Jack
Dear Managers,
The journey from 2017 to present has been an incredible rollercoaster ride, with the iGP Manager community growing to over 2 million managers. Since the launch of the original iGP Manager in 2011 this game and its community have exceeded my expectations countless times along the way. It's time for me to personally acknowledge that we have not always met your expectations, those of our most dedicated managers, on the matters of qualifying, pit stops, tyres, flags/VSC etc.
A comment on the most recent blog regarding the new Hall of Fame summarised that as "another useless update", encapsulating the frustration these managers feel in waiting for these points to be addressed. You might be surprised to learn that I agree with most of the criticism. They are fairly accurate assessments of the issues we need to address, and we will address them. That starts with a patch to improve pit stops tomorrow.
Naturally, speculation on what we're doing from the outside is a guessing game that will always fall short of a real explanation. I too would be quite confused by the trajectory of our updates if I thought they were done in priority order. The first understanding I would like to establish here is that they are NOT being released or developed in priority order. Rather, they are laying the foundations for what comes next. The second thing I would like to clarify is that not everything is as simple as it seems, e.g. developers were assigned to tasks like qualifying in the past and none of the solutions fully satisfied the community. Eventually, those developers had to be pulled away from those tasks, back to the bigger picture and future we are working on.
Growing and managing a totally independent company with limited resources impacts our decision making and priorities in a big way. With those limited resources, in 2011 we brought real-time grand prix of up to 2 hours in duration to the browser, and in 2017 repeated this at scale on mobile phones, an achievement still unmatched by larger teams with budgets we could only dream of. Everything we have done to date does not scratch the surface of our ambitions, though. To achieve our ambitions starting from our position as a small indie requires making some difficult decisions, sacrifices and prioritisations along the way. Any game dev could easily spend every day tweaking and patching, but this leaves them exposed, standing still in a fast-paced world, sure to be overtaken or to become irrelevant as the world changes. Instead, we have chosen to future-proof the foundations of iGP Manager in a way that will ultimately deliver far greater value to everyone.
Current updates won't make sense if viewed as arriving in priority order, or like we thought this was what the game needed most right now. We're not stupid, we hear you. I truly appreciate the patience the community has shown, during times when I couldn't even say this much about the work we are doing. I believe your full confidence in us will be restored over the remainder of 2020, as the level of support we've received from you has enabled us to continue to push forward and innovate.
As in 2011 and 2017, we have stretched ourselves to the limit in order to do this. We've been forced to take our focus off of the present to some extent in order to create the future we want to build. I apologise for being so ambiguous, but the good news is you haven't got long to wait until you will understand. In the near future a big part of the team will shift entirely to bug fixing and supporting you in any concerns. I promise that the future we are building together will be worth the wait.
many beautiful words but the facts?
Community Manager
