Open letter to Oovee

Subject: Open letter to Oovee
From: JanosBartok
Date: 5 Mar 2015

Hi Oovee,

Spintires is great. Thanks.

Unfortunately, it seems that many of us cannot play the game reliably. In fact, some of us cannot play the game which we paid for at all. We think that's a rather terrible state of affairs.

As your customers we want you to address the following issues directly and specifically.

1 - Quality Assurance

Prioritize stablilizing the core game and fully resolving game-breaking and save-breaking bugs. When you won our investment as customers, you made a promise. It's time to keep that promise.

We're going to make the assumption here that this is an issue of company management/priorities. Developers almost universally care about the quality of their work.

2 - Transparency

Customers often make speculative and totally unfair assumptions about the motives of the businesses they purchase products from. Oovee's behavior isn't helping.

When you make mistakes that affect customers, take responsibility and apologize. Be open about what happened and tell us what you're doing to fix things.

Recent flare-ups related to the situation with Pavel, ongoing game-breaking bugs and "The Pit" map fiasco (among others) are compelling examples. A few candid, proactive statements would have significantly reduced damage to our trust in and relationship with the Spintires and Oovee brand.

We expect you to move beyond the boundaries of the moderated Oovee forum and publish more formal blog post(s) or public-facing statement(s) as required.

3 - Product Roadmap

Spintires has been privileged to gain funding and investment from customers on kickstarter and other venues. The privilege of those relationships comes with responsibilities as well.

Publish a general, simple roadmap listing major feature updates, core improvements and other significant changes including realistic target dates. We understand that you will need to update the roadmap as things change (that's fine) - but we ask that you make those roadmap changes in a clear and accountable way.

Summary and request for response

Professional companies make actionable, specific statements to their customers and then deliver favorably on those promises.

We would like Oovee to address each of the three topics included in this letter: quality assurance, transparency and a product roadmap - with a specific and direct plan of action which we, your customers, can hold you accountable to.

We're asking for this not simply because we have a grievance but because we want to see Spintires succeed. We think Spintire has far more sales, gameplay and growth potential than the state it exists in today.

Next Steps

We suggest you view this letter as an opportunity: address current problems in a timely and honest manner and we'll do our part to help the game (and the studio) succeed.

We've created a simple review on Steam and will be promoting it. A link to this thread is included to help potential customers be fully aware of the product which they consider purchasing.

Thanks,

JanosBartok

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