Category: Editorials

[Not Massive] Steam Users Are Angry Over Early Tomb Raider Discounts


Shadow of the Tomb Raider is currently on sale and customers aren’t happy.

The third and final installment in the latest Tomb Raider reboot series, Shadow of the Tomb Raider launched on PC on September 14 to pretty favorable reviews and Steam numbers. This week, the game was discounted 34% off on October 16, 47% off for the Croft edition bundle that contains extra DLC. Since the sale began, the game has been bombed by negative reviews citing the game’s sale price. So why the issue?

Normally sales would be a great thing, but early adopters are not happy about Shadow of the Tomb Raider going on such a deep discount a month after launch and not even during a heavy sale period for Steam. More specifically, many of the negative reviews appear to be coming out of China where players are expressing frustration between two major topics: That the game is going on sale so soon after launch and of long wait times to import the game into China adding to the fact that the game is on sale so soon after many received their copies. In short, people feel burned that Square Enix discounted the game so heavily and so quickly after launch.

It seems more than likely that Square Enix is offering this deal because sales from Shadow of the Tomb Raider have been far less than anticipated. Back in September, Eurogamer noted that Shadow’s physical sales in the UK were down 70% from 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot, a more troubling idea considering that Tomb Raider initially launched just on the Xbox and this time around launched on all three major systems (PS4, Xbox One, PC) simultaneously. It also doesn’t help that Shadow cost about $100 million to make. Not a good sign.

Oddly enough, Amazon has the Playstation 4 edition of Shadow of the Tomb Raider on sale for $44.95, a 25% discount, while the Xbox version is only 5% off at $57. I guess we know which version sold better.

We fully expect Square Enix to comment on Shadow’s sales as the company has been pretty forthcoming about its opinions in the past.

Epic Games Wins Default Judgement As Defendant Fails to Respond


It’s been a while since MMO Fallout followed up on Epic Games v. C.R., the lawsuit where Epic brought complaint against a defendant who turned out to be a minor. C.R. was being accused of continuing to cheat in Fortnite, and promote said cheats through Youtube videos/streaming, in spite of over a dozen account bans by Epic. Epic filed a copyright claim against his video, defendant counterclaimed, and Epic filed suit as required by copyright law.

Most of the updates on this case have revolved around sealing and redacting documents to remove C.R.’s name from the record, so I’ve taken the liberty of skipping their coverage as to not bore all of you. The last couple of months have brought some small updates, ultimately leading to a decision within the past couple of days. Those of you who have followed the case know that C.R.’s mother wrote a letter to the court asking for them to dismiss the case, and I pointed out at the time that this may be damaging as it could be construed by the court as an official response and a motion to dismiss. I wasn’t wrong, and the court accepted the letter and interpreted it as an official motion to dismiss.

The motion was denied because it didn’t properly address the plaintiff’s claims, a premise that shouldn’t be surprising when you consider that it wasn’t written by a lawyer, or intended to be an actual legal filing. Following the court’s denial of the motion to dismiss in July, Epic Games once again filed a motion for entry of default, as outside of the initial letter from C.R.’s mother, they have not actually responded to Epic’s complaint.

After continuing to miss deadlines for response, the court this week granted Epic’s motion for default judgement, meaning Epic will likely get what it wants. And what does Epic want? Let’s go back to the prayer for relief in Epic’s initial complaint.

Epic wants the court to enter judgement in their favor and adjudge the defendant to have infringed on Epic’s copyright, to have contributory infringement, to have breached the terms of service, to have interfered in contracts between Epic and its other players through their cheating, and for the court to declare that the infringements were willing in nature. As punishment, Epic has demanded that the defendant be permanently barred from infringing or contributing to infringement, ie; cheating in their games and distributing/promoting said cheats, as well as deleting any videos showing said cheats and copies of said software off of his computer.

Now let’s talk money. Epic has demanded the maximum statutory damages under 17 U.S.C. § 504, which allows up to $30,000 (as the court considers just) with an exception for cases where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving willful infringement, in which case the maximum damage shoots up to $150,000 (again, as the court considers just). Alternately, Epic may ask for the “actual damages,” which were not specified. In addition, Epic has asked for attorneys’ fees, costs, and expenditures, as well as any further relief the court may deem proper.

Will Epic get paid? In my humble opinion, we’re more likely to see this end in a bankruptcy filing by the family.

MMO Rant: Blade of Queen Is A Lie Built On Fraud


I have to assume that there is a template for Facebook games on the same level as those stock Unity games that get released on Steam by the dozens. These games populate Facebook, they advertise using fraudulent means, and they disappear as fast as they showed up. Their developers/publishers are all based in Hong Kong, most of them have no physical address, and I can only assume that they’re being pumped out with something resembling sweatshop labor given their speed, frequency, and obviously mass-produced quality.

Blade of Queen, one of two “games” spawned by budding shovelware developer/publisher CarolGames is an embarrassment, its publisher is so embarrassed by what it has to convince people to play that instead of using Queen of Blade screenshots in its Facebook advertising, they went ahead and used a snapshot from Suikoden 2.

Blade of Queen is a game in the sense that there are graphics and animations of figures fighting on screen. It’s not a game in the sense that you have no control over your characters and the only influence you have is spending silver to boost your stats so that they can automatically fight and win their match by simple virtue that your combat rating is higher than their combat rating. The combat is punctuated by poorly translated Engrish dialogue, about some nonsense that most people won’t care about enough to try and read.

I can’t remember the last time I lost a battle in the story mode, nor can I remember the last match that did not end with a SSS rating. Giving ratings at the end of each combat match is pointless because the player didn’t do anything. There is no strategy, nothing to congratulate. There’s a game that Nexon published whose name escapes me, but it supplements the fact that the combat plays out automatically by giving the player varying types of troops, forcing you to plan out a strategy with your characters.

As if to further the idea that this game is a hastily compiled mess, combat sounds work about 5% of the time.

I’m rank 69 and I haven’t even fought a battle. Nobody is playing this. What am I doing with my life? You know, that rank 1 player looks oddly familiar. Where have I seen that name before?

I’ve found the game’s major financier, folks.

Here’s the thing about these games: They’re cobbled together in Hong Kong sweatshops for sweatshop budgets, get translated to English for about a dollar, and ultimately nobody ends up playing them because they see the game in the Facebook ad and have either been conditioned to immediately recognize the scam, or they click on the link and immediately see that the game looks nothing like what was advertised.

Sure, you’ll get maybe a half dozen, dozen players who spend more than the game deserves, but ultimately it’ll be shut down within a few months and nobody will notice because by that point it will have been replaced by several dozen more clones, all of which will similarly shut down several months later.

On the other hand, the game has boobs and booty for miles, it doesn’t take a genius to know that someone said “let’s throw some jigglin tiddies in here, that’ll make people overlook the rest of the game being worthless.”

Other than that, I have no opinion on the matter.

Old School RuneScape Introduces Taxes On Duel Arena


If Jagex isn’t careful, they’re going to have players throwing tea into Port Sarim.

The only guarantees of life in RuneScape are death and, apparently now taxes. This week’s update to Old School sees the implementation of several changes to combat real money trading, and the main headliner is the inclusion of taxes on duels. Winners will be charged a percentage depending on the size of the stake, ranging from .25% to 1% (see illustration above), and cash bets will need to be within ten thousand gold in value.

In addition, it will no longer be possible to stake items. Unlike most of Old School RuneScape’s changes, this update was not polled to players for approval.

(Source: RuneScape)

Chaturday: MoviePass In Bankruptcy Hell


I’d like to talk about MoviePass today, because MoviePass can burn in bankruptcy hell and I’m slightly looking forward to the inevitable criminal trials and convictions surrounding this sham of a business.

If you’ve somehow managed to avoid the last year of coverage regarding MoviePass, I’ll give a brief summary: MoviePass has been around for years, but they really gained public attention back in 2017. MoviePass is essentially a subscription-based debit card for watching movies. You pay $9.95 per month, and you can watch one movie per day every day of the month at virtually any theater, you simply pay with the card.

And I know what you’re thinking: A business that charges $10 per month that stands to lose, let’s check the calculator and round up our figures, upwards of $320 per month per member (I’m low-balling depending on your local ticket prices) sounds like a horrible idea.

You’d be right. As an investor, you’d only see slightly less of a return taking $100,000 and making it rain at a strip club. I say slightly less because $100,000 in MoviePass stocks bought in October would now be worth $1.85. I’m not exaggerating, that’s not a joke.

And I’m not going to dive into whether or not the folks at New York State investment bank Maxim Group, who continued to advise buying MoviePass stocks despite knowing their business plan, and despite its dropping value, performed any criminal acts. They made tons of money by advising people to buy stocks in a failing business. I’m just saying if you are an investor, take a moment to consider the judgement of a broker who sets a price target of $20 for a stock that closed at nearly half that before you take their advice on investments.

According to Business Insider, Maxim also helped Helios unload hundreds of millions of shares, pulling in lots of money and reaffirming their buy rating with a target price of triple the actual stock’s value. Maxim has never given MoviePass a sell rating, despite its value now being worth pennies.

And MoviePass wasn’t always run by the criminally incompetent, and ignoring the first five years of this product’s existence would be doing a disservice to the two people who founded it: Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt. During the first few years MoviePass had a mostly sustainable program that experimented with plans, including one in which you paid $40-50 per month for unlimited movies (1 per day) and the service reportedly had 20,000 subscribers at the end of 2016.

And then it was sold to an analytics firm, Helios and Matheson, who proceed to push the flight sticks all the way forward and crash the company within months. For those keeping track, Helios is the owner that introduced the horribly unsustainable $10 unlimited cost, with the goal of offsetting the losses by bringing in a massive amount of people and then collecting data from them to sell on the open data market. In short, Helios seriously overestimated the value of the data and underestimated the drive of the consumer to make the most of their money.

Like an elementary school class president who campaigns on the promise of soda machines in every hallway that dispense free Coca Cola, MoviePass faced the harsh reality of rolling back its perks and making a lot of people angry, or going bankrupt and making everyone angry.

MoviePass no longer allows you to see the same film multiple times, likely to cut down on card sharing. The company initially planned to increase prices to $15/month, which it reversed course on, and introduced peak pricing which was also reversed. It is limiting pass holders to three films per month, still a deal, but began removing some of the more popular films completely. This weekend began altering its available films to either be low-rated schlock (Slenderman) or inconvenient film times.

For three times over the past three weeks, MoviePass has actually run out of money and briefly gone dark. I have no idea where they are getting the cash infusions to keep the service going another week at this point, I can only assume that their list of investors overlaps with that of the Juicero, the $800 Capri-Sun juice presser.

Thankfully, the death of MoviePass can at least be attributed to one productive model: AMC has introduced its own pass which costs $20 per month and allows its viewers to see up to three films per week as opposed to MoviePass’ three films per month. It also, unlike MoviePass, allows subscribers to see IMAX and 3D films and offers concession discounts.

Oh and AMC isn’t constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, unlike MoviePass. MoviePass’ new subscription plan ($9.95 for 3 movies) goes fully into effect on September 15, and according to CEO Mitch Lowe there are still investors willing to stick around and they have confidence that the service will be able to pull itself up under this new subscription plan.

Other than that, I have no opinion on the matter.

[Not Massive] Germany Allows Swastikas In Games/Depictions of Hitler


Depicting Nazi imagery in video games has been illegal in Germany for quite some time now. The law has come under a fair amount of criticism over the years as while it has a “social adequacy” rule that has allowed films and TV series to get by (Inglorious Bastards for example), video games have not been subject to the same treatment. Developers responded to these rules often going down humorous routes such as Soldier of Fortune 2’s storyline being rewritten to replace Nazis with robots that take over the world and then start imitating human life (a prequel to Job Simulator to be sure), and The Last Crusade showing a world where Adolph Hitler leads the Black Square regime

Well it looks like the times they are a’changing, and Germany will be allowing on a case-by-case review the approval and age-rating of games depicting Nazi imagery such as the Swastika and Iron Cross, as well as the character of Adolph Hitler. According to Games Wirtschaft, the catalyst for this change was the 2017 release of Wolfenstein 2, where in order to skirt German regulations, developer MachineGames removing Hitler’s mustache and having him referenced in the game as the Chancellor.

It should be noted that this is not a blanket approval of Nazi imagery, and that games will still have to be approved to ensure that they are within existing German law.

(Source: Games Wirtschaft)

Diaries From RuneScape: Old School Mobile Beta


I went into Old School RuneScape’s mobile beta with two questions in mind: How well this game would run on my Google Pixel (original, non XL), how well it would perform in my office which is a lead-wrapped dead zone, and how many seconds it would take my Pixel to be drained of its battery. Sorry, make that three questions.

The answer is surprisingly well on all accounts. I didn’t have much reason to doubt that my Pixel could run RuneScape at a good framerate, although I will never underestimate the ability for phones to mess up running the kind of software that computers of 10 years ago could pull off without a hitch. The game equally performed well in an area where Youtube videos regularly have trouble loading (thank you Cricket), and ultimately it drained by battery only slightly less quickly than I assumed it would.

Mobile Old School answers the demand for when you still want to play RuneScape uninhibited by having to go to work, school, or other obligations. It’s honestly the perfect game to port over to mobile, considering 80% of the leveling in the game is best played while having something else do to and not looking at the screen. Jagex designed the user interface from the ground up, and it makes intuitive use of the touch screen controls in order to present a game that is not horrible to play over a long period of time.

I was afraid that the awkward finger tapping controls of your average phone game would compound the already slightly awkward controls of RuneScape, but Jagex has managed to pull off a rather smooth system. Many actions in the game are notably slower than their PC counterpart, especially anything that would require you to right click (hold your finger on screen), but OSRS compensates making it rather easy to right click NPCs even when they are moving. Clicking anything while your character is running can be a chore, but then again I find it equally a chore to do so in the full version.

The only parts of Old School RuneScape Mobile that I didn’t like were factors that ultimately have nothing to do with the phone itself. Tapping the screen with my fingers is responsive, but everyone’s fingers become fat sausage links when you’re dealing with a game that tiles its buttons on what feels like a 10×10 pixel radius. There’s also the matter of battery, which RuneScape just ate a percentage of in the time it took me to write this previous sentence. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the fact that cell phone batteries these days just suck, and if you’re the kind of person that wants to game on their phone or do anything more taxing than idling, and doesn’t carry around a battery pack, I unfortunately can’t help you.

Thankfully Old School RuneScape Mobile uses the same accounts, same characters, same servers as its desktop version, so when you get home and you’re ready to play on the big screen, you’ll be able to transition without a hitch.

[Steam Direct] Valve Isn’t Doing Basic Checks On Marketplace Items For Scams


Actions speak louder than words, and for Valve and Steam nothing furthers the allegations that the company doesn’t put much stock in the quality of its services than the repeated instances of outright fraud that have occurred on the Steam platform over the past few years. We’ve seen meme games, troll games, asset flips, abusive developers, Greenlight vote fraud, a developer taking critics to court, and of course the repeated return of Ata Berdiyev who Valve repeatedly ignore until whatever latest game he is involved with starts bringing embarrassing attention to the Steam store.

Our latest controversy comes to us in the form of scam artist indie developers and Steam items. Valve has opened up the floodgates allowing developers to give their games inventories with tradeable items on the Steam market and, as usual, they have put absolutely zero effort into quality control and as a result, some shady developers have come out of the woodwork to start exploiting the unchecked system. Reports are popping up from numerous communities of developers uploading items that are visually identical to items in Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2, in order to con unsuspecting players into making trades.

This type of scam is different than what we’ve seen in the past, although it has been spotted before, because it directly implicates that game developers themselves are knowingly taking part and likely even perpetuating the scams. In addition, it shows that Valve is doing next to nothing in regards to checking against its sellers shenanigans. Are they vetting logos? No. Are they vetting tradeable items? No.

In the case of Abstractism, that includes tradeable items like the Team Fortress 2 rocket launcher knockoff shown above, the game has shown that Valve isn’t even properly vetting their games for viruses or other malicious programming. Abstractism has numerous negative reviews noting that the game is being flagged by several anti-virus programs as containing a trojan horse virus, uses a shady looking steam services executable that may or may not be authentic, and thanks to the work of several sleuths on the net, has more or less been shown to be a cryptocurrency mining operation.

Both games we’ve shown in this article, Abstractism and Climber, have been removed from Steam and their developers presumably banned from selling further titles. It does show, however, that Valve’s commitment to dealing with troll or illegal games is hollow, if not mostly fabricated.

Diaries From RuneScape: Let’s Talk About Rune Pass


Now for the record before we begin: I bought the Runepass with my own money, this is not a sponsored post nor was the thought ever proposed by Jagex.

My game time credentials in RuneScape are such; I have played RuneScape since 2004 pretty much nonstop, my account has more than 187 days of pure game time invested and I’m willing to be that I’ve easily put over a grand in real life dollarydoos through a combined cash shop purchases and the fact that my membership has literally not lapsed since March 2005 and still has me grandfathered in at the $5/month rate. Knowing this, it probably shouldn’t surprise you that I dropped the $10 on the Runepass almost immediately.

I would be lying if I didn’t say that RuneScape’s Runepass didn’t disappoint me in the slightest. There have been a lot of comparisons of this pass to ones sold in Fortnite, in PUBG more recently, and in games like Counter Strike: GO and Dota 2. If you compare Runepass to other games, it’s a terrible value proposition. Fortnite’s battle pass costs $10 and each season runs for about two months where as RuneScape’s first pass costs $10 and gives you approximately 15 days to complete 30 tiers. In Fortnite from my understanding you can generally accumulate enough v-bucks to essentially buy the next season pass, in RuneScape you get jack all in terms of existing content. In Counter Strike: GO, the items you obtain from passes can actually be sold on the market and used to buy more games on Steam. Here? Don’t even think about it.

On the subject of Dailyscape: Dailyscape is the lovingly applicable name given to RuneScape by players concerned that the game has become heavily reliant on daily tasks and while Runepass does contribute to Dailyscape, I’m willing to argue that it does so at a much lesser degree than previous events. This is RuneScape we’re talking about, so ultimately most stuff is going to come down to a grind. As someone who quit the previous three treasure hunter events because the gain of currency was stupidly slow.

This time around the point gain isn’t excruciating. The daily repeatable task has been gaining experience, starting at 10,000 then 100,000 and increasing from there. Daily pass tasks are simple things like cut 50 logs, mine 50 ore, etc. It’s the kind of stuff that you can complete in the matter of a few minutes by going for the low level and thus easy to mass-produce resources.

To put it into perspective, if you completed both weekly tasks: Complete 5 slayer tasks and harvest 50 times from farming patches which take no time at all, you’re five levels deep. There were 28 daily tasks that stacked (meaning you didn’t have to log in every day to complete them) and individually might take at most ten minutes to complete. That’s 140 points, or another 14 levels, and you’re up to 19 levels. This leaves 11 levels to be gained via experience which can likely be done by playing an average of an hour or so a day.

On the subject of MTX: On the subject of real money economy, Jagex has stated that the aim for this is that if Runepass is successful on the non-public level that they are aiming for, that it will lead to less Treasure Hunter promotions.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Jagex has the same relationship with promises and timelines as, well as I do. Jagex makes a lot of promises, a lot of those go unfulfilled. When it comes to money, especially, Jagex has not followed up on a lot of promises in the past. Let’s not forget that most of RuneScape’s microtransactions go directly against some promise that Jagex has made in the past in one form or another regarding what players can and cannot buy.

On the subject of rewards: On the subject of rewards, for $10 the Runepass rewards are rather…crap. A small handful of untradeable cosmetics and a bunch of untradeable experience items. And if you’re a maxed player who doesn’t much care for the ocean theme? There’s nothing for you here. I’d like to see Jagex put better rewards in future Runepasses considering this is something they expect players to throw $10 in for on a semi regular basis.

Give something good as a reward, to at least give the impression that people are getting their dollar’s worth. Throw in some rare tokens, some runecoins, something.

In Conclusion: Again, it’s hard to pass final judgement since this is effectively a pilot program and a lot of it depends on how Jagex treats its other microtransaction promotions going forward. If Runepass proves successful and they ease up on the other promotions as a result, all the better. If they double down on both, then we have a problem. But Jagex does need to have some sort of perspective on price and quality. If they’re going to charge the same amount that other games do, they can’t offer a fraction of the duration and rewards.

Bad Press: Saudi Arabia Did Not Ban 47 Games Over Child Suicides


If you’ve been reading the news this week, you may have come across a story that the Saudi General Commission for Audio-Visual Media has banned a list of 47 video games following the suicide deaths of a 13-year old girl and 12-year old boy. You might be more confused by the fact that the two were playing the “Blue Whale” social media game and not a video game at all, let alone one on the list of banned titles. The news piece caught me by surprise as I was fairly certain that I had read about games like Yo Kai Watch and Okami being banned in Saudi Arabia years ago.

Your confusion would be well founded, because much like the Blue Whale game itself, this appears to be a case of fake news with patient zero as none other than the Associated Press. Other than the AP’s claim that the ban list was associated with the Blue Whale Game, there has been no confirmation and the AP article even admits that the agency did not specify a connection. If you try to check local Saudi news on a new video game ban wave, you won’t find anything.

Thankfully the crack investigative team at MMO Fallout was able to get their hands on a list of prohibited games dating back to June 2017, showing that not only is the AP report incorrect, but that the conclusion it leads to is rather easily fact checked. Through the power of the Web Archive (please excuse the slow servers), you can view the list of prohibited titles published in June 2017. The list includes numerous titles that are on the current list: Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil 6, Yo Kai Watch, God of War, Assassin’s Creed, etc.

Unfortunately the web archive only goes back to 2017 for the Saudi website, but it is evidence enough that the AP’s report on the General Commission is inaccurate. MMO Fallout is not the first to bring this to light, as Ubisoft’s head of communications and localization for the Middle East took to Twitter to call out the Associated Press and request a retraction on the article. The AP report is still up as of this publishing, as are most of the websites that source their news stories from the AP.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Among the press that carried this coverage, Nick Santangelo over at IGN pointed out that there are no secondary sources for the AP’s claim. Games Industry has fully retracted their article. None of the other press websites at this time appear to have altered or retracted their coverage.