No, Pixistix, you are not beta testing the game. Our games are always released on one game site exclusively for about 2 weeks before they are available on other game sites. That's common practice in the casual games market. It does not mean that the game has not been tested, nor does it indicate that we are selling a 'beta version' of Virtual Families. We have already gone through an extensive beta test, and the game has been officially released. It doesn't mean that the game is perfect, though.

One of the things that we do during the soft launch period, as we have always done (even when our soft launches took place on Big Fish Games), is evaluate the feedback that players provide about what they like and don't like about the game, to see if we need to make adjustments during the soft launch. Since we really care about the opinions of our most loyal fans, you all have an opportunity to influence the game in ways that don't exist outside of the soft launch period. And, as always happens, despite exhaustive testing, you all find bugs that did not come to light during testing. We fix as many of those as possible, too.

We really appreciate all of you, our wonderful fans who come here to buy the game as soon as it's available. You give us great feedback and are always willing to share your very candid comments about the game - warts and all. We like to make the updates available as soon as we can, rather than make everyone wait for two weeks to get the final updated version of the game. Anyone who wants an update can certainly obtain it, but we make an announcement about a particular update only if there are fixes for serious bugs (like there were with the 1.00.01 hotfix, which Arthur announced within hours of the game's release).

General release simply means that the game will be going to every game site that wants to sell it. When that happens, we will let everyone here know that the game has gone into wide distribution, and you will all be able to download and install that update, too.