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ORIGINAL: Joel Billings

Did I say 10k at best? I thought I said between 5-15k units sold.

Check back with me in a few years and I'll let you know how it came out, but in any case I'd hire you to do my econometric forecasting (econometrics was my favorite class in college).

ORIGINAL: Joel Billings

I had a discussion with David Heath at Origins (and I think Erik was in on it) about WitP code. The decision was made to keep the code in house for a while longer. For now, Mike is working on WPO and on fixing some WitP bugs. At some point in the future (and I can't say if that's later this year or a year from now), we expect to open it up to a select group of programmers who sign up to work on it. We would not plan on just giving out the code to the world, at least not at that time. We have our doubts about the ability of volunteers to significantly improve the game without causing even more bugs, but we expect to be willing to try it out down the road. We certainly can't give up the revenue that we continue to make on WitP. Based on current sales trends, I'd say we have sold somewhere between 40-70% of what we will eventually sell, so you can see there is still a lot of sales that we expect (and need) from WitP. Opening the source could jeopardize this revenue. Down the road, it is very possible the code will be opened up for all to access, but that'll have to come later.

Just to indicate the ongoing sales potential of WitP, we sold about 15 at Origins. Considering the game was a year old, this is a very high number. SSI games rarely sold more than a few copies at a convention if they had been out for more than a few months.