The ads for Sins of a Solar Empire of are starting to arrive in the magazines in a big way. 2-page spreads in PC Gamer and Games for Windows (CGW) are here.
Moreover, the initial orders from retail have started to arrive. WalMart, Best Buy, EB, and GameStop are all on board.
Most gamers have no idea just how difficult it is to get a PC game onto store shelves (or any product for that matter). Next time you're at the store, look at the makers of most PC games. They're mega corporations. Here, we have an Indie developer and Indie publisher working together.
Retailers look very closely at how much preview coverage a game has gotten. They look at the rankings on sites like Gamespot and GameStats.com to judge the interest in a given game. What really makes the difference between a mega hit and a "sleeper" is the initial sell-in.
Hopefully most Sins beta testers agree that we have something special here. Sins of a Solar Empire is a fantastic game that may really change the way RTS's are made (I must say, the ability to save multiplayer games and return to them later is really nice -- besides for the obvious reasons, have you ever had a game going with friends for 45 minutes only to have someone drop due to computer problems? Now you could keep going where you left off).
Here are the issues we're in:
