By that standard nothing we say is wrong...
No, I was commenting about public opinion, not about fact. If the actual facts would have effected my comments, I would have been wrong. However, what I said was merely a comment on public opinion and expectation as it relates to certain results. It doesn't matter that the public was technically wrong, people still called certain games vaporware, and those games did eventually come out, some to great success.
Also, it occurs to me that if you had spent the time in which you wrote the two posts responding to what i said researching the issue this whole discussion could have been avoided...
This conversation wouldn't have happened, but the point behind it would still exist. I care about this topic, I don't care greatly about the other. I find it important for people to realize that perfect accuracy isn't necessary for every comment made ever, and that it's acceptable to know what is relevant to a discussion and what is not, and when to cut off further research as unecessary. I could have spent days researching that post, and still missed facts that someone would consider relevant. I could have written a college thesis on the public perception of vaporware, versus the intended usage of the word, comparing and contrasting various games, but that would have just been a waste of everyone's time.
Instead, I just did what interested me and was relevant to the situation. I looked up what games had been called vaporware, and mentioned that most of those were out now. I thought it was an interesting factoid. Public knowledge of a game's long development doesn't mean it will inevitably be a failure. I don't see how that is changed by the accuracy of the term "vaporware". If the games were announced or not doesn't change that they were long anticipated. Heck, it doesn't even matter if they were officially in development for the whole time the public was talking about them. I wasn't making some deep commentary, just a light observation.
If you really cared about the accuracy of my original statement, you'd have gone out and told all of us which games I listed were not technically vaporware. Go ahead, research a timeline of public announcement for each game, and check your facts, make sure that the official announcement was the first declaration that the game was being made (and that you didn't miss some artwork "leaked" to the press by a designer). Then write a 500-word essay on the length of time after various degrees of public announcement that is necessary for a tech product to be considered "vaporware". Then we'll all know pretty much what we already do. Decent games can come out of long development periods.
. I have fond memories of Duke Nukem 3d.
