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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4686397" data-attributes="member: 5143">Well, from what I know, the program was being coded by a 3rd party company.  WOTC gave the 3d engine to this other company to modify as needed in order to create the Game Table.In January(I believe) of last year, WOTC put up a job posting for programmers.  There was some information to the effect that their main job would be to handle the transition between the 3rd party company and WOTC of the DDI applications.  They would be primarily responsible for making post release patches.  At least, that's the impression I got from the job posting and some information on the WOTC boards.So, assuming they were hiring in advance of the transfer, they likely hired someone mid-late February.  In late February, DDXP was on.  I talked to the WOTC people there who were in charge of DDI.  They were confident that the Game Table would be released in beta form a month before the release of 4e.  They were accepting applications for Beta testers.  I applied, excited to learn more about 4e earlier than the books came out.  They were showing videos of the Game Table and demonstrations of it at scheduled times.About a month before 4e came out, in May, I got an e-mail saying that although I was accepted as a beta tester, that the beta test was being delayed until the release date of 4e and the new Dungeon and Dragon Magazines that were starting in June.  It said that the Compendium would come out first and would be available to everyone.  After that the programs would roll out as they became available, but I'd be the first to know.I never received any more updates after that.After that, I got e-mail from GenCon saying that there would be demos running all weekend where WOTC employees would be running actual games using the Game Table.When I got to GenCon in August, there were demos of the Character Builder and Visualizer but the Game Table was nowhere to be found.  From talking to people at the show and reading blog posts of people's experience there, I found out that WOTC had decided the program was too buggy and that it crashed too often to actually run an entire game in it.  They figured it was bad publicity to show it.  Although, people who asked to see it were allowed to as long as there was a WOTC employee standing over them and waiting to restart the computer.That's also where I heard the rumor about attempting to charge for 3d minis on DDI and the fact that the Game Table was not designed with that capability in mind.  It was being designed to run games first.  Afterwords, when they decided to integrate it with the rest of DDI(allowing you to search the compendium, attach a stat card to a mini, use 3d minis that you purchased, all only if you had a valid account and weren't running it in demo mode), they found that it was no easy task due to the way it had been coded(which was probably made worse by the fact that they were using in house programmers to modify the code that was created by the 3rd party company).From everything I've heard, I would guess that the failure comes down to the fact that they hired a 3rd party company to do the coding with very little oversight.  It is likely that they were shown demos of the program in action under carefully controlled situations where it looked like it was almost finished.  They gave a deadline to the 3rd party company of May, the company said they could make it.  And when they handed the program over, it crashed all the time and wasn't in a releasable state.They gave it to their in house programmers expecting that they could fix the problems with it in a couple of months.  They were not able to.  They decided to put their effort into finishing the Character Builder and stopped working on the Game Table entirely.  The Character Builder turned out harder to fix than they thought as well, and the finally got it done for January this year.My best guess is that, after the Visualizer is done, probably in a couple of months, they'll start working on the Game Table again, and it might be done end of the year, or early next year.</blockquote>

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