I want to play Cube World
Wollay is posting a lot now about the upgrades coming to cube world, and it looks awesome. I’ve already sunk a lot of time into the early alpha that was released. I really enjoyed playing this, despite the bugs, with my friends. It’s a fun experience. What bugs me is he disappeared for 3 years, and is now showing all the great upcoming stuff that he’s been working on, without letting the people try it out.
I appreciate that this is his game, and that I don’t really have a say in what he does. However, as I got around 6-7 people, including myself, to buy this game, it feels that I am quite invested in it. I’ve tried to message him a bunch asking when we will get an update, and no reply. I’ve also hoped to find SOME gaming news site that would talk to him, but they are all in silence regarding this. So I want to put down what I think he has done wrong.
1. Lack of communication with the people that have put their faith and money in you - This in my opinion is his biggest failure. If I knew an update was coming and had a date, I wouldn’t care if it wasn’t major. I wouldn’t care if it caused more bugs. I would feel like I was seeing progress.
2. Opening up the store - He allowed people to pay for this, rather than test out a demo. That I think was a mistake. He was eager to let people see this, but if he knew how far off he was until it was a fully featured game, then he should have waited. To be fair to him, I think he was pressured into letting people get their hands on it.
3. Closing the store - I know, completely against the point above. However, once the store was open, it should have remained open. I have a friend that I have showed this to, who has been unable to join in on the fun as he didn’t get it at the time. This has effectively made Cube World an exclusive club, but as it’s not been updated in 3 years, it’s hardly a club people are eager to join anymore.
4. Lack of updates - Wollay has been showing a great deal of stuff off. And he was doing the same before he went back into hiding. There is so much that we have seen, but early adopters haven’t been able to actually test it for ourselves.
5. Misusing early adopters - He should be using his playerbase as testers. We can find the faults and offer suggestions far quicker than he is able to do so. They are a two-person team, which is predominantly just Wollay. He could work on the code where players work on finding bugs.
If we take a look at Minecraft, we see that it was done the complete opposite way to Cube World. Mojang had good communication with the players, was updated frequently and after a low initial cost, the price was going up and up as it got closer to release. This would have been perfect for Cube World, but it was a chance that was missed out on. Minecraft today is nothing like what was first released. Things have changed, features were added and removed. That is how games should work when released before the “official release.” I am annoyed at the situation, but I am still very eager to play whatever comes next.