Well, I am a fan of the Shadowrun Line since the 2cnd Edition and I bought every single PDF Product from the 4th Edition right until the Corporate Guide. And I bought every single book from the 4th edition that was translated in german to have it in paper. The reason I stopped buying the english PDFs right upon their date of release is the poor quality that startet with the Corp Guide discussed in many other threads here and on Dumpshock or the german Pegasus boards.
I can understand the difficulties as explained here in this thread, but seriously that can't be an excuse forever. I mean you just need to go back to the standards you had, not do anything fancy or impossible. I can understand that CGL had a rough time, but please show us your sincere intent to do things better again. In my opinion the timely release of erratas would be the first step in that direction and a strong reason for me to buy the corrected PDFs and the upcoming products right on their release date again. You have lost some trust from your fanbase and I think that would be the right way to begin getting it back.
As said in this thread, this may just be a single opinion, but you can multiply each comment left here and get a very good clue what your customers are thinking. Multiply good comments by a factor 10 times higher than the bad (it is 10x more likely to complain, than to compliment), but even if you do this you must see there is a certain ammount of mistrust in the quality of your releases. Just putting out new products will not fix this, even if they are better than the last, it will take a good ammount of time until this is recognized. That's why starting with erratas should have a high priority, this shows the dissatisfied custumors of the last products, that you take their opinions serious and that you are back on track regarding product quality.
At the moment I don't trust your approach towards quality, whatever the reasons behind that may be. Please restore this trust.
And about that leak - I can't understand why anybody does this and whoever does is certainly not a fan of the game line and treats other peoples work and enthusiasm without respect. But I'd rather see some trash talk about early ideas or unfinished chapters on the internet, than seeing poorly edited books that I have just bought for real money. I understand it must be frustrating for the authors, but seriously: isn't it more frustrating to release a badly researched and edited book and getting this response from your honest customers? I can't really imagine that the trash talkers and trolls who comment on these leaks are part of your loyal customer base.
So please reestablish your old standards for quality releases and fix the errors that were made. I can't think of anything more important for the long term development of the Shadowrun game line and it's fan base.
There a few things more important than the trust of your customers in your products for any business that wants to make money and stay in the market.
