Hi, everyone! I want to comment here, too, to give you a little bit more insight into how (and why) updates work the way they do in the casual gaming industry.
When we update one of our games, it's very easy for us to provide that update to customers who have purchased the game from us. When we finish testing and preparing it, it's immediately ready to be made available to our customers.
In order to provide that update to other game distributors, we have to do additional work to prepare it for each major game company. Once we send an update to them, they need to repackage the game with their DRM software and run the game through their own QA process. All of this takes time (and money).
What we've seen is that most game distributors are unwilling to spend the time and money to prepare a game update for distribution on their site. The sad fact is that, once a game has been available for awhile, it costs the game distributor more to prepare the update than they'll make from sales of that game after the update. As Heather said, we can't make them offer those updates.
I'd also like everyone to understand why we can't just replace someone's game with our own version. The best explanation we have is what Arthur said
here when VV4 came out. Our games cost $19.95 back then, and prices are much lower now (all of our games cost $9.95 or less when you buy them from us). I'll quote the most relevant part of his post here:
Fun fact: When you buy a VV game at a competing portal, in most cases they keep the majority of the money. We receive as little as $2 from some of them. There has been a lot of controversy about this in the last year, and the general result was that many developers decided that they were going to quietly make their casual games smaller and cheaper, to make up for the low revenue coming in from all the distributors (due to the small % we keep, and the crazy price competition).
We really do not want to make the VV games, or any of our games, smaller or cheaper. In fact, we are spending more than ever on the development, so we are moving forward carefully and trying to make good decisions to keep this sustainable for us, and to keep making the games that we believe in.
As Heather said, everyone has a choice of where to buy anything, including our games. However, it's important to know how things work before you make your buying decision.
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