Over at the official id Software website, Todd Hollenshead; CEO of id Software has commented on the rather egregious flaws of the Quake 4 SP/MP demo release. Here's what he had to say:
"On behalf of id Software, I would like to express our regret over the snafu with the Quake 4 demo last Wednesday. We wanted to get the demo out before the Holiday weekend here in the U.S. and were working hard with Raven and Activision to make that happen. A bug in the multiplayer was caught at the last minute and we decided to hold off on the release. Single player was unaffected by this bug. Unfortunately, in our preparation for the planned release the bad build was mistakenly put on our public FTP instead of a staging site, and was apparently seen and downloaded by a website or two, and propagated from there. We tried to get the word out to mirrors and websites that multiplayer was broken in the build and not to mirror the file, but due to the late hour and the impending holiday, the request to pull it back was too little, too late.
We are working on finalizing the demo for release as soon as possible, but we want to be as certain as we can to avoid making the same mistake twice. I'm sorry for everyone who spent time downloading the demo and found the multiplayer was broken. Hopefully a properly functioning Quake 4 Demo can make amends.
On behalf of id Software, I would like to express our regret over the snafu with the Quake 4 demo last Wednesday. We wanted to get the demo out before the Holiday weekend here in the U.S. and were working hard with Raven and Activision to make that happen. A bug in the multiplayer was caught at the last minute and we decided to hold off on the release. Single player was unaffected by this bug. Unfortunately, in our preparation for the planned release the bad build was mistakenly put on our public FTP instead of a staging site, and was apparently seen and downloaded by a website or two, and propagated from there. We tried to get the word out to mirrors and websites that multiplayer was broken in the build and not to mirror the file, but due to the late hour and the impending holiday, the request to pull it back was too little, too late.
We are working on finalizing the demo for release as soon as possible, but we want to be as certain as we can to avoid making the same mistake twice. I'm sorry for everyone who spent time downloading the demo and found the multiplayer was broken. Hopefully a properly functioning Quake 4 Demo can make amends."
