Why is it so difficult for Focus to communicate progress?

Can someone at Focus explain why they are unable to communicate on a regular basis with the community?

It's been a while now since Mudrunner was released. The community rallied to buy Mudrunner and feedback on problems they have encountered. Yet, it seems that Focus have largely ignored the community, almost to the point the community are concerned about the future of the game.

If I was community manager at Focus, or even someone related to the the development and publication of Mudrunner, I would be desperate to get the community on side and reassure them. However, for Focus, that seems not to be the case. Surely someone, somewhere at Focus understands that good publicity with an engaged and enthusiastic community will help drive Mudrunner sales.

I'm fed up of visiting the Focus forum and the Steam Discussions looking for a hint of some progress. There are rarely any new stickies posted by Focus (or anyone connected to Mudrunner). I have trawl through community posts in a hope I might see a reply by someone connected to Mudrunner, which might shed some news on the situation. Every time it's the same, "we're working on a new update, we can't tell you what it is, or when it will be ready".

Why is it so difficult to to give a regular update, even if it was once a fortnight. Anything is is better than nothing. You clearly know what you're working on, but do not want to share, but even this would work:


20 Nov 2017

New update progressing slowly. Unexpected delays in development, which meant a full re-write of x component.

4 Dec 2017

Update has made some significant progress. We're now in final stages of putting a closed alpha release together.

18 Dec 2017

Closed alpha release built and is currently undergoing testing. We've already discovered a few bugs which we're working on.

8 Jan 2018

Having taken a break for Christmas period, we're now continuing development.

22 Jan 2018

We're at beta, hooray. Testing underway, not too many faults have shown up.

12 Feb 2018

The update is looking good. Here is a teaser of what's in store... x...
Anticipated release 12 March 2018


And so on...

Do you see how it's possible to keep the community engaged without revealing any details?

Seriously Focus, start communicating with your community. I don't care if it takes you two months to just change the pattern of the tyre tread, but please, please, please sort out a regular communications with the community, you will die without them.

What´s your problem?

Remember the days when o***e was the publisher.

The situation is now 1000 times better.

Dude, the game has 3 weeks and it has one patch already. I am not saying that everything will be good, but I say that it is extremely early to say something like what you said.

Some publishers dont say anything for months and thats the usual thing. I think that you are having nightmares from OOVEE (understandable) and anything triggers you now.

last edited by Araxp

150MB+ update on Steam today when I finally took it out of offline mode (to avoid the obnoxious "Connecting to Steam" message in-game).
Patch notes? Nada...
And no, it wasn't updating workshop content because Steam differentiates between the two...
I'm inclined to agree with @DruidsNectar insofar as we're not asking for concrete dates on patches and the like, just some kind of communication...
Last thing listed in Steam for news was when the previous patch dropped. Not a peep since then. Why?

The most recent posts by developers here was several times this month. And one of the mods here made a sticky about console mods. So they are communicating about progression. Maybe not as much as some would like, but it's a lot more frequently than other companies.

last edited by Triclonz

@mexican_420, That may just be a Steam update. I get them from time to time as well and thought the game was updating.

@Tattoo
Even though it was listed in the Downloads section under Mudrunner, along with separate updates for a couple of other games I own, each also listed separately?
I know when the Steam client itself updates it shows a progress bar prior to showing the Steam main screen, but that wasn't the case here...

@triclonz, I agree. I've read many posted from the @netheos and a couple others about the game and @pavel has even posted some info. That's a lot more than we got from the other forum.

@mexican_420, Hmm, I haven't noticed another update since the first one.

@Tattoo
I probably wouldn't have noticed either, but I subbed Aleksander71's Gaz 2975 Tigr and wanted it to download before I started Mudrunner up again, and I expected to see a small download listed as Workshop Content. Instead I saw an update listed for Mudrunner itself... That Gaz is the only mod I've subbed since Steam was last in online mode, and normally if there have been updates for mods I've already got installed they still list as Workshop Content...

@mexican_420, I dunno man. I looked thru Steam to see if there was a second update and there's no info on it. Did you get the first update?

Hi @DruidsNectar, sorry to hear you feel like we don't exchange with you enough. We do our best to answer questions from players, giving as much visibility on upcoming content as we can.

As explained in other posts, our first priority right after the release of MudRunner was to fix the most urgent remaining technical issues. It's been done in a first bug fix update a week after the release (10 days on consoles).

We're now working hard on a major update with a lot of bug fixes and some features highly requested by the community since release (wheel support on consoles and a new camera mode are the two main priority). We can't give you an accurate date for this update because it depends on how the testing process goes, but we aim at December.

More will follow in 2018. MudRunner community is huge and very active and we gathered a massive amount of feedback since release. We already plan to work on the most requested features.

last edited by Jellyfoosh

Very nice, appreciate it!

I also thought that I would bring this issue to the forfront as well "scrolling Map choices" it isnt possible to scroll map choice once you have downloaded modded new maps...you can only see 3 or 4 maps past the original 6 maps..theres NO scrolling ability in the maps menu...

Hi @netheos, thanks for the reply. I'm sure you are busy with loads of things, and it's difficult to reply to every single question/person, but you seem to make things difficult for yourself and the community.

Surely it would make sense to have some stickied posts (locked, no replies) where you update with whatever, even if it's just quoting questions an replying there.

It's not easy to have to read every forum post, both here and on Steam to see if you might have replied, or given a hint at some sort of progress.

As a a really good example, your reply above mentions that "more will follow in 2018", that's good to know. I can now sit back and not worry about looking until 2018. But it's a snippet of useful information buried in yet another post. I bet loads of the community will miss this, possibly more so for those who only look on Steam. If you put it in a sticky, at the top of the forum, most people would see it.

I hoe you can see why I make such a point about sticky posts. They simplify your job of communicating, and they simplify our job of finding those communications.