Our original publisher was Crystal-Interactive, who had promised it by Christmas. However, the game was returned to me with no sign that it had been beta tested, and their phone number did not exist in the United States, leading me to believe that... I''ll say it right flat out. They are fraudulent! Our next step is On-Deck Interactive, a division of Gathering Of Develepors. If that fails Street Gang will be released as Shareware along with Talisman: The Lost Omen of Loctun and Desert Storm: The Safari Adventure. P.S. Has anyone else had this problem with Crystal?

I don''t think they are an American company.

You know what you said can be considered libel, right?

The hardest part of writing a game is getting it out the door, mainly due to annoying publishers...

I''m sure you know this already, hope your future looks up .

Noooo! Please people not again! We already had this discussions in the past and the all reproaches showed to be wrong.

Edited by - Jester101 on September 15, 2000 3:32:20 AM

Personally, I find them fine and responsive. Probably they got a big load from developers.


bernie
www.bkgames.com

Dear Magic Card,

I will try to take your age in consideration and the fact that young people often do before they think. We were all young once so I won''t hold it against you.

However by immediately splashing your frustration on a public message board you''ve made it very difficult for all of us. Why did you do this? If you would have taken the time to E-mail me first then you could have heard from me that the phone numbers in our U.S. office have changed last week and I would have given you the new number instead... But do you do this? No! You immediately rush to a message board and put your grievances up for public display. And you KNOW there are many vultures out there who''d love to point the finger and say "I told you so!"... Furthermore you discredit us for no apparent reason before ther developers. Quite low indeed!!!

I can''t blame you for ignorance since you obviously don''t know how long it takes and moreover WHAT it takes to publish a game. Your attitude was: "I give you my game today, I expect it in the stores tomorrow, and I want to get paid the day after that!". This is ludicrous!!! We can still get your game out before Christmas but you simply need to resend it by UPS or FedEx and address it to the appropriate person this time.

For anyone interested in what it takes to publish a game and the time frame involved please refer to the Developers FAQ section on http://www.crystal-interactive.com.

Kind Regards,

Alex de Vries
President and CEO
Crystal Interactive, Inc.
"A Nutridata Company"
http://www.crystal-interactive.com
http://www.nutridata.com

Mr De Vries complains about the fact that a developer don''t may talk about the experience of developer and publisher.If it was a bad or good experience.The advice of every experienced developer also some well known agents is to ask developers who have experience with the mentioned publisher to check the developers who worked with the publisher in the past.

Point is that I and most people only see bad things about Crystal, not good things.Also I find it a waste of time to hang a round at this messageboard if I was a busy director.
Perhaps there are some clear reasons why the director hangs around here. Strange because evey other value publisher doens''t do that.Also defending himself and the company only cause more damage, thats clear.Also it''s strange tospend time into this things.Most developers aren''t as stupid if they sound like.
It''s very clear that Crystal was bankrupt in the past, so I don''t have trust also at that point.Also I saw the games on the site of crystal, most of that type of easy games are by competitors published on big collections. So it''s very dumb to think that a retailer or consumer will buy a cdrom with one easy game, when there is a extrme big games collection available for
perhaps the same prize.I have enough marketing experience to mention this.

Also I think it''s not easy on the market of value games, because of the big competition.As developer you can try to find perhaps a interested publisher in value games for publishing your title.
But it won''t easy because this market also have it own problems.
I advice to check odigames.com ,they are more experienced and more trustable.Also check there advices they give on replies of indie developers. (godgames.com)

Again everybody is free to give her/his opinion it''s a free world!Also I find it a very comic situation to see how Mr de Vries tried to defend himself.It''s a waste of time to spend here as a director in this forum.If the company do his job well,
there will always enough products submitted by developers.But if it isn''t, they won''t get much submissions.Some well known value publishers gets to much submissions, thats why it''s difficult for developers, because of the big competition.And at least but not last most people here are only to code games for pleasure.
They have mostly not enough time to spend whole day and every evening in coding/designing a game.Most people do for fun some levels of a game and that is it. So strange to hang around here to waste time.

I honestly believe that he originally came here to offer information from the publisher side of the game development world. I think that the fact that no other value publishers have come on the board to talk with us says a lot of good things about Alex. No one else took the time to give us straight-forward information.

I think he came here originally to offer info, and probably also because he wants people to use Crystal as a publishing company...which is perfectly logical since he''s the CEO for the company. Now, all he does is defend the company after initially only wanting to help us out and possibly generate some business...

And that''s vulture number 1!

Thanks loads!!!!

Just publish it yourself. Why waste money on a publisher?

Get a website, do up your stuff, and bang! Of course, you also can hit the million or so shareware websites, etc.