The teaser is the start of the marketing campaign building towards the Ashes. Mainstream consumers are still watching football, and a lot of Cricket fans even are thinking about the IPL and looking forwards to the Champion's Trophy: The Ashes are still barely a blip on most people's radars.
Once it comes, I'm sure it will have all the focus in the world, but you're fighting against a lot of competition at the moment - I would think it better to keep the powder dry until you can get some focus.
Now, as far as keeping YOU guys happy goes, licensing approvals are still ongoing: this is pretty typical based on previous versions as well - certainly it's not unusual. In fact, here's part of a Q+A that Codies did in 2009 for Planet Cricket where exactly the same things were brought up (I believe this was about a month ahead of launch):
"There are a multitude of reasons for us being quieter than usual up to this stage, mainly related to the licenses involved in the game. It is a very complex area and the guy in charge of our licensing department has worked absolute wonders.
For example, we could not release any screenshots until all of the player heads had been approved by the relevant board, the players? union and, in some cases, the players themselves. These restrictions still apply to anything we put out, whether it is a press release, screenshot or a video. The approval process is pretty rigorous and takes weeks rather than days. When you consider that we had to wait for the Ashes squads to be somewhere near finalised you can see our problem.
I actually don?t agree with the PC perception that we have done that bad a PR job on this (after all, I want to keep my job as I really like it). In our opinion Ashes Cricket 2009 is not the kind of game that requires a protracted marketing campaign such as we are seeing for games such as Modern Warfare 2 (plus we don?t have their budgets). Our campaign has to be more intense and targeted around the actual series and the game?s release date. We want people to be able to see it, think ?wow that looks cool?, and then be able to pick it up from a shop straight away."
Anyway. That's my take on it - the current situation is nothing outside the norm - bear with us.
