Matt is the Producer, a Ubi Soft Employee and my contact at Ubi, the person I interact with concerning Lock On matters. I work for TFC/ED, the developer.

Ubi Soft has a deadline in which to get the demo to various magazines in order for the demo to appear on the CDs included with the mags. This deadline is, I believe, early next week.

For the past few weeks we have all been working hard to get the demo ready to meet this deadline. Matt was working with members of the marketing and technical staff to get everything in place. Things like mirror sites and coordination with the online staff to get the files up on the FTP servers took place.

Matt was operating with the understanding that once he approved the final demo version it would be released for online distribution and also sent to the magazines.

Last week Matt called me and told me that he was convinced that the version of the demo in testing at the time, Demo Beta 06, would be
"The One". We had wanted to make some changes to the scenarios and fix a few minor things, but Matt was concerned about the upcoming deadline and wanted to be finished.

About a week and a half prior, Matt, Igor and I had just finished an evaluation of the bug database and the progress being made in the past few weeks. We determined that our chance of making our scheduled code release date at the end of August was no longer possible. This information was passed up the chain at Ubi Soft and new dates for the final version were being decided. Things like this take days in a large company to finalize. Add to it that almost all of Europe was on holiday in August and you can see that new date decision took over a week to make at Ubi.

It turns out that the Team implemented some of Matt's changes and created Demo 07 last weekend. This version had a major showstopper bug in it and while we waited for Ubi to finalize their decision, Demo 08 was created to fix the showstopper bug. Demo 08 was submitted to Ubi on late Thursday night, Moscow time. Demo 08 is the release candidate for the Demo.

So, in addition to the Demo plans, Matt and I also discussed how we would announce the new release dates. We both agreed that it might be best to have one of us announce the new dates and one of us announce the Demo status. It was decided that he would do the new date announcement and I would announce the Demo and follow up with regular status reports on the development progress of the Demo.

At that moment we were operating on a plan, not an assumption, to release the Demo the next week. No decision had been made by anyone at Ubi Soft, to Matt's knowledge or understanding, to change the plan.

We made the announcements. In retrospect, this is where I made a big mistake. In my desire to get the information out to an anxious and vocal crowd I allowed myself to be put in a position where factors beyond my control could change and invalidate my good intentions. I should never have made an announcement of something that Ubi Soft could change. Of course at the time, Ubi Soft, to me, was my colleague and friend Matt Wagner. He was calling the shots on things and was also operating on the same plan.

After our announcements were made, a day or so later, Matt attended a meeting with some Marketing folks which included more senior people than who Matt had been working with earlier to coordinate distribution and release of the Demo. It occurred to these managers that it might be better to wait on the Demo release to better place it with the magazines and get better Press coverage for the title. They were now concerned that because a new release date had just been established, it made more sense to have the Demo released online near the same timeframe as it would appear on the magazine CDs in October. They told Matt that they wanted to discuss this with the Marketing managers in Europe and would make a final decision.

Matt informed me of this "development" and I became VERY concerned because I knew the turmoil that this would create, especially after we had JUST announced the Demo would be released online in a week. Sure we put in disclaimer and qualifiers, but people had the reasonable expectation that the Demo would indeed be released in a week.

I phoned several of the managers at Ubi Soft that were in the process of making the final decisions. I stressed the potential backlash and impact on the forum members who are the dedicated fans of the product. I also point out to them the no-win situation that Matt and I were facing. I made several alternate recommendations. They said that they would discuss it all with their counterparts in Paris and would have a final decision shortly. They also asked me and told Matt that we should refrain from making any further announcements regarding the release of the Demo. That explains my three days of online silence on the forum.

It took almost a week for Ubi to make the final decision. I received a final phone call on early Friday morning informing me that the delay until October was the decision and it would be announced. I wrote my "Grenade" response and battened down the hatches.

On Friday morning around 10:00AM the bomb was dropped.

Lesson learned for me? NEVER participate in an announcement about something beyond your control. Now that lesson seems simple, but real life is more complicated. At the time when I made the announcement about the Demo I had no reason to doubt what Matt was telling me. Matt had no reason to doubt that the plan would be followed. Had either of us suspected that someone else higher than Matt would change the plan neither of us would have put ourselves into this situation.

Imagine how we both feel when people, who are understandably upset and disappointed, accuse us of being liars and that we knowingly broke a promise. My reputation and my credibility with some people have now been sullied. This is personally very upsetting for me and Matt is equally distressed. As a result of this affair I know that I will now be more restrictive of what I say online. This is unfortunate as I prefer to be open with the community about the status of our projects. But, I am not going to put up with anything like this ever again. All of this has been totally unfair, but life is unfair. This is a business decision. One that I actually think makes sense with regard to having the biggest impact in the market for the product. I do disagree with HOW this decision was made and the timing.

All of this is the truth, and is, frankly, more information than anyone really has a right to know.

If you want to still call me a liar and question my intentions and integrity then there is nothing I can say or do to change your mind so believe what you must. I'd be curious to see how some of the people crying the most about this situation would have handled this if they were in my shoes at the time.

Carl