Category: Editorials

[Column] Bulkhead Interactive Asks Community To Manipulate Steam Reviews


Bulkhead Interactive is playing with fire, and I have a feeling they’re going to get burned.

World War 2 shooter Battalion 1944 currently stands at a 31% “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam, with 115 currently playing users and an all time peak of 16,341. Earlier today, Bulkhead’s community manager posted a thread on the game’s Reddit page asking the community to review, which can be very easily interpreted as “review positively,” especially given the explicitly stated goal of this campaign is to improve the game’s recent review score from mostly negative to mostly positive.

The statement very coyly tries to avoid any guaranteed accusations of review manipulation by telling players that their reviews can be positive or negative, it doesn’t matter as long as they’re giving their feedback. I have to wonder who Bulkhead thinks they’re fooling by trying to play dumb, especially when comments like the one below are being made to players who say that they enjoy the game, but don’t want to give a positive review because the player base is so small. Since Battalion is an online-only multiplayer game with no bots, the low player base can make the game nigh unplayable at off-peak hours.

“Player numbers are not the game that you’re reviewing, is the game good is the question.”

So give the game a positive or negative review, it doesn’t matter, just remember that you’re not to review the game based on criteria that we (Bulkhead) don’t approve of. Specifically criteria that would make the game look bad, like its low player count. Bulkhead even went so far as to dangle an incentive for getting the review score up, noting such feat as a prerequisite for the company to hold a sale.

“Any player who would like to leave a review, please do so as soon as possible. The reason being is that we would like to see the ‘Recent Reviews’ change as soon as possible, so that we can do our first sale. It’s a very achievable task but one that requires the community, new players, devs, and old players to work together.”

Early Access: Battle Royale Survivors Is Lazy Dreck


I had to give Battle Royale: Survivors a look, it just had to be done.

Battle Royale: Survivors is the latest in the long line of developers jumping on the PUBG bandwagon and if you’re thinking that this game looks like a twinstick shovelware title built off of the Unity engine, well you’re right on two of the three points. Survivors isn’t a twinstick game, although it would be a much higher quality product if it were. What it is is a shovelware title built on Unity that hopes to piggyback on an existing trend.

Survivors launched into early access on June 18, by which I of course mean that the game launched riddled with bugs and unfinished features, but a functioning cash shop where you can purchase money packs up to the best offer at $24.99. Cash can be swapped for TK, the in-game currency, at a base rate of 2,000TK per $1 USD, meaning the loot boxes run for between $2.50-$3.50 apiece, plus an extra dollar for keys for the higher two options. Additional characters will run you nearly 10k TK, or $5 give or take. Alternately you can grind TK through the games at such a snail’s pace that the game will become unbearable long before you even get close to unlocking your first crate.

Unfortunately the cash shop won’t be able to save a game that is currently sitting at barely enough players to fill up a quarter of a standard battle royale match, and I sit here waiting for my latest match to hit the bare minimum ten players needed to get started.

I’ve already noted that Survivors is not a twin stick shooter, but this is important because the isometric camera might have suggested otherwise. In this game you move with the WASD keys and your character attacks where your are pointed. This leads to shooting mechanics that are so poorly handled and controlled that I found myself constantly coming in the top 3 simply running around in the open with some sort of melee weapon and zerging out my enemies.

Shooting mechanics in Survivors are worthless, to the point where holding a weapon is a detriment in many situations. You can hold the right mouse button to aim, but you move so slow and the aiming itself is so wonky that anyone can run up behind you and start whacking away with a baseball bat, the janky controls and laggy nature of the game allowing them to just jolt left and right while you fumble and try to hit them. In addition, weapons are stupidly underpowered to the point of being useless in their own right.

Which isn’t to say that this title has zero good ideas. The idea to implement fog of war makes it possible to sneak up on people, and the wonky controls actually make it a viable strategy because you can’t really easily keep a 360 degree view on your surroundings. Unfortunately, that’s it. It’s the spicy dijon mustard in the dog food sandwich.

View post on imgur.com

But I call this game lazy because that is exactly what it is. Hastily cobbled together on Unity to throw into early access and hope that people pay far more than the game is worth for the simple act of changing your default character. Nowhere else is this idea of laziness more blatant than the massive buildings that will block your view and make huge swaths of the map impossible to interact with.

If Survivors became a twin-stick shooter, where your character faced the mouse and you had a reticle, the game would be 25% better. Otherwise, right now this game feels like yet another cheap, lazy, unity-based shovelware title. One where the game conveniently tells you to shove off after you complete a match and doesn’t let you continue playing. Really, it’s for your own good.

Beta Perspective: Defiance 2050 Is Hot Garbage, But Shows Promise


I meant to play and then discuss the latest episode of the Guild Wars 2 Living Story tonight, but since the game is a bit broken at the moment, I’ll talk about Defiance instead.

I’ve spent a good few hours playing the Defiance 2050 open beta this weekend, and the thought that keeps going through my mind is simple: A relaunch of a five year old game should not be breaking even worse than the original launch, even as a beta. But over the span of several hours, I’ve had my game crash, sat and watched as it became virtually unplayable due to rubberbanding and screen freezing. I’ve seen creatures just randomly despawn, watched as my vehicle refused to show up or in some cases refused to perform basic tasks like turning. Even major functions like the entire tutorial and medic ability had to be disabled during the final beta before head start because they were either broken or were causing server crashes.

But then the weekend ended and the servers became kind of stable. The turning speed of the quad is still absolute garbage and makes driving a major pain, but that’s another story.

I suppose I should get two things out of the way: First, Defiance 2050 is a remaster for the current console generations and PC players are essentially along for the ride. Second, as a gamer I effectively left Defiance for dead around the time that Alcatraz released and Trion Worlds started experimenting with those expeditions that were initially lauded as money-grubbing. It’s around this point that I wrote it off as a dead title, its game code feeling like it was held together with chewing gum and string every time I would go back and find it feeling more and more broken.

I put well over 400 hours into Defiance and had no real motivation to go back, so I’m treating Defiance 2050 as a new world in and of itself.

If you played through the original Defiance beta weekends as I did all those years ago, well Defiance 2050’s beta won’t surprise you since it’s actually the same content but five years down the road. The big mechanical changes to get used to are the inclusion of classes, and subsequent movement of the massive EGO grid into a linear list of class-specific skills. Otherwise, this game still has a mass of activities to sink your face into, be it story missions, side missions, pursuits, major arkfalls, minor arkfalls, emergencies, sieges, incursions, contracts, pvp, coop dungeons, leveling your power, leveling your class, leveling your character, leveling your weapon proficiency, leveling your vehicle proficiency, and of course the age-old tradition of trolling chat.

I’d previously committed myself to playing Defiance 2050 solely on the Xbox, since the whole thing seems redundant to play on PC with the existing version still available on the platform, however this last beta weekend was PC only so I made due with what I had. Outside of the poor server performance, it’s hard to say much about this game that I didn’t say five years ago. After a while of shooting creatures and watching the screen stutter for five to ten seconds only to come back with my character dead on the ground, Defiance 2050 felt less like a happy reintroduction to the world and more of a grim reminder of why I quit in the first place.

That said, I haven’t completely given up on Defiance and am still waiting to see if Trion can turn things around post-launch. Do I have enough faith to buy into the founder’s program? Absolutely not, but I am willing to clock in on day one and give the game a real spin.

The Netherlands Litigated On CS:Go Lootboxes, So Valve Killed Trading In the Netherlands


Gamers in the Netherlands woke up this week to find out that they are no longer able to trade or market items in Counter Strike: Global Offensive or Dota 2. Following a ruling by the Dutch government that Valve’s systems constituted a violation of its laws on gambling, threatening criminal prosecution unless the word of the law was met, which according to Valve wasn’t actually detailed in said threat.

So in response, until Valve can better understand how to work under Dutch law, they have gone ahead and disabled trading entirely for users in the Netherlands. This change affects Counter Strike: GO and Dota 2, however since the ruling affects any game where items can be won by chance and then traded outside of the game, more Steam titles may be caught up in the future. So far the Dutch government has only noted the two of Valve’s titles.

(Source: Gamer Revolution)

Feeding the Rumor Mill: Playstation Now and the Possible Downloads


Playstation Now is Sony’s streaming games service and answer to the lack of backwards compatibility from the Playstation 4 to the Playstation 3, its subscription service allowing you to play titles from the PS4, PS3, and PS2 on your PS4 or PC. All this for $20 a month.

In another life, Playstation Now had the added benefit that it could be played on a ton of a devices, making up for the streaming nature by supporting the PS3, PS Vita, PS TV, Sony Bravia TVs, Sony Blu Ray Players, and Samsung TV models, among other devices that I am no doubt forgetting. Then Sony in one fell swoop cancelled support for every single device outside of the PC and PS4, making Playstation Now a service that costs twice as much as the Xbox Game Pass and delivers an arguably lower quality service at higher prices. While Playstation Now offers a wider library, over 500 titles compared to over 100 on Game Pass, the fact that you are streaming titles means the quality of your experience is directly tied to your router’s performance and Sony’s servers.

So the rumor mill is churning this week and decided to toss out the delicious news that Sony is working on the ability to download games, ala Playstation Plus, for its PS Now customers. The updated will apparently be coming sometime later this year, probably after September, and will start with PS4 games only.

If Sony goes down this route, it would be a marked improvement for Playstation Now as a service. People who want to keep streaming their games can do so, those who don’t mind waiting for the download so they don’t have to deal with fracturing visuals and lag can have their cake and download it too.

How do you feel about the Playstation Now service as it is, well, now? Would you consider subscribing if it wasn’t reliant on streaming?

Chaturday: The Seeming Lack of Non-Trolling Offensive Games


I’ve been thinking long and hard about Valve’s new policy regarding offensive games and how this could negatively affect their user base, by which I mean I haven’t been giving it much thought at all. My attention, however, has turned to the idea that Steam will be flooded by horrifying, bullying, aggressive, abusive, games designed to be abusive and bullying, because the media told me to prepare for it and when have they ever published sensationalist material?

If you consider the history of offensive or controversial games, the list is actually pretty small once you filter out the titles that were deliberately cobbled together in a week by a guy using pre-built assets. A guy whose motivation is little more than a stupid joke for his friends or to intentionally bait the games press into writing outrage clickbait about his title, thus increasing its sales potential from zero to three because such coverage rarely results in sales if the game is genuinely awful.

Even then, what you are left with is a pile of games that were controversial for other reasons than its direct content, like Persona 5 bullying streamers or Baldur’s Gate pushing a low quality expansion. You just don’t see serious developers, or even semi-serious indie devs, trying to create games in the same vein as Active Shooter Simulator. As incredible as it may sound, there isn’t much money in that sort of controversy, and the negative blowback can be more damaging than any potential sales revenue. Just ask Konami what it thinks about Six Days in Fallujah.

Which leads us to the group that will for the most part be making these games: Tiny fly-by-night indie developers that nobody has ever heard of before, virtually indistinguishable from the troll accounts. If a game like Active Shooter is submitted again to Steam, would it even be given the consideration that it might not be a troll title? Or Gay World? I have my doubts.

I suppose the goal here is two-fold to discourage troll developers: You’re spending $100 to submit a game that has a high chance of being flagged and dumped as a troll game and you’re not getting that $100 back. If, by chance, the troll game gets through the initial screening, odds are it will either be drowned in the sea of Steam games and nobody will see it or the wrong person will see it, raise a ruckus, and we’re back at square one.

Will that discourage trolls? Hell no, and to further my point I point toward the Something Special for Someone Special, a wedding ring in Team Fortress 2 that broadcasts a global message to all servers upon activation. The ring costs $100 and that price hasn’t stopped thousands of people from purchasing it and some using it to broadcast messages like “Anne Frank has accepted Adolph Hitler’s apology ring,” because those messages aren’t checked. $100 for a joke is nothing for a large swath of people, even if the payoff is people see it for five seconds and then it’s gone.

The developer behind Active School Shooter denies that his game was meant to troll the public, a claim that ultimately falls on deaf ears considering his previous list of published titles including White Power: Pure Voltage and Tyde Pod Challenge. Most trolls will deny that they are in fact trolls, meaning Valve will need to use their critical thinking skills to determine if the next Active Shooter Simulator is a troll game.

On second thought, Valve only declared the game a troll title because of its association with Ata Berdiyev, so we might be doomed in that department.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

[Column] EA Origin Premier Is A Value Proposition


Back when Origin/EA Access debuted on PC and Xbox, I said that it was one of the most gutsy things that Electronic Arts has done in their history next to the Origin Guarantee (refund policy) and my reasoning was pretty simple: By showing off their games in 10 hour trials before launch, EA is taking two major risks that players could A.) burn out of the game within that ten hour window and B.) If the game isn’t good, it can tank day one sales.

And you don’t have to look far for evidence of this, because Battlefront II is a prime example of a game that most assuredly lost a lot of day one sales because of the reception to the early access demo. Yes, the service costs money and for many the $30 per year is worth it to cover the included vault games as well as the ability to personally preview new releases and see if they are worth it. Even if you are not an Origin subscriber, you still see a benefit in that other people are playing the games early and able to report on their quality.

This weekend, EA announced a new tier of membership to Origin: Origin Access Premier. This is no doubt a response to Microsoft’s Game Pass on the Xbox One and functions very similarly. For $14.99 per month or $100 per year, you get full access to new games without the ten hour time limited demo version that standard Origin Access members receive. This seems to include all of EA’s first party lineup as well as potentially some third party titles, since the promo page teases Anthem, Battlefield V, A Way Out, and EA’s 2019 sports games. Incidentally, this is also marks the first Madden game on PC in a decade.

I’ve seen some varied response to this service and, as I said with Origin Access when that first launched, this is a value proposition that is entirely subjective to your wants and needs as a customer. If you are hardline militant on owning your games or refuse to go digital except when necessary and don’t care about the five day head start, well this service doesn’t offer much to you. If you’re the kind of person who burns through several Electronic Arts games per year from day one, then dumps the games like a bad habit, there might be a value proposition in $100 versus whatever you’re currently spending. If you’re the casual player who only buys games once they are extensively marked down, it might not be a bad value to subscribe for one or two months out of the year to check out the current library without restrictions.

Ultimately I still stand by my belief that Origin Access and Premier are a net positive for gamers, even if you only consider it to be the canary in the mine for EA publishing low quality releases. If Anthem is bad on launch, trust me when I say the internet will let you know with plenty of time to cancel that pre-order.

Chaturday: The One in Which I Get Myself Blacklisted, And That’s a Good Thing


I had some extra time to work on today’s Chaturday article, so I thought I’d make this one extra long. Sit back and enjoy.

This week I’d like to take a look at Valve’s recent decision to no longer curate games on Steam, barring games that are illegal or blatantly trolling. This has prompted an immediate and unsurprising backlash from a population of the internet whose income and livelihoods are directly proportional to the amount of drama that they can stir up. The doomsayers came out of their holes to proclaim that the service is now damned to be a hellscape of disgusting pornographic games where Nazis and white supremacists murder babies! The National Center on Sexual Exploitation claimed that there were one thousand games on Steam with sexual content, and every single one without exception was objectifying in nature.

It’s important to note here that none of the games journalists you may have seen talking about this are trying to take your games away, and I know this because they’ve been telling us repeatedly for the past five years. If I am repeatedly slapping food out of the hand of a small child, it doesn’t mean I’m against that child eating or trying to control him, I’m just saying that his hands can’t hold the food that I don’t personally like.

And for what it’s worth, I think that a lot of these recent decisions at Valve come down to the flat corporate structure. The decision to remove Hatred all those years back was done and then reversed because there is no real managerial structure in the company. Nobody to come out and squarely lead with a vision for how the Steam store should exist. As a result, factions form with differing opinions which arguably led to the warning letters being sent to certain developers a few weeks ago, and you have a company that massively disagrees on how to police the store with nobody around to pull rank and say “my word is final.” Nobody can agree on who gets to push the big shiny “approved” button, so nobody gets to push it at all.

I could spend a year going over quotes from our friends in the games media losing their collective sanity over this announcement, but I don’t have that kind of time. Inverse posted a piece saying that Valve’s response to trolling was to monetize it, despite that being a complete lie, saying that Valve’s answer to bigotry is to monetize it, despite not having any evidence of games genuinely advocating bigotry appearing or attempting to appear on the platform. Polygon’s Ben Kuchera wrote a piece with the subheading “anything goes as long as you give Valve a cut,” a blatantly false statement followed by paragraphs of trying to connect how Valve is wrong for deciding what constitutes an “illegal game” as it makes them the arbitrary decision maker, but also wrong for not acting as arbitrary decision maker on which games pass muster for the store. Freelance writer Nick Capozzoli compared the statement to Valve essentially saying “We believe we should bring Nazis together,” a flagrant misrepresentation.

Even the founder of Itch.io got in on the salt-throwing, posting “A platform that allows “everything, unless it’s illegal or straight up trolling” is ridiculous. Please keep your malicious, derogatory, discriminatory, bullying, harassing, demeaning content off . Our ban buttons are ready.” Incidentally, within five minutes of searching, MMO Fallout had managed to pick up a lengthy list of titles hosted on, and thus presumably endorsed, by itch.io, including hentai games with less-than-consensual sex, games where the objective is to beat up aggressive, beautiful girls, and a game that simply describes itself as “Learn Japanese You Faggot!” Itch.io is a veritable dumping ground for virtually everything that would never make its way on to Steam, be it meme games, troll games, outright piracy, and unfettered copyright infringement. If there are any stores that have no standing to criticize Valve’s curation, it’s itch.io.

It’s not entirely surprising to see outlets deliberately misinterpreting Valve’s statements, bringing up titles like Active Shooting Simulator and conveniently passing over either the fact that the game was removed, or why it was removed, and presenting hyperbolic questions on whether or not Valve will accept certain games, pointing to titles that a reasonable person could conclude to fall under the trolling rule. I say unsurprising because many of these writers are the same people whose bread and butter lies in outrage bait, throwing out accusations and feigning offense to drive hate-views by the thousands, otherwise known as trolling for profit. If these articles had been video games, they’d be banned from Steam.

One subject in which I will agree with my fellow press on is this: If Valve is claiming that they are going to only block illegal games and troll games, they damn sure better start actually doing that. As I said previously, Valve has pretty explicitly stated that they had no intention of selling Active Shooter Simulator on Steam, a statement that would hold more water if Valve weren’t clearly getting ready to sell Active Shooter on Steam. The same goes for titles like Aids Simulator, Gay World, and that shooting game where the only goal is to kill gay people. Titles that are so obvious from the slightest glance to be troll titles and yet they managed to get their way on to Steam before being removed.

In reality, the media should be happy about these changes, as should Youtubers. After all, the idea of Steam being flooded with dozens of games on a daily basis just means that people will be going back to modern and traditional games media in order to find the titles worth playing. It also grants a fantastic opportunity to the portion of games media that really likes writing troll bait but hates actually playing games. If Steam actually becomes the cesspool that you predict, you will have a lifetime of articles to express faux outrage.

The only people who have a genuine right to be angry about these changes are the developers, for whom many this open door policy means drowning in an even larger ocean of competing voices.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Crowdfunding Fraudsters Update: Indiegogo Sends RCL To Collections


Let’s get one thing straight: The Spectrum Vega Plus does not exist and Retro Computers Ltd. has lied every step of the way. On to the story.

It seems as though the long saga of Retro Computers Ltd. is finally reaching its tired, stretched far too long, conclusion. This month, RCL was given a simple set of instructions by Indiegogo following numerous, increasingly ridiculous excuses for delays and minimal contact with their base of backers: In return for an extension to June 15, Indiegogo wanted contact information for Sky representatives, that RCL needed to refund any backer who asked for a refund, and provide RCL with a review console.

These demands should theoretically be easy, especially the review console since as we all know, RCL allegedly had the whole stock set to ship between March 8 and 12 until the Cobra Commander of retro games, also known as former directors Paul Andrews and Chris Smith, dastardly reached out and encouraged developers to pull licenses over unpaid licensing that RCL claims it totally paid.

Keeping with tradition, Retro Computers Ltd treated deadlines like guidelines and completely ignored them, and now Indiegogo is sending in the A-Team. According to an update sent out to backers just tonight, Indiegogo announced that it is working with a collections agency to recoup funds in an effort to refund backers. They note that the effort will take considerable time, and that the campaign is still open to the Vega+ team should they decide to update us on their big shipment of Vega Plus units that may or may not exist.

All demands by backers to see photographic evidence of the release-version Vega Plus have been ignored by Retro Computers Ltd.

Dear Vega+ Backers,

As you are aware, we recently provided the Vega+ team a provisional extension (June 15th) to fulfill, based on some requirements from us. These included sending us contact information of Sky representatives, and refunding backers immediately upon request, as well as providing Indiegogo with a review console.

Unfortunately, these asks have not been met and we are unable to further provide the Vega+ team an extension. This has been a challenging situation for all involved, and one we thought would be resolved with the backers receiving their game consoles.

This week, we will be working with a collections agency to attempt to recoup funds disbursed, in an effort to be able to refund backers. Please note that, while we are pursuing collections, this process can take considerable time and the Vega+ team still has the opportunity to fulfill on their obligation of shipping the consoles to backers. We refer you to the Vega+ team for any updates on shipping. The campaign is still open to the Vega+ team, and they continue to have the ability to update you all via our platform.

We hope that the Vega+ team follows through on their promise, and that any remedial efforts on our part will be rendered obsolete.

Thank you for your understanding, and patience.

Trust & Safety, Indiegogo

(Source; Indiegogo)

Chaturday: You Can’t Download A Console (Yet)


The Pach is Bach! I have a particular affinity for Michael Pachter, partially because he gives me hope in my qualifications of becoming a respected analyst for the gaming industry ala Michael Pachter but without the few products I’ve assisted with being market failures, ala Leigh Alexander. Pachter isn’t right with his predictions all of the time, but then again who is?

This week Michael Pachter made the prediction that the next generation of consoles will still have disk drives, for reasons that are completely grounded in sensible logic: Retailers. Pachter makes the argument that there is no way consoles are going to go all-digital because retailers would revolt and many would likely refuse to stock them. He also notes the strong presence of the used game market.

“So, if you have to buy a console at retail, you can’t say to a retailer ‘Hey, please promote and sell my console but we’re not going to have any games available, so once you sell the console to your customer we’re going to take over the customer and own the relationship, we’re gonna make them download everything and screw you, we’re never going to let you sell a game again’.”

He’s right, and we know this because it has happened before. Ignoring the fact that the PSP Go sold like a wet fart, a number of retailers (read: small stores where employees would have more information and discussion with customers) were openly advocating against sales of the PSP Go, because the system was digital only and the store had no opportunity to recoup profits via software sales. The PSP was small potatoes, the idea of the Xbox Two selling without a disk drive? There is almost no incentive for Wal Mart to stock it, given how low profit margins on consoles are.

We can sort of look toward the PC market as an existing example of this, as that industry essentially went digital only over a decade ago with very few remnants of physical media still existing, and the majority of those being fancy plastic boxes with Steam keys inserted. My local Gamestop’s PC section is smaller than its display of Hatchimals, consisting of a keyboard (on clearance), two mice (on clearance), a bunch of cash cards, and ten boxed games (on clearance).

But I don’t think that Gamestop particularly cares about PC because they never had a stake in the hardware part of sales. Sure you had stores selling Steam machines for a hot minute, but that venture floundered and assuredly the physical retail market now considers the PC as that thing that doesn’t make up a notable portion of its income but is relegated to little cards that don’t take up much shelf space, so the two factors balance each other out.

But Connor, you might say, the PC market is doing just fine and there is neither physical media nor a used game market. True, but you also have to factor that the PC used market was stomped out well before the market boom of video games, swapping games mostly died with the 3.5 inch floppy and Microsoft DOS.

Unlike the PC market, retailers have a stake both in the hardware and the software aspects, with the second half helping the first in terms of revenue. Ignoring the backlash from consumers, the retailer revolt would pretty much torpedo sales and harm long term business relationships between retailers and the manufacturers.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.