Great job! That's what we wanted to hear. And everyone, posters, mods, and article writers: THANK YOU I'm glad we all banded together to complain - and ultimately get results. There's no way to tell if the articles had an impact (maybe they were always planning to fix it but got lazy), but in my mind, I think having Reddit, Touch Arcade, and Pocket Gamer write a nice big article did help. I also saw an amazing number of comments on our Touch Arcade article. This is what I love about the community when stuff like this happens. SQE (mobile at least), strikes me as a company that is now more concerned about their wallets than trying to find a good balance to make customers happy. If they had fixed all their games quickly and offered great support, people would continue to buy and speak highly of them. Now that stuff like this has happened, SQE might not know, but a lot of people are turning away from them - either not buying from them anymore or telling others how horrible they are. SQE is shooting themselves in the foot and they don't even realize it. I seriously do wonder if the only reason they decided to fix it is because of all the articles and possibly a flood of refunds / complaints for TWEWY. Shaun might have emailed them, they messaged support again, and finally came around to making some real decisions. As the clever people at the JB community found out, the fix is rather simple so then the "complicated" excuse just doesn't seem to work. Well, I'm expecting this update soon because if they wait a couple more months to stall then they're even worse than I thought.
I promise you anyone low enough on the ladder to be working support during Super Bowl Sunday shouldn't be trusted to make major announcements for anything. I wish people could spend more time talking to game devs like we do. Things like this are never as nefarious as people want to make them out to be. Ever. But, we did it Reddit, etc.
It wasn't a major announcement. S-E didn't make a press release. It was just their customer support, the only way a consumer can directly contact the developer/publisher, telling them that the app is dead and customers should get refunds. It was an unequivocal statement, no ambiguity. It's hard to ignore that. In the light of the app being dead for months since the iOS 8 launch there was no reason for the average customer to not think they had been hoodwinked.
Saying your company dropping support for something is definitely a major announcement. Squeenix historically has been slow to update everything. But, whatever, let's have a party we did it everyone!
I mean, it *could* be a couple more months. The North American side of the company has virtually no say in any of this stuff. The Japan side didn't even seem to be aware of any of the fuss until I told them about it. I've had a lot of experience with companies like this so red flags went up pretty quickly for me, but it *is* pretty wacky when you can't necessarily trust what the customer support says to you. I guess what I'd say here is always remember which part of the company is the dog and which part is the tail.
We've seen major companies pull working apps without any notice though... And again, the completely unambiguous nature of the response, which could have easily been delayed till the correct answer came back from Japan/the devs, made me and the other people here assign guilt to S-E. I guess we'll know how this all works out depending on if we'll be able to play TWEWY on stock devices in 2015.
^ Nice find. Looks like they're trying to clean up the mess they started. Though of course it could be a stall tactic until they finally "feel" like getting people to fix the io8 problems. I do find it funny they say "it was a lot more severe." It was even more than that. The answers are not even close, they're opposite. One said no more updates, one said they're working on it. And if anything, they sent multiple answers that are exactly the same, not one screwed CS message but a bunch of them.
Sounds like they are trying to buy time. I mean it's been proven that it's a file location problem and can be fixed in minutes.
Their PR is just.. Surprising... Don't know why SE let's someone answers question like these without contacting the devs.. I'm glad Shaun sorted things out for us..
Eli, I wholeheartedly agree that things are rarely (not "never") as nefarious as the conspiracies we can construct in the absence of fact. And I truly appreciate TA and other sites fighting the good fight for us. That said, I'm a recovering game developer of 22 years. I've worked for small studios and I've worked for behemoths. There is indeed nothing nefarious about sunsetting a game. As unfortunate as it is for the players, it's just economics. TWEWY is a niche game that had its day over two years ago. It's sold at a premium price point that is laughably high given the price sensitivity of mobile gamers. I would be shocked if they were selling more than a few copies/week outside of Japan. With that in mind, it's not a huge leap of faith: The game has been unplayable for almost five months, not to mention that Apple gives devs a heads up to start doing compatibility updates before a new operating system is released. The customer service snafu certainly didn't help. Regardless, it's a moot point now and I'm very happy to be wrong.
Now that we know TWEWY will eventually be working again, can we pull one of the versions, make the other universal, add retina support and all that lovely stuff and...ya.
Love the game and agree 100%. I bought the iPad version way back over the iPhone one, but on a Retina iPad it looks pixelated. I'd love them to add proper Retina support but I don't see them devoting the time required to the game for that to happen. This will only be a simple iOS 8 compatibility fix.
Last I heard, doing this results in people who bought the pulled version not getting the universal'd one.
This goes double for me having bought both iphone and ipad version, even though i got the ipad version on a christmas sale.
