between a promised release date and a hopeful timeframe. They aren't the same thing.
I don't think anyone is angry that the iOS was prioritized a little bit. I think the anger stems from the fact that the android version was given so little priority that the next version of the game is out on all platforms but Android, which doesn't even have the first game yet over a year later.
as an Android developer I have no problem believing that device / hardware fragmentation caused some issues. I absolutely cannot believe it caused over a years worth, if proper attention was shown to development.
@Troodon80 did a great job tracking down all those tweets. Keep in mind that all that info excludes anything posted in these forums - which is where I've seen the updates on development.
So, yeah, there has been plenty of communications.
As far as BG2:EE being prioritized over BG Android... Good, I'm glad they did that. I'm sure there are fiscal and legal reasons they decided to focus on BG2:EE: I believe they were contractually obligated to deliver both games within a certain period of time - however, even if this is not the case, I'm sure that once the legal nonsense halting production was cleared up, the goal became "Get this done before we get tied up in more legal disputes." Anyway, I'm sure they had BUSINESS reasons to prioritize, but, as a user, I'm glad they did. Even though I desperately want to full saga on my N7. (With cloud saves... :P)
@Troodon80 thanks for posting. I have followed twitter, and in retrospect I guess you are right in that the tweets and messages we have seen have been honest. I dont know why I got the impression that the release was close, but I guess wishful thinking made me a bit unrealistic.
@Aristillius, totally understandable. I'm still hopeful/wishful for a Linux version, but I realise any potential Linux version is going to be even further away while Android is being worked on. :-)
I just had an Epiphany ( that's the spirit of Christmas in me I guess ) and I wanted to leave it here for you, fellow players. Usually, with big video-games company, even when we get something like " We hope it will be released for the ... ", we always knew that they have it all figured out, and that the communication is nothing more than hype built around the release. We are not used to company, like Beamdog, who are honest and talk to us almost every step they make. I don't think they know when BG:EE1/2 android is going to be released. But we are so used to corporate b***sh*t that we take the hope for granted, just because it usually is true.
So, even if it bother me to still not play BG:EE on my Nexus 7 2013, I thank you Beamdog team, and especially the forum team , who get to deal with us. Your doing a good job, and I'm sure you doing the best you can. ps : Sorry for my english, I'm French
Oh Boo Hoo Hoo..... Whine all you want, you know you guys will still buy this the second it comes out.
Nope, I will NOT buy this game for my Android phone anymore. I have enough for waiting and waiting and waiting while the iOS version get fixes and updates and suppport and BG2EE and etc. Bullshit! If devs are not give respect for Android fans then we won't give them our money, they don't deserve nothing. I was the stupid I have believed that once I will play BGEE on my SGS3, then on Note 3. I've planted to buy BG2EE on Steam, but... I'm sooo disappointed, so I just say thanks for the nothing!
I think it's a shame that we see so much negativity in this thread.
Yes, I am dissapointed about delays etc, but I also think that developing Android is potentially the hardest part of the BG:EE project for Beamdog. I also check by quite a bit and feel that I have been kept fairly well informed.
I will still buy both these games when they come out next year. Once Android is up and running I look forward to other EE's too.
So to @Dee and all the other hard workers at Overhaul, have a good break. I look forward to updates in the New Year.
I think it's a shame that we see so much negativity in this thread.
Yes, I am dissapointed about delays etc, but I also think that developing Android is potentially the hardest part of the BG:EE project for Beamdog. I also check by quite a bit and feel that I have been kept fairly well informed.
I will still buy both these games when they come out next year. Once Android is up and running I look forward to other EE's too.
So to @Dee and all the other hard workers at Overhaul, have a good break. I look forward to updates in the New Year.
You're right - it's far better to vent and scream and shout and generally behave like a 5 year old having an internet temper tantrum (not saying you are but others certainly have acted this way).
Oh Boo Hoo Hoo..... Whine all you want, you know you guys will still buy this the second it comes out.
Nope, I will NOT buy this game for my Android phone anymore. I have enough for waiting and waiting and waiting while the iOS version get fixes and updates and suppport and BG2EE and etc. Bullshit! If devs are not give respect for Android fans then we won't give them our money, they don't deserve nothing. I was the stupid I have believed that once I will play BGEE on my SGS3, then on Note 3. I've planted to buy BG2EE on Steam, but... I'm sooo disappointed, so I just say thanks for the nothing!
Not sure if you misspoke or not, but I don't think it ever would have been available for your phone. I believe it's a tablet solution.
Yeah I'm sure I've read some tweets or posts from Overhaul that it isn't available for phones (even iOS) yet, due to issues with the usability of the game on small screens.
Doesn't mean it can't happen, but yeah.. not happening yet.
I dont honestly care about the problems with developing for android or the market share on IOS, I am an android end user who doesnt own an iOS device.
What I'm concerned about is , there will be a lot of people (like me) who have simply waited too long and are not going to buy it and this will lead to a discussion where people say 'See this is why you shouldn't develop for android, look at how few people are interested in this game, the market just isnt there.'
The market is there, well it was but I'm moving to one of the newer windows devices that are coming out. As ive had this device for a while and feel like an upgrade. So prepare for an even more fractured tablet market.
SO, i have been waiting for 6 years for Half-Life 3 to be released, it sucks but when it is done I bet it is going to be glorious. I think the same goes for Baldurs Gate. Playing the PC releases I think Overhaul has done a bang up job of really just making these timeless games better, and I long for the day to play it on my Note III, and when it comes there will be much rejoicing on my part, but like Half-Life 3, I would rather wait and it be done right than it be crap.
>SO, i have been waiting for 6 years for Half-Life 3 to be released
completely new game, with no promised release date, and no current releases on any platform
>I think the same goes for Baldurs Gate
old by video game standards, enhanced edition is already out on every other major platform, was supposed to be released a year ago, the sequel is already out on every other major platform but iOS, and that's coming soon
Comments
You should compare iOS to android, and then iPad to other models like the nexuses, galaxies, etc...
I was mostly disappointed to see the tweet from Trent Oster last month that said they haven't been working on android for a year, which meant they hadn't even started it by the original rough release date
One of these studies say that there is a complete change from Q2 2013 where Apple had 60 % share. As I said, Beamdog was working to release BGEE at that time and it's only when BG2EE was well into development that this shift occured. Nothing new to me, and it doesn't change the figures regarding Beamdog rationale when starting the work.
In France, where I live, we have a lot of Android tablets available for prices starting below 100 €. Many of them have very low processing or graphic power, probably not sufficient to play Baldur's Gate, considering that iPad 2 already is too slow. Many of these tablets do not even have Android Play available, so they are not targets for BGEE. It seems it's even worse in other countries in the world, like China, where Android is gaining a lot of market share.
If you look at the sum of the major manufacturers on Android mentioned in one of the studies, the sum of them are now just above Apple at Q3 2013. In terms of market perspectives, the existing base of iPad is still an incentive to release BG2EE on iPad before Android, in my opinion, especially when you start developping somewhere around Q4 2012 or Q1 2013.
I won't comment on promises about an Android release since I was not really interested until recently.
But, with Overhaul being a small company, I could see that they would have to prioritise revenue first.
The issue with nailing down numbers of devices is that for Android, only devices that can access the Google Play store actually count. They claim 900,000,000 devices activated since they started, and 1.5 million activated daily. However, looking at the publicly available figures, a (very?) large percentage of those devices cannot access the Google Play store.
Another thing to consider is that although Android has the larger market share of devices, Apple has the market share of app revenue. Currently, people who own iDevices are more willing to pay for apps.
$20 is reaching the highend on either app store, so it's fair to say that it would be a safer bet to ship on iOS first to get the revenue coming in so that work can continue on the lower revenue platforms.
Having said that, it is stretching the bounds of believability that it takes over a year to port to Android from a PC/iOS build. Plenty of companies manage to release multiplatform games in less time than that. Content development is what usually takes up the lions share of dev time and in the EE's case, the content was already done. The Infinity engine must really be a mess of spaghetti for it to have taken this long. =p
regarding Google Play and China tablets, over 99% of new China brands (read as "not a nobrand") have an access to Google Play.
regarding iPad please take in account that a lot of people buy iPad because it is a luxury brand and maximum what they play is a HD remakes of 8-16bit games, indy or cut the rope etc.
Regarding xmas fail, Do not give a promise when you can do it. You can't by a loyalty, for example see a games flowers for Blizzard games, Blizzard can sell any crap if they decide to, but they will not, I suppose they know that they can do it only once.
I'm continue to play a PC version now increasing a chance that I will buy an android version after a 2-3 years pause when you will run out of money and sell rights to someone else more responsible.
Fingers crossed for release in january.
Don't tell us 'coming soon!' the entire time, and hint at us with 'any time now's
I don't know anything about development, but isn't it possible that they prioritized iPad over Android, not because of the popularity of the platform, but because of the uniformity? I see issues in the Play Store all the time that are for a single device or another, whereas all apps in the Apple store work on iDevices.
As a mean average, there are over five tweets per month. This also disregards tweets that are not really informative. You can find them all listed here.
What this whole thing boils down to is performance, that is "performance on a wide variety of devices." Not just three devices.
Second, some devices that use a different GPU cannot handle some of the new code that they re-wrote just for Android's APK format.
Third, for Android, there are three texture formats as opposed to the single format on iOS. More texture formats likely means reduced performance that they would then have to balance.
Fourth, there is a difference in how the file system reads between iOS and Android, so saying that they favour iPad because of popularity is not really a reason. Android requires more work in re-writing 15 year old code—that cannot be stressed enough that it is 15 year old code they are re-writing and not just starting from scratch or using third-party software such as Unity or some framework—and so it takes longer to do that work.
Last, but not least, if the iPad version is buggy then it means there's a very good chance that the Android version will be buggy. Any bugs reported for iPad will likely delay the Android release so that they can sort them out prior to releasing it. After all, would you rather have a game that you cannot complete because you demanded that it be rushed?
I've edited in spoiler tags because otherwise that just looks obnoxious. Even with the spoiler tags it apparently still sends requests to twitter... Oh well...
That aside, I have generally erred on the side of understanding when Beamdog hits a rough patch, but the number of times people have had their hopes dashed here was unnecessary. I was going to get this for Christmas- if the port to android is really saddled with this many perilous twists and turns, I would suggest not promising anything until the game is 100% ready.
I know that because every time someone says that they get accused of pussyfooting. So we were hopeful that we would be ready for Christmas and it didn't pan out. No promises were broken here.
Does that mean we aren't absolutely devastated about the delay? Of course not. But please understand the difference between a promised release date and a hopeful timeframe. They aren't the same thing.
as an Android developer I have no problem believing that device / hardware fragmentation caused some issues. I absolutely cannot believe it caused over a years worth, if proper attention was shown to development.
So, yeah, there has been plenty of communications.
As far as BG2:EE being prioritized over BG Android... Good, I'm glad they did that. I'm sure there are fiscal and legal reasons they decided to focus on BG2:EE: I believe they were contractually obligated to deliver both games within a certain period of time - however, even if this is not the case, I'm sure that once the legal nonsense halting production was cleared up, the goal became "Get this done before we get tied up in more legal disputes." Anyway, I'm sure they had BUSINESS reasons to prioritize, but, as a user, I'm glad they did. Even though I desperately want to full saga on my N7. (With cloud saves... :P)
Could you at least change that to something closer to the truth, for example "In Progress" or such? =D
Usually, with big video-games company, even when we get something like " We hope it will be released for the ... ", we always knew that they have it all figured out, and that the communication is nothing more than hype built around the release.
We are not used to company, like Beamdog, who are honest and talk to us almost every step they make. I don't think they know when BG:EE1/2 android is going to be released.
But we are so used to corporate b***sh*t that we take the hope for granted, just because it usually is true.
So, even if it bother me to still not play BG:EE on my Nexus 7 2013, I thank you Beamdog team, and especially the forum team , who get to deal with us.
Your doing a good job, and I'm sure you doing the best you can.
ps : Sorry for my english, I'm French
Yes, I am dissapointed about delays etc, but I also think that developing Android is potentially the hardest part of the BG:EE project for Beamdog. I also check by quite a bit and feel that I have been kept fairly well informed.
I will still buy both these games when they come out next year. Once Android is up and running I look forward to other EE's too.
So to @Dee and all the other hard workers at Overhaul, have a good break. I look forward to updates in the New Year.
Merry Xmas!
Doesn't mean it can't happen, but yeah.. not happening yet.
What I'm concerned about is , there will be a lot of people (like me) who have simply waited too long and are not going to buy it and this will lead to a discussion where people say 'See this is why you shouldn't develop for android, look at how few people are interested in this game, the market just isnt there.'
The market is there, well it was but I'm moving to one of the newer windows devices that are coming out. As ive had this device for a while and feel like an upgrade. So prepare for an even more fractured tablet market.
completely new game, with no promised release date, and no current releases on any platform
>I think the same goes for Baldurs Gate
old by video game standards, enhanced edition is already out on every other major platform, was supposed to be released a year ago, the sequel is already out on every other major platform but iOS, and that's coming soon
nowhere near the same thing