Is Forever Delayed or Never?

Dozen Days of Words episode 5 is in a functional state though is not finished. I could probably finish the game for release next week if necessary but with my nephew in town I decided that an extra week before the official release date was a good idea. If I do finish it early I may post the game a week early and link to it from here so readers get a week of early access to the game. I'll let you know my decision next week.

The big news today (well, last night if you want to get technical about it) is the fact that 3D Realms is closing it's doors. They are the company that is developing Duke Nukem Forever, which will now probably never see the light of day. While Take 2 still holds the publishing rights, they are not funding the game. It is still possible that another company will purchase the rights to the game from 3D Realms but with existing distribution rights, this is less likely. Most likely the game is dead. When you think about it, the fact that the game was so long in development made it unlikely that it would live up to the hype. Even though a lot of the delay was probably caused by the game developers continually playing catch-up with the rest of the industry, too many people figure that such a long development time must mean that the game should be really good. These unrealistic expectations means that no matter how good the game was it would never be good enough.

I suppose it is also possible that the opposite would happen and that the majority of people expect the game to be bad. While the game being better than expected could be good, if nobody bothers to try the game because they expect it to be junk then you still end up losing. Either way, DNF was in a pretty bad spot.