Here’s a quick patch to fix the most glaring bugs of the last release. Before listing the changelog I’d like to reveal my plans for alpha 9. Note that my plans for alpha 9 might change at any point if something becomes infeasible or doesn’t work well with the rest of the game. First point of business is the notion of quality. Currently, quality and development duration are synonyms in Software Inc., which doesn’t really make much sense. I plan to separate quality from development progress, such that quality can vary during development, depending on employee skill. Secondly, I want to get rid of the progressbar in the alpha phase of development. The progressbar mistakenly gave the impression that software should always be outstanding and that releasing early is not a viable strategy. Ideally the average quality of the software you release should be exactly that: “average”. I’m introducing peer reviews instead. You’ll be able to send a build to your employees to test and report back the current state of the product, the accuracy of which will depend on a number of things. I’ll also add “Lines Of Code” and "Art assets" metrics, which will allow you to “learn” when a product is done. But the completeness of a product should not be as apparent as it is now. Bug count will also be obfuscated. Bugs will impact product success through refunds, and I’m currently debating with myself whether bugs reported through support work should be fixed in separate patch releases, and not directly as it is now. Pre-marketing is going out and instead you’ll be gaining product followers by utilizing press releases, press builds and going to conferences. Announcing a release date and sticking to it will have positive effects on marketing. Post-marketing will no longer have an upper limit, but you’ll have to actively compete by throwing as much money as possible at marketers and ads. I’ll be overhauling the newspaper to focus solely on player products and make reviews more detailed. I’ll make innovation, stability and usability more transparent and give the player complete control over balancing them. I want to introduce subsidiaries, which will allow you to buy out a company without closing it, and then controlling it, much like automation, but with the added ability to keep in the background and let them do their thing.

Alpha 8.11.14 changelog:

• Lowered social needs, now takes twice as long for people to feel isolated
• Employees will try to meet at watercooler every 3 hours if they have low social stat, instead of once per day
• Removed coffee vapor, not worth the performance cost

• Audience retention was not scaled with days per month
• Fixed trying to check feature dependency for features that are not compatible with selected software category. Found by selecting "Fighting" category in "Game" software from mod
• Fixed employees sometimes not leaving behind items, so they end up holding on to them forever, breaking their behavior, e.g. not going to the watercooler because they already have water