Welcome to our twelfth Weekly News Roundup, in which we report the news surrounding Dead Matter from the past week.

The countdown is over and the Closed Alpha is officially out as of August 19th. Because of the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) this is a rather short News Roundup, looking at the Closed Alpha release and some of the footage that came out of it so far...

A Bumpy Start

14 days of countdown are behind us, and the Closed Alpha has been officially released for all partners and backers. But the launch has been a little bumpy, to say the least. Partners received their keys quickly and could hop straight into the game as planned on the 19th, the backers however, who put their money into the project to support the development, couldn't get theirs, even three days after the release date.

So what happened?

The backers were supposed to log into the QI Store to get their keys from there, however the site was offline on the release date and for three days after. The site basically collapsed under the traffic, too many requests in too short time. And how things go, if people cannot reach a website they will try again and again, resulting in a DDos like situation.

Could this have been prevented?

Definitely yes. Sending out the keys via E-Mail would've prevented this situation. Or having sufficient webserver power to handle the requests could've prevent this as well.

People are angry.

The Discord and official Forums have been locked, due to people spamming, complaining and acting hostile towards the developers. Some even went so far as to say that the website was taken down on purpose to delay the launch of the game, which doesn't make much sense considering the partners got their keys and were able to play the game. It was clearly ready for being pushed out.

Time to calm down.

As mentioned above, the situation could've been prevent, but it wasn't. People make mistakes. QI is a young, independent team and this was their first attempt at launching a game, or to be more precise, an early alpha version of a game, for the community to test and provide feedback. After the many delays of the launch, it is understandable that people might be disappointed and are loosing their patience, but there is no reason to be aggressive about it and to spam the developers. They were aware of the situation and tried to handle it. Crowdfunding is always a risk. Whenever backing something on a crowdfunding platform, game or not, there is no definite outcome and no definite timeline. This should be well known to everyone by now. So time to calm down, things are settling. And this is an early alpha version. It was released to show off the current state of the game, and, most of all, to gather feedback for further development. The final game is still a long ways off.

And now?

Today, five days after the release date, the website is back up and operational. The initial storm has passed and everyone should be able to get their key now. There have been various statements and updates on the official Discord, head over there if you wish to know more about the situation.

Closed Alpha Footage

The Closed Alpha is under a strict NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) and without explicit permission, it is not allowed to release any kind of footage or information about the game. This why we cannot post anything about the Closed Alpha for now and our Guides are not being updated. We are in contact with the devs to provide updated Guides in the near future, hang on! However two content creators (partners) had the opportunity to show the Closed Alpha off and talk to the devs. The first was Klean (watch here) and the second MrAtomicDuck (watch here).

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Tags

Weekly News Roundup, Closed Alpha, Release, Footage