Elemental launch was "catastrophic poor judgment"

Speaking on the official Stardock forums, Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock has revealed that the problems associated with Elemental's disastrous launch were nothing to do with the game being pushed out the door early. In fact, Wardell says that releasing a game early is "an easy thing for a company to 'fix'... If the game had come out in February, it would still have been a disastrous launch because lack of time wasn't the issue." Wardell says he had his "head in the sand."

The full post, below, makes for extraordinary reading.

There will be massive consequences for Stardock's game studio. I'll be talking more about this when I get back. But the game wasn't released early. The game was released poorly. Head in the sand syndrome imo. I've read the reviews as much as possible given my hideous internet access up here and I agree with them. We just didn't see what they were talking about. We thought any complaints would be about polish points or something.

EVERY competent software developer knows that the programmer must never be the one deciding whether the program is done. Yet, my love of Elemental broke my self discipline and I began coding on the game itself in vast amounts and lost any sense of objectivity on where the game's state was. I normally only program the AI on our games so I can keep a level of distance from the game itself to determine whether it's "Ready". On Elemental, I was in love with the world and the game and lost my impartiality.