Re: Q9 Has a New Home
@Jayde, you actually said some of the things I was trying to say and was going to just add a bit clearer than I had. I'd also ask Gene, since he seems to be new to the audio game community and spoke about playing Halo and things, if he was around in the late 90's and early 2000's to see some of the unfair business practices FS has exercised while trying to destroy the competition? At a time when Microsoft was being hauled in court for being a monopoly, Freedom Scientific was essentially using some similar practices to force itself down the blind community's throat, while crushing it's competition under frivolous lawsuits and excluding devices they distributed from being supported as braille displays and hardware synths simply because it came from a competitor. So Gene, that scorn you mentioned other screen reader users hold Jaws and FS for was well-earned. I too am not a big NVDA user for similar reasons to Jade, but I welcome NVDA's entry into the ma rket because they've forced more competition onto FS from a different angle than the other traditional screen reader makers have tried. Trust me, the screen reader wars of the late 90's and early 2000's were very bloody, and not just between the companies, but the die-hard users themselves of their screen reader of choice.
What disturbs me most is this whole Leasey thing could start the entire community fragmenting again, and dragging the gaming community into an even greater war. Competition is only possible when a product is able to be used by the masses and alternatives are also able to be compared and contrasted. Taking Q9 out of the audio games community as a whole and cramming it into a very tiny fraction of the market may start a trend amongst other devlopers selling their products to platforms targeted at specific screen readers. Could you imagine the outcry if David sold the rights to Shades of Doom to ABC platform which is targeted solely at Window-Eye s users, and Aprone sold his rights to Swamp to XYZ platform targeted solely to NVDA users? Two of the community's largest and best games would suddenly become inaccessible to Jaws users and other users alike, with who knows what consequences to the audio gaming community as a whole. And in a niche market as this, the last thing we should be doing is trying to divide who gets what and starting another war, which is why this was such a poor decision and has upset so many people. If Bryan were truly the classy businessman he seems to think he is, he'd listen to his customers and offer a stand-alone copy of Q9 for non-Jaws, non-Leasey users for a reasonable price, while leaving Q9 as a free incentive to paid Leasey members as an alternative. He could compromise if he really wanted to, but the tone of that blog post makes it sound like he's a really stubborn guy that wants things his way, even if it costs him his reputation and potential customers. Seriously, how many Jaw s users that don't want to buy Leasey might be effected by this change? It's always the ill-conceived, rush job things in life that come back to bite people later, and it's really sounding like most people that've commented here think this was a really poorly-conceived deal.
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