"All he is good at, is making something great..."
Oh, well. It could be worse.
Switching from making cRPG as a hobby to developing a game full time was a bold step. Too bold, got hit hard by reality, failed in the end, probably due investor disagreement, silenced because of muh contracts. Personally I'd give him another chance because he is good at this one thing: making something great. Maybe the Chinese are good at maintaining it.
Eh, I am just butthurt over the whole event I will not lie. cRPG without a doubt was the game/mod I invested some of the most hours of my gaming time to. Nothing compares to this day the experience and time I invested into cRPG. I was never a good player sure, but it was just such a great thing that I could not get enough of, that sadly died to poor upkeep. OKAM was about the same: Had an absolute blast could not put it down. In all honesty, I really hope that chadz gets better at the upkeep part, I say things out of anger and disappointment sure. In reality I would probably give his next project a chance because I am a sucker for this kind of stuff.
I really do wish the whole Donkey Team success in the future, I am more than confident of their ability to make good content, but they just need to get better at finding people to maintain and keep things alive. You really cant just simply make something good, then fail to keep up on it, because that is how things die. Hopefully OKAM was a good enough learning experience for a few things they need to work on.
-Do not make promises you can not keep, it only makes you look bad and leaves people like myself bitter
-Once you make something, keep it alive. cRPG died off, in my opinion due to shitty servers from lack up upkeep and just overall lack of care. Strat died off because people stopped working on it and keeping it alive, strat was why a majority of people people played. I never played it much myself, but from what I understand the poor upkeep of strat is why most people left.
-Be transparent if you can not hit a goal. I am sure the Donkey Team realized before 9/1/2016 that Epic was just not a possibility. Yet we all waited in the duel server that night, hundreds of us, for something that was a botched launch, which leads to my next point
-Better testing. Epic could have possibly worked out and not been as broken and failed as it was if they let more of the players test it than they did. The game was already early access and EA games are known to be buggy. What harm would it have done to let us EA players test it all out even when unfinished so when it was finally launched, it would not of have just been DOA? We would have all gone in knowing it could be a broken mess, and been fine with it, other than being promised something that was just broken at launch.
-Be careful about what you promise. We were given a timeline of things that would come (equipment etc). To my knowledge a vast majority of that just never happened. I personally stopped playing in October of last year until I tried it again the other day. So I can not say for sure about that, but seems a lot of it was left out.
I do sincerely wish them all success in the future, and like I have said many times in the past (both on discord and here) I am being critical as fuck, because I know this is a team of skilled developers, they just need to get their shit together.