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"We sit around the table and look each other in the eye and ask, do we feel comfortable releasing this game to players?" Murray said. "Our number one goal with the soft launch is server stability," he said.Īccording to Murray, the scope of the game and its content have grown in the past few months, and the company has uncovered several bumps in their systems - both making the second delay necessary. "Worst case scenario, we change some systems or order more back end hardware, but we want to make sure we don't have any semi-disaster scenarios. Zombies in each region, and extrapolate from there what you have in terms of server capacity," Murray explained. "We can make lots of educated guesses, look at how many people play Plants vs. Murray and the team at PopCap hope to test their internal predictions for the server and monetization systems with the soft launch, as there is "only so much can do" with their own untested estimates.
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This allows us to have a more controlled testing player base and determine how to keep the game healthy, then map that to the expected growth when we launch worldwide."
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"We want to be double confident, so we're testing it in a smaller region. "If we had more players than we could account for, some of the systems might fall over," he added. "While the more players you have the better, our major reason for keeping the testing pool small was because we don't know our backend stability yet.
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"We didn't want to launch in a large region, but we wanted to work in a region that had similar economic behavior ," Murray explained. or Europe, Murray said PopCap wanted to keep the testing pool small. The developer will monitor player purchasing behavior in order to stabilize and tweak the game's final pricing model.Īs for why the soft launch is set for Australia and New Zealand rather than a larger market like the U.S. PopCap also plans to test in-app store capabilities and pricing models Murray noted that players participating in the soft launch will see price fluctuations. "If you're connected to the internet, you can save your progress and share accounts across multiple devices - and we need to make sure those systems, along with our ability to stream that content to players, works." Zombies 2 we're taking advantage of a lot of newer technologies," Murray said. While the game will not require an internet connection to play, it will have a handful of online features. Zombies 2, including its back end server capacity, cloud saving system and monetization structure. By the end of June, launch was pushed back again, this time to late summer with no specific date given, with PopCap stating the company needed more time to polish the game.įor the next few weeks, PopCap plans to test the foundations of Plants vs. Spring passed, and in early June PopCap announced the title would launch on July 18. Zombies 2: It's About Time was announced last summer for iOS, with a release window of late spring 2013. Zombies 2: It's About Time has been delayed so developer PopCap can further test the title, which will begin with a soft launch in Australia and New Zealand later today, senior producer Allen Murray told Polygon.
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