Lots of points to touch today...
Gaming Press: Euro Truck Simulator 2 seems to have a hard time grabbing attention of mainstream gaming news sites and media in general. Most reviewers learned to ignore small simulation games, and ETS2 is simply getting the same treatment, even though we managed to convert quite a few people to our side who might think of themselves of hardcore gamers (see for example this long thread on Overclockers). The game hasn't even attracted enough reviews on major sites to be given a ranking on Metacritic.com (see ETS2 page on Metacritic), strangely there are not even any user reviews there. Metacritic happens to be THE games industry website by which games are ultimately measured if they succeeded or failed critically, yet ETS2 doesn't even register on their radar so far. Looks like a potential task for all of us to help with evangelization of ETS2 to the masses ;-).
Steam Greenlight: Being largely ignored by gaming press may also influence things when Valve Steam team is screening games. Even though the game has scored some very nice positions in recent PC games best-selling charts in several European countries, we still don't have an easy path to make it to Steam. Looks like pushing the game through ETS2 Greenlight campaign is our only hope. Putting a little note into ETS2 in-game news on the Profile screen has helped a bit - we are getting more votes every day now than a week or two agoc- however, we did not really jump much higher in the queue.
Patch: We expect to do the "freeze" on code & assets for the planned ETS2 update tomorrow, and have it tested and ready for release by the end of the week. The patch will include numerous fixes and little improvements, the volume of feedback from you was huge and we managed to address hundreds of little things that were reported, even though there are still hundreds more to look into, not to speak about the big things on peoples' wishlists. Stay with us, there are more updates in the plans, we definitely plan to improve the "core" game for many many months (and in the next blog update we may discuss our options for expansions ;-) ).
New Translations: The new game update will also include several new languages, we are well on the way to add Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Recent changes in the game required adding a few new strings, so if you are one of our ETS2 GetLocalization loyals, please check your language again.
New servers: We still don't have much actual sales data available for ETS2 retail sales, usually data are reported quarterly, so we just rely in our guesswork on publicly available best-selling games charts to give us a clue. Anyway the anticipation of success on the market for ETS2 has given us confidence to have two new servers installed at our ISP. In the coming days we plan to finally launch official SCS Software message board to be able to interact better with the fan community and to give you a better way to discuss our games.
