I'm willing to buy a video game, but I really dislike the trend of paying for in-game merchandise. A game isn't a shopping-spree!

So, I'll tell you what. I will invest 1000$ for, say, a 5% return in one year. If REG believes in this project, that should present no difficulty (I'm sure their profit margins are considerably larger). Barring that, I'll contribute whatever the final product will cost, minus 20% (but only for a fully-functioning stand-alone game, and that's 20% off whatever promotion price REG ends up offering anytime during the first year).

Greed, to push it back past Christmas by a measly two weeks? Now, how does that help sales?

For anyone who's been reading Brandon's updates, this should come as no shock at all. He was late (by a month or so) on his submission of the first draft (of course, those deadlines were self-imposed, so you can't really fault him. Plus, Alloy was cool, and I guess he had to tour for a few weeks). The second draft isn't done yet, and they should probably do about 20 of them to really polish this one (ToM was showing its speedy production, and no one wants that again). And naturally, since this is the last one, everyone wants to make it the best it could be.

I was worried the fall date wasn't going to cut it now that we've fallen behind, and we'd end up with a worse book because they wouldn't want to miss out on the holidays sales. I'm not worried any longer (well, not so much). Let it be the best book it possibly can (it's insane to expect we wouldn't miss RJ), that's really all we can ask of Brandon, Harriet and Tor. Thank god they agree (on second thought, it wouldn't hurt us to thank THEM).

Nice going James. Do you happen to know whether he answered that bit about the timeline pre-ch8-release?