Re: Q9 Has a New Home
@GeneWarner, I'm curious to know what reaction you'd have if, whatever your favorite game is, that developer suddenly decided to up and sell all rights to their game to a platform that's solely useable by people with copies of Window-Eyes only? You see, you've admitted that you're a satisfied Jaws user and are looking into purchasing a copy of this platform, so in a way, you're viewpoint is a bit biased. However, the majority of blind computer users probably are not Jaws users, so yes we have a right to be upset that a product which, until days ago, was openly available for purchase by all, is now only available to those that own copies of that screen reader and also purchase the platform. I myself had considered buying Q9 a couple years ago after giving the demo a second go, but medical bills made it inpossible for me to afford it. I literally just found out a couple days ago that I'm coming into some money, enough that I could renew my old Jaws key and purchase this platform and the game, but I'm not insane enough to waste that much money, just for one or two games, and the rest be absolutely wasted.
And before I'm labeled as a Jaws-basher, the first screen reader I used was Jaws, and while I can't say I liked it and now use Window-Eyes as my primary screen reader and NVDA occasionally, I don't begrudge anybody else that prefers Jaws over any other screen reader. On the other hand, I don't like the idea that FS tries to shut it's competitors out of the market and seek a monopoly over the market at every step, but that's the company's problem, not any user of the product's viewpoint. That's also not really a topic germane to discussions about games. Therefore nobody should be bashing Jaws users because they choose that screen reader, and for the most part I haven't seen most of the commenters here do anything that could be perceived as bashing anybody because the y prefer Jaws or this screen reader over that. In fact, most of the comments in this thread haven't been specifically directed at bashing Jaws at all, only complaining that this game is being restricted to users of a specific screen reader. As the point I tried to make earlier, I'd probably have a problem if somebody tried to force a game to be Window-Eyes specific only myself. Hell, most of the games I play, I actually prefer sapi output rather than Window-Eyes myself, and I've repeatedly urged a number of game developers that've tried getting rid of sapi support over the years to rethink that.
I've also seen posts arguing that Phil didn't have to get our permission to make this decision. While that's correct, that argument goes only so far. This community are the customers and prospective customers, and we have the right to complain if we feel we're not being treated fairly by somebody that's offering a service. We also have the r ight to refuse to purchase anything from that developer in the future for any decision he/she makes that adversely effects us, the customer. Take the situation with BSC as an example, if Justin were to turn up and start producing games again, I'm betting the outrage from what he did will have earned him a rather sour reputation that will dog him, and any future projects in this community would likely not be as well-received as they otherwise might be, had he been a little more considerate of the customers' opinions. James North earned some hard feelings in the community and with prospective customers with some of his sketchy business practices many years ago. I'm not suggesting that what Phil did was wrong or bad and his reputation is now garbage, but I think these examples should be a warning to future developers to start listening to the people you claim to be putting all that hard work for. No, we can't tell Phil what would've been the best decision to ma ke, but it would've been classy of him to have sought his customers' opinion and taken that, as well as his own situation, into consideration, before making this decision. Had he done so, he perhaps could've found a different distributor that would've been just as willing to have continuing supporting the product, without closing the product off from most of the community. Or perhaps as part of the agreement of sale, he could've made it clear that it must be continued to be offered as a stand-alone product, in addition to being included in this platform. Nocturnus is completely right, with this community being so small, the last thing we should be doing is going around and telling most of the tiny market that they're money isn't good enough, simply because they haven't spent even more money on a certain screen reader. In other words, the goal should've been to keep Q9 around for the widest audience possible, while handing responsibility o f it over to somebody else willing to take that responsibility. In this case, it looks as if the goal of making as many people as happy as possible was ignored solely for expedience, rather than putting just a bit more effort into finding somebody else willing to continue offering it to the entire community, at least from my perspective. Yes, you can't make everybody happy, but it would be nice if a greater effort would've been made to make as many happy as possible in this case. But what is done is done, and the only thing is to learn from this situation in the future if you're a developer that finds themselves desiring to no longer support a game, but also don't want to see that hard effort completely go to waste as abandonware.
And I also don't get the argument about if NVDA access is implemented, the product has to be made open-source. Entombed II is being developed as a commercial project with NVDA access, I believe Time of Conflict 2 has NVDA sup port, and neither of those are open-source projects. I'm sure there's other commercial games I'm not thinking of off the top of my head right now that have NVDA support, and they're not open source. To me, it sounds like a flimsy excuse to duck responsibility for what is turning out to be not a very well-thought out decision that has upset the very people these games are supposed to be sold to. If I were in the sort of position Phil has described, I guess I just would've done things differently, as I'm sure just about everybody else here would've, for many different reasons, some of which others certainly would've disagreed with. Again, this is simply my opinion, and not meant to be taken as any sort of attack on anybody.
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