Unfortunately, Plimus scheduled system maintenance at the same time as our launch of VV4. They appear to be having continuing problems, but we are handling the issues everyone is having as quickly as we can. We do ask for everyone's patience and understanding; we are as unhappy about this as you all are.

Silly question I'm sure, but how do I find and open the Game Guide? It comes with purchase, right?

Not silly at all. I don't see it anywhere either.

Nice to see LDW going greedy like EA and selling extras like the game guide for another $10.. Just look at steam games. Updates with new content are released even years after release for free..

Nice to see LDW going greedy like EA and selling extras like the game guide for another $10.. Just look at steam games. Updates with new content are released even years after release for free..

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Fun fact: When you buy a VV game at a competing portal, in most cases they keep the majority of the money. We receive as little as $2 from some of them.

There has been a lot of controversy about this in the last year, and the general result was that many developers decided that they were going to quietly make their casual games smaller and cheaper, to make up for the low revenue coming in from all the distributors (due to the small % we keep, and the crazy price competition).

We really do not want to make the VV games, or any of our games, smaller or cheaper. In fact, we are spending more than ever on the development, so we are moving forward carefully and trying to make good decisions to keep this sustainable for us, and to keep making the games that we believe in.
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Fun fact: When you buy a VV game at a competing portal, in most cases they keep the majority of the money. We receive as little as $2 from some of them.

Just to put this in perspective, if you buy the game from us you pay $19.95, as you always have, and you get the game guide free. We are not intending to make one cent on the game guide, we are trying to give people more reasons to buy the games from us.

Steam has a different model. Their games that continue to receive the free updates are their in-house games and are the vehicles for their portal. They reward you for using their portal (Steam) with the free content updates, and they monetize that by selling hundreds of other games to you. I love Steam, btw...it's just a different model.

Fun fact: When you buy a VV game at a competing portal, in most cases they keep the majority of the money. We receive as little as $2 from some of them. There has been a lot of controversy about this in the last year, and the general result was that many developers decided that they were going to quietly make their casual games smaller and cheaper, to make up for the low revenue coming in from all the distributors (due to the small % we keep, and the crazy price competition).

We really do not want to make the VV games, or any of our games, smaller or cheaper. In fact, we are spending more than ever on the development, so we are moving forward carefully and trying to make good decisions to keep this sustainable for us, and to keep making the games that we believe in.

I will talk more about this going forward as we figure out and announce the rest of our distribution plan for Virtual Villagers 4 - The Tree of Life.