Category: Editorials

[NM] Lawbreakers Discussing Marketing, Dismisses Free To Play


Lawbreakers launched nearly one month ago, and suffice to say the game hasn’t been that well received on PC. Despite boasting a “mostly positive” review score from those who did pick up the title, the population peaked at 3,000 and has plummeted to a present 163 concurrent users as of 9am EST on a Wednesday morning as of this writing (by comparison, the recently free Brink has 813 people playing). Cliff Bleszinski has called the game a “marathon, not a sprint,” dismissing concerns over population issues and expressing hope that the game will see an increase in players over time.

But if you’re holding out for free to play, it isn’t being discussed. Over on the Steam forums, when asked about plans to address low traffic, the following response was given:

To answer the original question “when”, I can only say “soon”. We had roadmap meetings with Boss Key last week on what they have planned for the rest of the year. We’re working out a marketing plan to support that new content and reach out to more people. We’re also doing regular updates to the game based on player feedback, so we are listening and acting on the issues that come up.

We are committed to the long-term success of the game. And no, we are not discussing F2P.

The person quoted is a representative of Nexon, the publisher of Lawbreakers. The statement was later reiterated in the same thread:

We are not discussing F2P, and the OP is correct, it doesn’t really solve more issues than it brings with it. We are still working on patches (next one is next week), future content as well as addressing player pop.

Boss Key’s plans to revitalize the game will have to be seen, but at its current trajectory the game is going to need a big marketing push in order to get its name out there.

MMOments: Grabbing Free Costumes in Marvel Heroes Omega


I’ve been rolling through the latest event in Marvel Heroes on PC and Playstation 4, of which the latter is woefully outpaced by the amount of time and money I’ve placed in the former. While Marvel Heroes Omega on Playstation is by all means an inferior product at the moment, I have to hand it to Gazillion for having a better idea from the start as to how they want to take their product. Marvel Heroes on PC was a mess at launch, in fact it was a mess when I played it at New York Comic Con back in 2012, just a well disguised mess. It’s come a long way, but as I’ve said in previous articles there are things that the community has come to take for granted that aren’t exactly how Gazillion wants the game to go, but can’t remove because it would kill the community and likely the game itself.

One clear advantage, in this humble author’s opinion, that the console version has over PC is that it seems to be making up for the lack of fast experience by giving away loot boxes. Rather than through shared quests, console players receive daily missions that, upon completion, reward a Defenders loot box. The box is the same as the paid one, and it has a chance of containing costumes. Gazillion may not be handing out experience like it’s candy on the console version, but PC players aren’t getting their hands on new costumes at no charge.

In fact, I was able to get my hands on the Elektra Maskless costume just today (seen above). The boxes also hand out marvelous essence, the currency to buy general costumes from the store and eternity splinters to more quickly collect heroes. The quest itself is a pretty simple diversion, defeat 200 Hand members and a number of elites, you can complete it in one run of the Hand tower in Chapter 3 story mode.

Otherwise I can’t talk much about the gear other than to say that it is not the best in show, and therefore as an efficiency minded ARPG player, it is completely useless to me and not worth grinding the Hand currency to buy. If you’re on PC, the ongoing events are worth it if you’re looking to level up the related characters or get Spider Man to cosmic prestige to get ready for his Omega Prestige (coming soon). For those on console, it’s nice to be able to get your hands on something that Gazillion is normally pretty stingy with: Free lockboxes and free costumes.

[NM] Assassin’s Creed Forums Struck By Trolling Over Skin Color


If you’re looking to rustle some jimmies or meme it up on the Assassin’s Creed Origin forums, you might want to think twice or risk the wrath of some overworked, twitchy moderators. The forums are undergoing an apparent fumigation after they were targeted by a collective of trolls and angry gamers responding to so-called “blackwashing,” alleging that Ubisoft is depicting characters in the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Origin as darker in complexion than some believe they should be.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins launches October 27, 2017 on PC, Xbox, and Playstation. The game serves as a prequel to the series, set in Ptolemaic era Ancient Egypt with the player taking the role of Bayek and the origins (get it?) of the order of Assassins and their rival Templar group.

The series has been criticized over its historical accuracy. Recent studies have shown that ancient Egyptians shared more ancestry with Near Easterners (West Asia, Middle East) and that Sub-Saharan genes did not mix until more recent times, however the study notes that the genetic samples were taken from a single site and may not account for all of Egypt.

It is possible that populations in the south of Egypt were more closely related to those of Nubia and had a higher sub-Saharan genetic component, in which case the argument for an influx of sub-Saharan ancestries after the Roman Period might only be partially valid and have to be nuanced.

Much of the spam on the forums appears to be users repeating various memes, with some trolling using harsh, offensive slurs. As a result, the moderators appear to be taking a heavy handed approach to keep up with the influx of posts, and the nature of the posts has led some to believe that the complaints are rooted in racist ideologies.

[Community] Wild West Online, Everquest Next, and Guaranteed Refunds


I refuse to advocate or advertise Wild West Online’s preorder scheme, but I am going to tell you why I don’t trust buying into it and how it all comes back to Everquest Next, zombies, and Sergey Titov.

As one of the most incompetent and shady developers in this industry, MMO Fallout takes great caution when covering any game that even smells lightly of Titov’s touch. The rumors that he was involved in Wild West Online’s development, in fact just the idea that the game is using the engine that his company made, is enough to warrant intense scrutiny. If you’ve been following the game’s impending alpha launch, then you’re probably aware of the next “too good to be true” marketing trap: The guaranteed refund.

Let’s look at Wild West Online’s guaranteed refund policy, shall we?

So, up until the second phase of Alpha testing, we’ll let you refund your early bird purchase with no questions asked. This gives you a chance to play the Alpha yourself, and opt-out if you think the game won’t develop into the game you wanted. There are no restrictions on amount of time you have played, and there are no limits on how long you owned the game — so long as you decide before September 27, 2017 you will be granted a full refund.

Sounds great, right? No questions asked refunds for the first alpha wave, what could possibly go wrong? Well, let’s go back to Titov’s The War Z, which also had a no questions refund policy going into its alpha. The thing about getting rid of that policy so early in development is that developers tend to promise features that are coming if players just hold on a little longer, until after the refund window has passed. War Z waited until beta and launch day to implement some of its more egregious cash shop items, including the four hour respawn timer, making unpopular changes and refusing to implement features that it promised would be available for launch if players just held off on hitting that refund button.

Even more, let’s take a look at Daybreak Game Company and Everquest Next: Landmark, a game sold entirely on the premise that if you wanted a refund during alpha, you could have it with no questions asked. Of course, it wasn’t until after the refund window passed that Daybreak would announce the cancellation of Everquest Next, Landmark’s sole reason for existing, and basically doom the game to an early death while simultaneously telling players “hey, we offered you a refund window and you didn’t accept it. Tough luck.”

Steam has a refund window of two hours of gameplay, fourteen days after purchase, with exceptions in the case of developer malfeasance. Rather than buy into, and vicariously promote, players supporting a system that will present them with a completely unfinished game, one that has historically used a disguise of customer friendliness to hide a system that can be easily abused and then defended under the premise that the customer should have known that the product was incomplete, I’m going to go with this website’s running policy: Don’t preorder on a system that looks too good to be true.

And to wrap up, I don’t trust a refund system by Xsolla as far as I can throw the company (and if you haven’t figured out, I can’t throw things far). Once again, let’s go back to a name that finds itself on some of the industry’s sleaziest con jobs, and talk about the War Z’s guaranteed refunds. Back in 2012, War Z had a guaranteed refund policy which Xsolla promptly rendered moot by denying refunds. They pulled every excuse out of the book, from losing orders, not being able to find accounts, transitioning companies, and even quoting the terms of service saying that all sales are final.

The one that Hammerpoint copied from League of Legends.

So with Sergey Titov’s engine and Xsolla “all sales are final” handling the refunds, I’m going to do all I can and simply recommend that players don’t get caught up in the “guaranteed refunds” system like it is a safety net. It isn’t, and until you have the much more reliable safety of Valve overseeing the transaction, I recommend sitting it out on Wild West Online.

[NM] One Year Later, No Man’s Sky Explodes In Users, Positive Reviews


If No Man’s Sky can teach us anything about the industry, it’s that you’re never too late for a second chance. Launched August 12, 2016, No Man’s Sky launched in a rather horrible state: Players quickly realized that the game had effectively been launched in early access, just without the tag or many of the promised features. No Man’s Sky was slammed in reviews and more than 90% of the population who bought the game on Steam abandoned it in month #1. It also spawned a lot of memes including this video which succinctly sums up the difference between the hype and final product.

Since then, something miraculous has been happening with rather little fanfare: Hello Games has released quite a large number of updates, tweaking the game and adding in a metric ton of new content. The Foundation update added in new game modes, the Pathfinder update improved visuals, introduced permadeath, and gave more of a reason to build yourself a base. This is also alongside numerous patches adding quality of life improvements, and other new features to give players a reason to keep going. Most recently, Hello Games deployed the Atlas Rises update, bringing 30 hours of story content, new worlds, and more.

And the result? The population has exploded. As of this writing, recent reviews of No Man’s Sky show a 75% approval rating and there are over 10,000 people playing at 11 a.m. on a Monday morning. As more and more people return to, or try out No Man’s Sky for the first time, it looks like No Man’s Sky is finally turning into the game that Hello Games promised it would be more than a year ago.

Just goes to show what can be done when a developer focuses on improving a product rather than immediately abandoning it after a bad launch.

[Community] PC Gaming May Not Be Dead, But Lawbreakers Is Starting Out Weak


Cliff Bleszinski has a long history with PC games, although you may not know it if you just started gaming within the last ten years. For a while, Bleszinski had a great relationship with the PC platform, until Unreal Tournament allegedly sold quite poorly on the system (according to Gamespy online stats from the time), leading up to 2008 where Bleszinski announced that Gears of War 2 would not be coming to PC, blaming piracy. In reality, Gears of War 2 didn’t come to PC because it was an Xbox platform exclusive.

“The person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know [BitTorrent] to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC.”

Certain developers have been exaggerating the effects of piracy on PC for years, going further back than 2011 with Ubisoft claiming that 95% of PC consumers would pirate their product, a factor that runs in direct contradiction to their investor reports which consistently show great sales on PC. As a result of his snubbing of the community, Bleszinski’s name has been somewhat dragged through the mud over the years.

Now Bleszinski apologized for his comment at the 2015 Game Awards, alongside showcasing his upcoming (now released) game Lawbreakers. Well Lawbreakers has launched and while it is receiving very positive reviews, from critics and gamers (87% positive on Steam), the population on PC has been slow to adopt the title. Steam Charts shows a launch day peak of 3,000 which has been steadily dropping over the past week. By comparison, Battleborn launched to a day one peak of 12,000 and is presently sitting at a peak of 280 over the last 30 days, including free trial players.

Bleszinski, for his part, has already responded to news comparing Lawbreakers to Battleborn, noting that the game is “a marathon not a sprint,” and that he would “rather be the underhyped game that slowly ramps up into something that people adore than something that comes out with way too much hype that there’s a backlash for, which is why I think the Steam reviews are so positive.” You can check out the entire interview at Eurogamer.

As for Lawbreakers, we will need to wait and see if the game is able to attract more publicity, and thus a more active population, and what plans are in store should traffic continue to dwindle.

Retro Computers LTD Melts Down, Spams its Indiegogo Page


The saga of Retro Computers LTD and the ZX Spectrum Vega Plus continues. If you haven’t read our previous coverage, you can do so here. While RCL has consistently responded to angry backers in an unprofessional manner, mostly by sending out social media admins to agitate the masses, the company finally began responding on Indiegogo today.

To announce that an announcement would be coming.

We will be making an announcement very soon. We are also very sorry that a hardcore group of people who have been refunded Ratcliffe and Co are still posting abusive comments.

Rather than utilize some free time to update backers, RCL then chose to spam its own wall, posting the following message no less than 40 times in the span of an hour or two.

Chatter on side channels suggests that RCL breaking their multi month silence may be due to the impending release of their bank records by shareholder Paul Andrews.

Regardless this appears to be just another case of RCL being tone deaf in their dealing with angry backers. Despite claiming that no refunds are denied, a quick inspection of the Indiegogo Page still shows numerous fresh claims of ignored refund requests.

Failure of Direct: Fidget Spinner Simulator


Valve’s dream for Steam is to have any open platform where virtually anyone can get in and sell their wares, and if you’d like a glimpse of the future under this branding than look no further than Fidget Spinner Simulator, an asset flip developed and pushed onto Steam by a hack Russian developer known for pushing mediocre asset flips under the name bcInteractive. Now operating under the user berdyev, fidget spinner simulator is available for 79 cents.

It doesn’t have trading cards, because Valve smartly updated their systems to prevent parasites like Berdyev from profiting even further off of games that would hardly pass muster at itch.io. For more information on Berdyev, feel free to reference this video by SidAlpha:

But not content with merely being a terrible game, Berdyev dedicates two achievements to mocking autistic people because that’s what twelve year old internet edgelords do these days, and who doesn’t love a good maymay?

With Valve’s new system, the best that we can hope for is that Fidget Spinner Simulator will never be approved for trading cards, making the game utterly useless for the Russian trading card farming market, and that the Steam algorithm will ensure that Berdyev’s titles are buried with the rest of the trash, never to be seen by the average user unless specifically searched for.

Nontroversial: Secret World Legends and the Unsurprising Subscription


Subscribing to Secret World Legends is a subscription that automatically renews like a subscription. This statement may be obvious to anyone who has subscribed to a game, a newspaper, or television service, but for some reason it needs to be reiterated when talking about Secret World Legends. The community has been in a bit of a tizzy this week, which may have origins in trolling, over some misconceptions regarding the game’s subscription.

First, let’s discuss the claim that Secret World Legends signs you up for a recurring payment without explaining this. It isn’t true. The button to subscribe says “subscribe,” and when signing up with your payment details it explicitly states that you are signing up for a recurring payment. This is standard for virtually every video game with a subscription on the market and is made clear when checking out.

Second, there are statements floating around that the game sets you up for a one year subscription through Paypal when signing up. This is another falsehood. When you sign up with Paypal, you authorize Funcom to charge you the subscription fee every month as long as you’re still subscribed. The authorization lasts for a year, a limitation imposed by Paypal, but does not constitute a year-long subscription. It basically means that you won’t have to log into paypal and authorize Funcom every month. In a way, this subscription system is more restrictive as other games won’t stop after a year and will keep billing as long as the card is good.

In short, a subscriptions constitute subscribing to a service, and setting up a recurring payment means a payment that occurs more than once. It does not, incidentally, allow Funcom to take money whenever they feel like, for whatever sum they feel like.

 

[Column] Mobile Legends Threatens The Press, Good Luck With That


Riot Games is currently suing Moonton over alleged copyright infringement in regards to their game Mobile Legends. I’m going to reiterate that last statement because Moonton apparently doesn’t want me to tell you this: Moonton is currently being sued in court over alleged copyright infringement regarding Mobile Legends allegedly ripping off League of Legends. Those of you who are interested in reading up on the lawsuit, filed in California, can do so here. If you don’t feel like sifting through 44 pages of legal documents, I’ll be running an In Plain English article summarizing the charges. There are plenty of photos comparing the two games to gawk at, so I recommend taking a look.

The part of this lawsuit that caught my eye is that Moonton needs to read up on the free press and the definition of slander, because the company has posted a threat to the media reporting on this lawsuit: Stop, or potentially face intimidation through legal threats. Moonton posted the below statement on their Facebook page calling the stories “unreal,” and “rumors,” albeit refusing to go into detail on either aspect. For their part, Moonton has explicitly denied all claims of infringement, which can also be read in the statement below. The lawsuit is real, for a case that will occur in a real court in the real state of California.

The lawsuit notes that Riot Games had initially gone through Google and Apple to remove the app from both stores, alleging that Moonton simply changed its name, made minor changes, and put the game back on the store.

Most notably, after Riot discovered Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA and notified Google that the game was infringing, Moonton purported to remove the game from the Google Play store. But that was simply a subterfuge. Immediately after removing Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA, Moonton (without notifying Riot or Google) released a “new” game, Mobile Legends: Bang bang. However, Mobile Legends: Bang bang was not a new game at all, but in fact was the exact same game as Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA, with some modest changes. This ploy of “hide the ball” was part of Moonton’s deliberate business strategy, designed to hamper Riot’s ability to protect its intellectual property.

Winning a defamation lawsuit in the United States would be incredibly difficult. It requires that the plaintiff prove that the allegations are false (a nonstarter in this case, as the lawsuit is very real) and that the author knew that the statements were false and can prove material damage related to said statements. In cases of lawsuits, the press can’t be sued for writing about a lawsuit, provided the author isn’t making their own conclusions, and represents the allegations as just that (charges, not convictions). Moonton can’t sue the press for reporting on the allegations made by Riot Games and win, not in the states anyway.

More on this lawsuit to come.