Thank you to those of you who have been patient and not hassled about the demo and release date over the last few weeks.
We now have some firm news so.....
We are on track for going into manufacture during the coming week, hopefully sending code off for disc testing on Monday, which would lead to going into manufacture late on Friday night.
If this all goes to plan, then the demo will be released next weekend on Saturday night/Sunday morning UK time at midnight, and, again, if this all goes to plan, the game will be released in the UK and in as many other territories as possible on October 20th. I will provide a full list of release dates in each territory in a couple of weeks when we know how the manufacturing process is going.
I have just confirmed the same information with our partner for the demo, the News of the World (for those who don't know the paper, it's the biggest selling Sunday tabloid paper), and it will appear in the newspaper along with a first look of the final packshot in the paper that comes out tomorrow (Sunday). The packshot will hopefully be available on Sigames.com on Monday - I am still awaiting the final file myself!
The demo will be available in 2 versions.
The vanilla version will include the English and Scottish quickstarts, and English language only, with limited assets (logo's and player pictures etc). This will be available from the News Of The World's website in conjunction with Play.com, to try and maximise the bandwidth available. The link to this will, of course, be on sigames.com when it's released at midnight.
The strawberry version will include extra quickstarts, and extra languages (to be confirmed), with more assets. This will be available initially as a torrent only, also at midnight, from www.sigames.com. For those that don't know about torrent technology, we will release a guide towards the end of the week, with some suggestions of free torrent downloading software to download.
The reason for taking the route we have this year is simple - it's very frustrating for people to struggle when downloading a demo, and our bandwidth just cannot handle all of the traffic that happens when the FM demo becomes available, which leads to frustration of people not even being able to get on the website because the server dies. This way we are hoping that the website stays up, and everyone can get the demo in a timely fashion. It also means that people can set the download up when they go to bed on Saturday night, and should be ready to play on Sunday when they wake up.
We fully expect mirrors to be available on Sunday too, but we will mainly be reliant on websites who have staff working at weekends for this to happen, with the exception of sites like rapidshare who we will upload to on Sunday morning when we should have time (as Saturday is going to be rather busy getting the files made, verified, tested, torrented etc).
