Charting a New Course for Diamond Mind Baseball

10/09/08 – Forum  (Dayne Myers)

The main news is that we are now planning to do a version 10, rather than a small upgrade.

So, what changed?

Over the past few months, I have talked about the future of Diamond Mind Baseball with members of the DMB community through the forum and other avenues. As a result of those discussions, we concluded that it would serve the community best to add new features through a series of smaller, more frequent, and lower-priced upgrades, an idea suggested by various members of the community. Originally, we conceived of a series of very small upgrades. However, your passion and desire for a new version led us to wonder if we could do something more extensive. With that in mind, Luke devised a process to make upgrades more efficient, and Tom offered to work with Luke to determine what was feasible. This has taken longer than we'd hoped, but we hope you'll appreciate the results. The eagerly anticipated version 10 game upgrade package will contain many customer requested features we think you'll appreciate. Since this plan is the result of Luke's inspiration, initiative and hard work, I'll let him describe the details separately.

In the long run, this plan will enable us to do more regular updates to the game in a cost-effective manner, with a new goal of updates once per year.

In addition, we're happy to say that not only have we been working on the upgrade package details but also future plans for Diamond Mind that we want to share with you. Here's what you can look forward to in the coming months:

DMB PC Division. Your passion for the game, combined with Luke's plan for an efficient regular upgrade process, has convinced us to continue ongoing development of DMB. Doing so, however, will require focus and attention beyond my capacity, particularly given some family issues I'm facing at the moment. Therefore, we are creating a separate DMB division that will focus on the PC game, with Luke Kraemer as its general manager. He (and Pat, of course) will now be your primary contacts and interface to the community. Given the concerns that some of you have expressed about the focus of Imagine Sports being its online games, we hope you will find having Luke and Pat in charge here to be a good arrangement, given their many years of serving the DMB community.

DMB Website. As part of creating a separate business unit for DMB, we will restore the original Diamond Mind website. Its traditional and easy-to-follow layout contains a wealth of information that helps answer questions for prospective, returning and continuing customers. The website and the DMB forum together are great informational and support tools for all, and we also want to be responsive to your input on this.

2008 Post-season Teams Disk. In case you haven't already heard, we produced another post-season disk, which is available now for purchase in the store. The price is $9.95 and is available for email delivery only.

2008 Season. We will start taking advance orders for the 2008 Season "Disk" on Monday, October 13. In addition to providing everything you need to play highly-realistic games using real-life teams, the upcoming upgrades to DMB will make this the most realistic season ever! The 2008 Season will begin shipping on or about Wednesday, December 10.

Deluxe Seasons. As previously announced, we are upgrading the Classic 1974 - 1977 seasons to Deluxe Seasons. These four seasons are already upgraded Classic seasons, having had game-by-game lineups and real-life transactions added to them. Now, we are making them full Deluxe seasons, adding left-right splits, re-evaluating player ratings and updating manager profiles. We plan to have the first one ready to release in December, followed by another one about every eight weeks or so.

Version 10 Game. The new version of DMB will include a number of new features, including new play-by-play and some new controls for it, playing time limitations, some new reports, and assorted other goodies. Luke will provide details and even some screen shots in his separate announcement. Version 10 is tentatively scheduled for release in February, 2009. When the feature list is finalized, we'll announce the price, the projected ship date, and the date when we'll begin accepting advance orders. Those future announcements will be coming from Luke and Pat at the appropriate times.

Specialty Disks. We have been working on some new specialty disks, one of which is a series based on All-Star teams. We hope to release the first of these sometime in the next couple of months. Luke or Pat will pass on more details as the time nears.

Newsletters. This announcement will be delivered via a DMB newsletter in the coming days. Pat will be handling that and re-establishing a regular DMB newsletter system.

Thank you!

We want to thank you for your feedback, suggestions, encouragement and patience recently and for your support over the years. It was truly your loyalty and passion for DMB and your ideas inspired some new thinking and this new approach, along with a renewed commitment to the PC version of DMB, and we will do our very best to repay that with top-quality products at a fair price.

And now it's time to...

Play ball!!

Dayne Myers

CEO

Imagine Sports, Inc.

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