We’re talking about this again.
Ship of Heroes. Ship of Zeroes. I hesitate to make the easy ship joke and refer to it as the Titanic because there were members of the press who genuinely believed the tagline that the Titanic was unsinkable and in this case nobody believed Ship of Heroes would be able to leave port let alone make its maiden voyage.
I think it’s safe to say that the folks at Heroic Games Corporation are completely delusional, and I say that with the utmost empathy. If I spent the last nearly decade of my life working on something only for it to come out with the level of quality and reception that Ship of Heroes came out in, I think I’d be having a mental breakdown too. I’d also be relatively pissed if the product I was really banking on staying dead came back to life.
I commented a week and a half ago about how Ship of Heroes can’t break 30 players and as of the last 48 hours it’s having a hard time breaking ten. If I started selling ranch-stuffed hotdogs out of the trunk of my car I’d have a bigger revenue stream than Ship of Heroes will when the first month runs out. I’d also have a happier and more loyal clientele.
The folks at Heroic Games are still blaming trolls for the game’s performance rather than the fact that their delusional pricing structure and mediocre quality product did all the work on its own. On October 1 they once again decided to show their quality of character, this time blaming review bombing during the first week of release.
Make no mistake, the folks at Heroic Games are flat out lying here. Ship of Heroes wasn’t review bombed. The Wiki article they point out says in the first sentence that a “review bomb is a malicious Internet phenomenon” and absolutely nothing going on with Ship of Heroes’ reviews qualifies as malicious. People bought the game, they played it, they didn’t like it. They reviewed it negatively and stopped playing.
The reason people are referencing Homecoming in their reviews is because the comparison is legitimate and reasonable. One is completely free and the other is asking for utterly ridiculous prices for the quality of product it’s putting out. Ship of Heroes has the kind of face only a mother could love, and maybe a dozen other people spread across the whole world.
This is how we avoid predatory monetization. Yeah and I avoid high cholesterol by simply never buying groceries and then starving to death. At the end of the day, you have to eat.
They claim review bombs are a fairly common problem for new games on Steam, and that’s also a lie. Most new games on Steam don’t even hit that 10 review threshold for a score, let alone getting enough attention to be review bombed. And I’ll note to the devs in case they see this that I’ve been part of a group that follows and tracks Steam review bombs for years. I was literally invited to Valve’s offices.
Heroic Games keeps trying to push people to its forums over Steam which it claims is free of trolls, much like the game. Which is true. It’s also virtually free of anyone else as the game drops into single digits and the forums the last time I checked had two posts by the same user (not counting dev posts) within the last 24 hours.
The only trolls that are actively harming Ship of Heroes are the folks at Heroic Games. Because whenever I see people quoting posts as reasons why they were turned off of giving the game a try, they’re not quoting the alleged trolls. They’re directly quoting the developers.
Ship of Heroes doesn’t need haters, the devs are doing a fantastic job sinking themselves. Otherwise I have no opinions on the matter.
MMO Fallout 