It seems this forum can never be happy for a moment. We all seem to dwell on the negative - why is the Raider taking so long, why is W7 not released yet, why is there so much content coming out so soon, why is there another PWT, etc.

Some of the complaints I agree with. Specifically, I really hate how FFG announces their new content. For those of us lucky enough to pick up W7 at Gencon, before we even got home, W8 was announced and started to be spoiled. And for those who COULDN'T pick it up, had to wait another month for W7 after W8 was already announced. It seems to me that this isn't a good business model since it's already making the customer look forward to the future instead of basking in the present, and spending money.

But obviously there are other considerations - Gencon is a great place to announce upcoming products, and there's a time to market aspect, as well as timing stuff for Christmas. So, with my modest business background, and ignoring unforeseen delays, I'm going to take a look back at the previous releases and show how I would have done them, and who knows, maybe someone from FFG will read this and like an idea or two I have and apply it to future releases.

So, to start with, the releases to date:

Sept 2012 - Core set, Wave 1

From here, we can see that the core waves are being released twice a year - one in the fall and one in the spring. So, the first changes I would make would be to standardize these releases to August / February. With the waves bringing the biggest changes to the meta, spacing them out evenly prevents the game from becoming stale, and also allows the game to establish a meta for each wave. Furthermore, it allows the store / regionals / nationals to be played with the spring meta, while providing a fresh challenge for worlds.

The Imp Aces, Rebel Aces, Transport, Tantive IV, and Raider would be designed to fit in between the main releases. Obviously this provides slight tweaks to the game without overhauling it completely in the middle of a season. Furthermore, it spreads out the budget. Retail on wave 7 costs $95, which is right between a Tantive IV and a Raider, indicating that a Huge ship is the same financial burden as a full wave (though one could argue that people buy more than 1 of each ship, making a wave much more expensive).

In a perfect world, I would think the game would want to release the Tantive IV, and then shortly there after the Raider in order to establish the epic game play with the largest ships. Obviously this didn't align with the vision of FFG and the play testing group. Though one could argue that the play testing group dropped the ball on the epic rules anyways, seeing as it's better to just bring 300pts of ships than the epic ships... but I digress. The Tantive IV should happen first since it's an iconic ship in the actual game. As such, I would have announced that (or perhaps both that and the Raider) at Gencon 2013, for a release in Dec 2013 for the Tantive, and June 2014 for the Raider. I realize I'm pulling the Raider ahead over a year, and the Tantive ahead by 6 months, but we are talking about a hypothetical world.

For the Transport and I would probably reverse the order this time, releasing the Gozanti for Christmas, and the Transport in June 2016. This also plays off of the marketing of the Star Wars Rebels show, as the Gozanti is featured there, and will probably sell more at Christmas because of that.

The last remaining things that have currently been released are the two Aces packs. One could argue that if you were going to go back in time and do it correctly, then there would be no need for Aces packs. But, let's be honest, there's always going to be some retroactive tweaking going on. For example, the Raider "tweaks" the Advanced, so why does it have to be packaged with an epic ship to receive a tweak in this system... I say it doesn't. I say it gets timed with the Epic 2 point ship for the other faction. This way both factions get something at the same time, and it maintains the ~$100/3months investment ($60 Tranport + $30 Imp Aces). Given, this kinda gets broken going forward with the Scum being the 3rd faction, but 2 of the 3 can get love at the same time.

So, the new timeline:

Sept 2012 - Core Set, Wave 1

February 2013 - Wave 2

Sept 2013 - Wave 3

Dec 2013 - Tantive IV

February 2014 - Wave 4

June 2014 - Raider

Sept 2014 - Wave 5

Dec 2014 - Gozanti, Rebel Aces

Feb 2015 - Wave 6

June 2015 - Rebel Transport, Imperial Aces

**Forecast**

Sept 2015 - Wave 7

Dec 2015 - Scum 2 pt Epic, New Core Set

Feb 2016 - Wave 8

June 2016 - Scum 3 pt Epic

Sept 2016 - Wave 9

So, here is a release schedule that very evenly distributes content along with cost, while making some marketing sense. While it doesn't work going backwards due to the timing of the epic ships availability, if they were designing to these releases, the time table could be moved around some.

But more importantly, they could easily adopt this product launch schedule going forth, and in all honestly, they probably have something similar already as their projected launch schedule. As someone in program management, I know that what you want and what you get are often misaligned, so I can sympathize with the delayed releases *cough Raider cough*. But I cannot excuse their marketing strategy.

FFG has this "wonderful" habit about ensuring that there's always something else out there to look forward to. However, this means that you never get to enjoy your new shiny toys before realizing how much you want to play something else that's seems so much fresher. There are 13 weeks between each release, and here's what I would propose as far as a standard sneak peak schedule.

-10 Weeks: Announce the wave. Introduce each of the ships and give some ship background. Spoil 1-2 pilots, and 1-2 cards.

-8 Weeks: Focus on first ship. Spoil 1 named, and 1 card. Do not reveal the dial.

-6 Weeks: Focus on second ship. Spoil 1 named and 1 card. Do not reveal the dial.

-4 Weeks: Focus on third ship. Spoil 1 named and 1 card. Do not reveal the dial.

-2 Weeks: Focus on the fourth ship. Spoil 1 named and 1 card. Do not reveal the dial.

-0 Weeks: the product has released. Spoil whatever you want at this point.

+2 Weeks: Article (potential guest writer) with a squad list showing off some cool synergy.

What does this do for the game? Several things.

1) It prevents all of the "WHY IZZ IT TAKEINGS SO LONG!?!?!!!!!" complaints/threads

2) It keeps the game/discussion centered on what just came out, not so much on what will come out

3) It prevents the new content from feeling "old" upon release (due to proxying and other methods of playing new content prior to release)

4) It provides a reason to buy the ship - find out everything else in the pack, and see if you like how it flies

5) It provides a scheduled cadence for news releases to always keep X wing in the news, and always have something to keep the hype up.

This works for the standard 4 ship wave release, but obviously would have to be modified for the Ace packs, Wave 6, and the Epic ships. But a similar approach can be taken. If the 2 point epics are released at the same time as an Ace Pack, you have twice the content to pull from, and 4 ships to spoil (or double content in the case of a double ship ace pack). As for the 3 point Epics, it'd be difficult to have 4 content based articles without spoiling everything, and without making them seem stupid. This could probably be shrunk down to 5 total articles - announcement, 2 content based, 1 launch, and 1 squad based, removing 2 of the content based articles. Instead, those could be substituted with guest articles like we've seen in the past by PHeaver, Hothie and Alex Davy (can the lead developer be considered a guest writer?)

So there you have it. How I would schedule the X wing releases if it was a perfect world (which it isn't). But I do think that going forward, knowing the game is a commercial success, it would be easy enough to adopt this strategy. And it would be instantly feasible to adopt the announcement schedule.

It seems reasonable enough. I never want to sound ungrateful for the game and the content, but it is rapidly reaching a point of oversaturation for me. Conceivably, the Raider, Wave 7, Episode 7, and Wave 8 could be released within 4 months. That is way, way, way, WAY too much to compress into that time frame. I wish they had simply not even announced Wave 8 at this point and pushed that back to spring 2016 (which may happen anyway) and the Ep 7 stuff was closer to the end of the year. I can afford to get whatever I want, so that's less of a factor, it's that the game gets watered down with too many releases. The poor TIE/Adv waits years for a fix and immediately gets cast aside for Wave 7 and Ep. 7 stuff. That's not right, IMO, and the releases could have been managed better.

Again, not complaining about the content or FFG's excellent work on the game and use of the license, but it is absolutely too much stuff.

with a box cutter, a pair of scissors, and a giant box of PLANO

I would release everything that will be in X-Wing ever on the very first day without any delays or problems.

Kleenex

Episode 7 will be a one-off event. If they were releasing at this speed all the time I would agree.

What would I do? I'd have regular release schedule, with two waves a year and huge ships/aces packs in between.

And shipping, development, labour, manufacturing, and licensing issues, most beyond my control, would screw it up almost every single time, so I'd end up releasing it when I finally got it.

Sound familiar?

4) It provides a reason to buy the ship - find out everything else in the pack, and see if you like how it flies

Oh joy. Blind buys.

4) It provides a reason to buy the ship - find out everything else in the pack, and see if you like how it flies

Oh joy. Blind buys.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't a "blind buy" typically referred to something like Magic or Heroclix where you will never know what you have in the box? Where as this "blind" would only be for the people buying it on release day/night, as it would quickly be spoiled otherwise.

<snip>

And shipping, development, labour, manufacturing, and licensing issues, most beyond my control, would screw it up almost every single time, so I'd end up releasing it when I finally got it.

<snip>

This. You can plan all you want, but there's just too many variables at work to have a consistent schedule, as nice as it'd be.

So there you have it. How I would schedule the X wing releases if it was a perfect world (which it isn't). But I do think that going forward, knowing the game is a commercial success, it would be easy enough to adopt this strategy. And it would be instantly feasible to adopt the announcement schedule.

Except that your distributors would most likely need that information more than 10 weeks in advance. So the information gets out earlier than you'd want, and you no longer have control of when that information reaches the players.

So there you have it. How I would schedule the X wing releases if it was a perfect world (which it isn't). But I do think that going forward, knowing the game is a commercial success, it would be easy enough to adopt this strategy. And it would be instantly feasible to adopt the announcement schedule.

Except that your distributors would most likely need that information more than 10 weeks in advance. So the information gets out earlier than you'd want, and you no longer have control of when that information reaches the players.

In the past 3 years that has only pseudo happened twice, once with a spanish distributor showing stucf early, and once with a snafu by target.