Upcoming crazy

Between work travel, family visits, family travel and just the usual day to day nutiness, the next eight weeks are going to get really wild. I’ll be in Tokyo, Osaka, London, Cologne, Healdsburg, San Diego and Las Vegas, all in the next eight weeks. Oh and mom and dad will be visiting for a little more than a week in that window too (which I’m looking forward to).

At the same time I’m trying to keep on top of things workwise but there are a fair number of shifting components that are a bit out of anyone’s control (which I can’t discuss) but I will have to react to.

Sharon just got back from a week in Prague for her company’s global sales summit. My mother-in-law was as always, a huge help during that week.

I just got back from E3 about three weeks ago. The show went very well for us and I had a ton of productive internal and external meetings.

We’re about to release SSFIV:Arcade Edition for PC next week, which is something I fought really hard to have happen internally, trying to respect the fans’ requests. Unfortunately, fucking pirates have already cracked and leaked the game online in advance of the launch next week. While inevitable, it’s truly heartbreaking for many folks here to see that happen in the timeframe it did (and yes, had there been more time in the dev schedule, we could have used ZDPP to lock it down, but we were trying to keep the release date as close to the console retail release as possible so we cut a couple corners). Hopefully the paying fans who have been asking for it will be significant enough to justify the release but we really needed it to stay locked down another couple weeks.

Mini-edit – Our team has spent some time looking at the pirate version. It seems some of their workarounds involve the running of virtual machines that eat CPU cycles to circumvent what we had in place for security. The good news: their game runs slower, which means a worse experience for illegitimate users. Secondly, they still have no online play or services (which we knew were secure).