Yes, we need more time

Euto Truck Simulator 2 will not be ready for release on the market in August. This was an honest estimate made early this year which we have provided to our publishing partners, and which I have announced to here on this blog. However, we realized that we need more time to complete the game in the quality that we want to achieve. Please accept our apologies for keeping your hopes high and then disappointing you.

We are committed to shipping a finished and polished game above anything else, and while the decision to postpone ETS2 release wasn't easy, it is the right thing to do. There may be some negative reactions now to this delay, but think about what would happen if we shipped the game with major bugs - you would all go berserk bashing it and our reputation and business could be damaged beyond repair. It is really better to give you a game that's fun to play with no big issues. We need the game to succeed if SCS Software is to stay in business and keep on developing simulation games. Each step along the way matters.

At the moment, we think it will take an extra month of testing and tuning to get the game completed, possibly pushing the release date into September. But this is still our best guess, not a guarantee - the game is only done when it's done. We are only human, we do what we can to build the game according to the vision that we started with, and it's no small task for us for sure.

Thank you for your patience and continued loyalty - we are doing this for you.

Yours sincerely,

Pavel Sebor
CEO, SCS Software


PS: Perhaps these images may not stand a chance to compensate for the bad news, but here is a few shots from truck purchase process to cheer you up a bit:

Euro Truck Simulator 2 trucks

No, we really haven't slowed down working on Euro Truck Simulator 2 as some of you are suspecting judging by your comments. In fact the ETS2 team has been fully concentrating on the work on the game, so much that we didn't pay much attention to anything else including creation of promotional material for the game at this stage. Finally we have reserved some capacity for creation of movies and screenshots in the upcoming weeks, so you can look forward to seeing more of the game.

For today, we have just a very quick glimpse at a few ETS 2 truck configurations...

Scania Truck Driving Simulator 1.1.0

Two new Dangerous Drives challenges plus a lot of fixes and improvements.

Head over to the Download page (if you haven't checked out the game yet, is it even possible?) or to Update page if you just need to bring your copy of the game up to date.

A total of about ten bonus Driving Challenges is "in the pipeline" for future game extensions, plus quite an addition to the Deliveries city map - so we still have an excuse to continue improving the game for a few more patches :-). Thanks for your support!

Czech Finals of Young European Truck Driver 2012

A small team from SCS Software has visited Czech YETD finals today, taking place at Scania truck dealer Scanwest in the city of Plzeň. We wanted to experience the atmosphere of the competition ourselves, after implementing it into Scania Truck Driving Simulator based just on movies and photos. We were in awe, the best drivers really can do incredible things behind the wheel. This year's Czech winner is definitely going to be a very strong contender in the European finals.

We were also presenting the new game to the visitors - both adult truckers as well as kids looked to have a lot of fun with it.

Teething problems

Scania Truck Driving Simulator has been out for some 48 hours on the official website, and frankly speaking, many things did not go quite right, as you have witnessed yourself. Our hand was forced to launch the game website a few days ahead of plan, due to the fact that the game hit the shops in Poland a week before the official global street date. It was urgent to get the leaderboards and online registration process up and running. This in turned caused an avalanche of complains from you, our most dedicated fans, that it's not fair not to be able to join in the fun while people in one country already can. So to make you happy, we want ahead and started offering the digital edition as well, while all preparations were not yet fully completed. There were so many people immediately downloading the game that our servers almost melted, and we did not manage to add mirrors for the downloads fast enough. Then even the official game site went down for a few minutes due to traffic overload. But there hides some good news in the bad news - it's good to have problems because so many people are so interested in getting their hands on the game!

By the way in Poland the Polish box edition of the game is doing quite well, currently sitting nicely at #5 in the Best Seller chart at Empik.com. We know that our games have a huge following in Poland, but it would be a dream to be able to replicate this on other markets next week.

We are preparing the first patch for the game which should be available for download next week, and address many of the glitches reported over the past few days. The patch will also include a couple of new Dangerous Drives challenges. We are planning several free content updates for the game which are going to come to you through a series of patches - quite a lot of new stuff. Yet more Dangerous Drives are in the pipeline, and also a sizable extension of the free-roaming map for "Deliveries." We will also use the new patch to ban the leaked keys which unfortunately somebody felt the need to share with the rest of the world.

We are about to upload some new texts onto GetLocalization, and we would highly appreciate again your help there, both with the new texts and also with polishing of the existing translations. Now that the game is out in your hands you can finally see clearly how the translations feel and where there is an opportunity for improvement. Thank you for your help!

Scania Truck Driver Simulator now online

The big moment is here, we are launching the digital edition of the game today, along with the official web site at www.scaniadrivergame.com!

Scania Truck Driver Simulator The Game has appeared on store shelves in Poland this week already, ahead of the official street date, so we had to act faster than we anticipated to allow people to compete online.

We also have a new, shorter and more dynamic cut of the official game promo video trailer on our YouTube channel as of today:

We would like to thank sincerely to all of you who have helped us in the closed beta testing period, and to those of you who have helped us translating the game into so many languages. Now that the full game is out, it will be easier to see any trouble in the translations and correct them for future patches of the game.

Release & Post-release

When a game is released, it's hard to pinpoint a specific moment in time when the team can consider the work to be truly finished. The game has "gone gold" a few days ago already - we have started producing the "gold masters" for our publishing partners - but the process has been going on through the whole week and it's going to continue well into the next week.

Meanwhile, we have been hard at work finishing elements of the official game website (www.scaniadrivergame.com), which we expect to launch early next week.

Our brave group of beta testers kept torturing the game even after the official finish line, and they have managed to discover a few glitches that we need to fix. So the programmers and designers kept going, working on the first patch of the game. If you are curious, here is the "changelog" so far:

• Additional type of steering wheel & pedals-friendly automatic gearbox which does not flip brake and accelerator pedals during reverse movement.
• It is possible to give hints to the automatic gearbox using the Shift Up/Shift Down buttons.
• Fixed HUD mirrors and look presets for UK vehicles.
• Fixed waiting times on gas stations
• Better TV camera placement on several YETD challenges
• Three additional bonus Dangerous Drives levels built

The game has also started to get mentions in the news. Scania corporation has a piece of news on their Newsroom announcing the upcoming game. Over at truckgame.cz, a competition has been announced giving away copies of Scania Truck Driving Simulator to winners over the next couple of days.

We also need to prepare more promotional material to warm up the public to the game launch, and today we have a new little movie for you, showing scenes from the free-driving map.

A very busy week this has been!

Lots of things happening...

We are officially "Gold" with Scania Truck Driving Simulator for some of the markets, but still producing the final 1.0.0 versions of the game for other markets. This is a big moment for the team working on the game, but their work is far from done. There is the game's website still to be launched, updates to translations to be prepared for future patches, and we even have new content for further expansion of the game already in our plans. We are happy to confirm that the game is going to start appearing on the markets during the week of June 18th (there might be small differences in various countries).

Yesterday we have organized another truck sounds recording session, this time with a Mercedes-Benz Actros. As always you will see a short video of it soon - a whole day's worth of work of several people compressed into a short clip which takes another few days to post-process and cut, just so we can show you what we are working on.

Work is of course not ever ceasing on Euro Truck Simulator 2, and as we know that you always crave for something to see, not just to read the boring text, here is a bunch of images from ETS 2: