How about if we pre-purchase max. We pay the full price now in exchange for a solid release date.
Okay, let me see if I can explain this whole thing to you.First off we're going to go with the expert testimony of Mr. Frederik P Brooks, who in one of his many essays, while working on IBM Mainframes, wrote that "writting a compiler is at least three times as difficult as writting an application". The difficulty aspect is ofcourse one of complexity.
Now for any large application (like Half-life 2) which is 3 times easier to write than Max3D, they missed their release date estimate by at least a year. And then another 8 months. Some large applications miss theirs by much more (to the point of them being used as the punchline in a joke). Now remember that this is for a project, that is significantly easier to predict a release date for than a compiler.
Imagine the moaning if people actually pre-pay and a release date won't be met...
Well ofcourse the release date could just be a rediculously long time in the future. Like 10th October 2010. They've already paid upfront, so what should anyone care if they chose to buy something else in the mean time.In an extreme case of "don't ever pull this @#!* again" these people should not be allowed to purchase the Max 3D module until after that date.
If you want to discuss venture capital for BRL you're going to need alot more than 5K.