As you may imagine, I'm a little tuckered out after a very long weekend.  From the high of going to release and a very sucessful couple of giveaways to the deep deep low of pulling the game from the marketplace, it's been an insane emotional helter-skelter.  But through all of the problems, bug reports and stomach-churning decisions the members of this website, the Indie Games twitter crowd, the XNA Creators Club members and the many people who've tried the game have been quite simply amazing.  Of all the positions to be in 3 days after release we never thought we'd be here with the game pulled off the market, but equally we never expected so much enthusiasm, encouragement, kindness, understanding and sympathy in our hour of need.  We really, truly thank you all from the bottoms of our hearts for all the kind words sent here, on Twitter, email, xbox live and the XNA club. 

We started testing Space Pirates on the 24th of September last year.  That's three and a half months of testing.  There are pages and pages of feedback on the XNA site for both playtest and peer review.  The build that we sent for peer review that made it through was played by plenty of people.  At no point was it even considered possible that the game would behave so badly when it got out "in the wild", otherwise we wouldn't have made it through that peer review.  We wouldn't have wanted it to pass.  But pass it did.  I was probably the very first person to download the game and play it on my own "playtime" xbox (I have one for dev work and one for playing on, but I also use the "playtime" one for testing my and other games).  It ran flawlessly - in fact slightly more smoothly than the development build.  I was more than happy - I was bouncing around with joy.  We got some messages on Xbox LIVE from gamers, we got tweets, we got emails from people saying what a great game it was, how much they were enjoying it.  We ran a release giveaway here which went incredibly well.  It seemed like everyone was having a good time.  Then, someone tweeted me to say they'd had a crash during the free-space tutorial when they killed the first enemy ship you meet with missiles rather than lasers.  I tried to replicate the problem on my playtime box, and my dev box, but couldn't get it to crash.  I advised the user that we'd disable the missile controls until they were actually required in the tutorial, put the fix in the development build, and things seemed generally OK.

I was away from my laptop for some of the evening (thursday night is poker night round our way) but when I got back to the code dungeon to check my emails and all that stuff, I got a horrible, horrible suprise.  Not only were there more Code4s in the tutorial phase of the game, but they were also happeneing as people were trying to bag their 5 kills for a hyperspace licence.  I was mystified, Charlotta was mystified, and others friends who'd downloaded the game were mystified - we were (and still are) crash-free, aside from my mate Damon who also reported the "startup hang" issue (thanks Deej).  There were also reports here and elsewhere that the markets were behaving oddly too.  We found that bug and crushed it (it was related to enemies collecting cargo from other vanquished enemies and going to the station to sell it in a way we hadn't expected, buying and selling several hundred times and skewing the market).

At this point the problems became pretty much uncontainable.  We've made a big thing of being a responsible development team who are determined to do the right thing by our customers.  On Sunday morning then we made the decision to pull the game from Xbox LIVE Marketplace.  And at every point the comments we've recieved have been really positive, especially when we decided to pull the game.  Frankly the market price problem alone is enough for us to want to pull the game, but even so the support which we've been given turned what could easily have been a crushing weekend in to something manageable, and with the feedback we've got suggesting tweaks it's actually been really very positive.  So once again, thank you to everyone who's been with us through all this.  We are going to get this game fixed, improved and back on the market.  We're more sorry than we can say that the game wasn't what YOU wanted when it hit the marketplace.  It's not a mistake we're going to repeat, whatever it takes.

Seriously, DrMistry Loves You All.