Teh $1 question... Does everybody, in the dev team, agree on this way to release content? If not, are we sure the whole dev team will follow this way and not change plans again?
VERY GOOD news
the biggest reason why we have had to change around the way we wanted to do releases, is because of the timing that valve had with the orange box SDK. we talked with them about what they thought their release schedule would be for the orange box sdk, and they said it would be best for us to try and shoot for a release. we were trying to balance things so that we could get a release out before the SDK came out. but then the SDK came out when we had started cleanup. after that we said "why clean it up if we have to recode it anyway" so to save time we all decided its best to just switch over.
and yes the whole team is pretty much on board for this release schedules type. we probably wont hype up our first couple of releases until we have a solid set of content and we can call it beta 4 or something like that. they we will do our big rock star release, we want to get the community involved in our working process of testing the game. so we have our internal testing with our bomb ass beta testing team. get thing stable internally then let it out to you guys to let us know how the game feels, your kind of going to be our focus groups. then once the game gets past beta 1.1 levels we can jam it out to promote big time and hopefully get the game into as many peoples hands as we can.
thanks for stickin with us guys and believing that we weren't dead. we have to many crazy devs that will never leave the project no matter what happens haha.