Not meaning to take anything away from your research. But everything I have seen about who the publisher (and porter) is of late points to Humble Bundle. They were the publisher of the Switch port, and lots of posts say it’s Humble Bundle. I do however recall some sort of digital flyer branding StS with tencent about 2 years ago, but that was since dismissed as a joke. So, do you have a source to backup this A.C.E theory? I’m not sure it really matters at this stage but we may as well kick around the can. edit: and btw, I just checked, and don’t starve app says “iOS version by Blitworks”, and Stardew Valley says “Ported by Sickhead Games”. So where does this A.C.E company come in to it?
I mean, it's not uncommon for the Chinese versions of certain games to be published under different publishers. Regardless, I appreciate the effort put into that post, whether or not it's accurate. See, this is what not being transparent does. I wouldn't be surprised if MegaCrit lost a few sales (or a few hundreds in IAPs ) as a result of this BS. I really wish they took back their baby or, indeed, got Playdigious on board.
I lost interest in mobile port awhile ago. Bought the steam version instead. I don't think I'd buy again as even if mobile port is released (if it ever will), the version of game would be outdated anyway
Thank you for the detailed info! Going to try it asap. About Slay the Spire, I am also very interested. Been playing Sentinels of the multiverse and having a blast. If STS is the ultimate card game I can only wonder how great it should be. Sentinels already is too addictive and allows a lot of replayability.
yeah, me too... and also, after years, still wondering why Yatch Club Games, or someone else, never bothered to port the excelent Shovel Knight on iOS, taking account of its fame, it would sell very well imo.
Sure, we all know that any company publishing under some other company name can happen, Chinese or not. But just staying on the point that xdawg made about this so called A.C.E Program being the publisher of Dont Starve and Stardew Valley, And apparently this A.C.E Program company is owned by tencent, well I’m saying I’ve had a look and those games are published/ported to iOS by Blitworks and Sickhead Games. Blitworks is Spanish and Sickhead Games is US. (Simply check wiki). Both of these companies are prided and well known porters. I very much doubt tencent or so called A.C.E have been meddling with them. So I’m not convinced about xdawgs statement on that one at all. For that reason, and based on all the stuff I’ve seen myself about the port, I think it’s fair I’m a little skeptical with xdawgs findings about this A.C.E company and the spiel with tencent and the port. Hence why I’ve asked for some sources on that for some healthy and real debate points. Should be easy enough if true. I’d simply love to see some source. Big companies making little companies to do their dirty work...sure, that does tend to happen. Not only with Chinese companies but the entire world, and not just to do with iOS porting. I get that.
This is why I dislike the dangling carrot, i.e., "coming soon" "later this year", trailers, etc, because it only feeds speculation and not anything factual. Drop the game already without all of the vapor hype. I don't want to watch a Youtube video, I want to play the game.
China is just a whole other ball of wax. It's very common and probably likely that a different company is handling the Chinese release of a game than who did it in other parts of the world. Also video games in China are extremely regulated and have to go through a tedious approval process through the government, and the speed at which games get approved is extremely inconsistent. It wouldn't at all be strange that a game is finished but is just waiting for government approval for 6 months. So it's possible that there actually is a company called ACE doing ports of popular indie games, and while maybe they are just being lazy about it they also could be taking a long time due to an absurd amount of red tape that's out of their hands. It's also possible that they're the ones contracted to port Slay the Spire in China, and also possible Humble is contracted to publish it elsewhere. Basically any scenario is possible, which makes it all the more frustrating we don't have any sort of official news to clear things up.
Talbs is right, all the info I talked about with A.C.E. could be only applying to the Chinese market. I was making certain logical leaps that weren’t really backed up by any evidence, which I apologize for if I’ve caused too much paranoia. I fell into a rabbit hole of researching this yesterday on the Chinese part of the web, and just kept looking into A.C.E. and their handling of indie games under their ownership, without first verifying that they are in fact porting it for the US. The only evidence I had that made me think that A.C.E. was also in charge of the port was because they also seem to have gone off the map around the same time as MegaCrit has about giving updates about the state of the port (~5-6 months ago) but that could just be MegaCrit running into certain bugs. Like you guys, I have also been anticipating the release of this game for many months, and the angry gamer inside of me took over as soon as I found someone to blame for this delay, and I decided to write about it here. Take all of what I said as a worst case scenario, as literally anyone else they could have gone with, humble bundle or otherwise, would be a much better porter than A.C.E. who has literally sat on ports for more than 3 years in the past. I’m sorry for all the confusion I caused, I just wanted to bring up a possible explanation for why the wait was so long.
Can’t be a very good team then? Surely it’s not that difficult to port with all the games that have been done already?
Well, I mean, if porting was easy we'd probably have a more up-to-date Dead Cells and the Android port wouldn't have taken an entire extra year to put out. Those tweets aren't the transparency we deserve but at least MegaCrit are saying something. Let us have faith.
You are right at least it’s something. But it’s weird how vague Megacrit have been about the delay. No release dates, very little information on the issues; only small amounts of info gathered mostly from tweets and discord interchanges. Look how CD Projekt Red did it with CP2077, an official statement with a new release date and the reasons for it. I may be wrong, but I haven’t really seen any of this for the sts port, and while it may be a smaller release, I still think it’s been handled pretty poorly by megacrit and whoever the publisher is.
I’ve never played it so to me it doesn’t matter all that much, I’m excited to try it because I love the games of its kind I have played on iOS but I have those games and others people make hopefully to keep me happy anyway. Plus will they ever stop updating Pirate Outlaws? It doesn’t look like it.
Metalcasket had a point in response to that, but otherwise how can anyone say any different until we know who they are anyway? As we have no clue and get basically no information. Sure they might end up being great devs and they have just been working in secret and it’s everything people have been wanting. Or they may not be the best, share no info, make it f2p or change something fundamentally about the game and release it randomly after zero hype. Although that worked for Bethesda I’m not sure it would for everyone.
