Editorials – Page 81

Crowdfunding Fraudsters: Life Is Strange 2

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Update: And the campaign has been shut down.

2a: a person who is not what he or she pretends to be :impostor; also: one who defrauds:cheat

Today’s Crowdfunding Fraudster comes to us from Kickstarter, for Life Is Strange 2. You may be thinking right now, “Connor, Life Is Strange was a completely legitimate game. It was published by Square Enix for crying out loud. How could a crowdfunding effort to make a sequel be fraudulent?”

The answer is simple: This campaign isn’t being run by developer Dontnod Entertainment, nor is it manned by publisher Square Enix. This campaign was started by a fan Scott Ashby, trying to raise twenty thousand dollars to persuade Dontnod to make the sequel a reality. According to the campaign page, there are two options should this be successfully funded: Give the money to Dontnod to fund the sequel or use the money to buy the rights to Life is Strange and hand it over to another developer to make said sequel.

Despite the money going to someone else to create the game, the campaign creator has already made some promises on how the game will be including 16 different endings, a musical mini-game, and other game features. Quite presumptive to think you can raise nowhere near the amount of money that such a game would require to develop, but to also hold said money ransom unless your demands are met. Whoever donates at the $1,000 level will be allowed to write the backstory for Principal Wells with every $1,000 donation after that being allowed to voice a character. Because that’s exactly what you want in a story, character plots that are essentially fanfiction and amateur voice actors.

So obviously the campaign is filled with as much ambition as it is lacking self awareness or a basic understanding of how the gaming industry works. Ashby does not have the rights to the game, is not making anywhere near enough money to buy said rights, can’t compel the developer anyway, and in some distant parallel universe where this campaign had any hope of succeeding, could simply walk away with twenty grand in his pocket and say that at least he tried.

Ultimately the sincerity of the campaign creator is irrelevant to the ultimate outcome: That backers will not see a return on their investment, and fans of the game could be tricked into thinking that this is somehow legitimate. The sooner that this project gets shut down, the better.

(Source: Kickstarter)

[Not Massive] Fig’s Crowd Funding Platform Is Fading

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Psychonauts 2 raised more than $3 million in crowd funding using a new platform called Fig, one which Double Fine President Tim Schafer serves on the advisory board. More than twenty thousand people pooled their money together to make the sequel to 2005’s Psychonauts a reality, but did the success of a widely anticipated game bring lasting attention to the Fig platform? Judging from the followup campaigns, it doesn’t seem so.

And let’s be fair, Fig is still a very young platform, it still has a life ahead of it to blow up into a big platform for video game crowdfunding. For now, however, the platform is comprised of five campaigns overall. Psychonauts 2 and Outer Wilds were both successful in reaching their goal, however the latter only aimed for $125 grand and beat the mark by one thousand dollars. Anchors in the Drift, the third and last campaign to have ended, missed its goal by a wide margin: Just a fifth of the half a million for a free to play ARPG from the creators of Scribblenauts.

Fig’s other two remaining projects aren’t looking that great. The Rock Band 4 PC port, for which Harmonix wants $1.5 million up front, has ten days to go and just scratched half a million dollars. The other campaign, a video game based on the Jay & Silent Bob characters from film creator Kevin Smith, may see itself become the platform’s third successful campaign if it raises fifty grand in the next five days.

With the success of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, all sorts of third party groups are coming out of the woodwork with their own short-lived crowdfunding platforms, and if Fig wants to continue off of its early successes, it will need to keep the momentum going.

Early Access Fraudsters: Asteroids: Outpost

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Generally you’d expect an Early Access Fraudster article to be about an indie developer, but the subject of today’s piece is none of than Atari itself, developed by the applicably named Salty Games, and it goes by the name Asteroids: Outpost. Asteroids is a modern day spinoff of the classic arcade title, a combination of Minecraft and DayZ that challenged players with setting up a base and defending it both from falling asteroids and the attacks of other players. It sounded like a great idea on paper, in practice it wasn’t so great.

Its continued sale is also outright fraud.

If you go on the Steam store page, the game currently holds a mostly negative rating with the top reviews imploring anyone who reads it not to throw down the $29.99 suggested retail price and to avoid the game and company at all costs. Despite the game still being available for purchase, according to Steam reviews the servers haven’t been in operation going back as far as November if not further, and there has been no contact or discussion from the Salty Games team. The official website is dead, all of the social media accounts are empty, and the game is completely unplayable.

In short: The project’s been abandoned, and either no one has bothered to tell Valve, or they just aren’t listening.

Judging by the forums, and the number of people who claim to have flagged the title over the months with no response, the latter seems more likely. Games suddenly shutting down without any notice from the developers isn’t new, as I said before, but this is something you’d expect out of an independent developer and not someone with the backing of a name like Atari. Granted, the Atari that exists today is a shell of the former corporation, one that mostly exists to license its properties out to the few companies that will buy them, but that is neither here nor there.

I tried contacting Salty Games before this article went up, the website is down and unfortunately I can’t find a single way to get in touch with the developers. The Asteroids: Outpost Steam account hasn’t been logged into in over two hundred days, and the group’s Facebook account hasn’t been posted on since last April. Salty Games doesn’t have a company website and Atari still acts like the game is still on sale on their own. If the studio has shut down, it hasn’t been announced and Google is turning up no results.

In addition, I contacted Atari’s press people to try and figure out what was going on and what happened to Salty Games. They haven’t responded. We also contacted Valve who, similarly, did not respond.

At the very least, we can sleep easy knowing that no one seems to actually be buying the game. After all, virtually no one bought it when the servers were live. According to Steam Charts, Asteroids peaked at 42 back in 2015 and hasn’t gone above 2 since. Judging by that success, it seems possible that Salty Games was shut down so fast that no one had time to shut down the Steam store page.

Regardless of their refund policy, Valve still has an obligation to remove this item from the store. It is, in all definitions of the words, abandoned and forgotten by a developer that may not even exist anymore. It died in early access yet continues selling tickets to a show that will never be performed.

Digital Homicide, Jim Sterling, Lawyers, Slander, And A Lesson In Legality

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Digital Homicide is an enigma. All but one of its games carries a “mostly negative” rating on Steam, its games are critically panned mostly for being lazy, uninspired hobby projects cobbled together with pre-made Unity assets, and the developer is constantly getting into childish squabbles with internet critics like Jim Sterling. Despite the overwhelmingly negative response to his games, Digital Homicide continues to pump out more and more asset flips. As of this writing, DH has 18 games on Greenlight.

If you don’t follow Jim Sterling on Youtube, you may not be aware of the ongoing feud between the Youtube personality and Digital Homicide over the former’s very negative coverage of the latter’s video games. The back and forth banter culminated in a rather lengthy interview last July in which Digital Homicide threatened to sue Sterling. Nearly a year later and it looks like Digital Homicide is making good on their word, and has filed a lawsuit in Arizona district court.

Now neither side are discussing the details of the lawsuit, and for good reason. Talking about a court case in the middle of litigation can backfire and potentially lose the case. Basically lawyers are afraid that the person will say something stupid or incriminating and wind up blowing their arguments. James of Digital Homicide wants to make the details of the case very clear once it is over.

I have an excellent lawyer very interested in this case but they only take retainer. Very few lawyers take contingency now for defamation lawsuits. For this reason I will also be documenting the process of this lawsuit(not the contents or personal information) and making it publicly viewable after the case is over so that others in similar dire situations can figure out how to defend themselves from online harassers and defamers.

Very few lawyers take contingency for defamation lawsuits because doing so would likely mean not getting paid. Luckily, you don’t have to wait for the case to be over to view, as MMO Fallout has access to the Arizona public court records and will be adding this case to our In Plain English coverage.

Despite his claim of an “excellent lawyer,” James has gone ahead and filed the lawsuit early. An attempt at crowdfunding his lawsuit of Sterling was quickly shut down over claims that people were charging and then quickly using chargebacks to hit Romine with fees. Court dockets list James Oliver Romine Jr. as a “Pro Se Litigant,” meaning Romine is representing himself without a lawyer. Romine is claiming in excess of ~~$2.636 million~~ $10 million USD in libel property damage. Romine has invoked 28 US Code 1332 which grants district court jurisdiction in civil matters where the damages exceed $75 thousand and is between citizens.

Interestingly, the case also invokes International Shoe Co. V Washington, a lawsuit from 1945 in which the courts ruled that a shoe company with salesmen that sold shoes in the state were subject to Washington jurisdiction when the state sued to recover unpaid unemployment fees. Romine is claiming in the dockets that Sterling’s videos being available in Arizona is enough to give jurisdiction even though Sterling himself does not live within the district.

Romine is suing Sterling and claims in his blog post that he will be suing the people leaving anonymous mocking comments, whom he believes to be overseas competitors, and is simply building a case file for the time being.

If you believe being anonymous will prevent you from recieving said justice you will be surpised when the summons shows up, this goes for competitors in foreign markets using alternate accounts as you may be foreign by you will be sued in the US. This is the first case. More are expected to be filed soon.

What Romine may not understand about US defamation/slander law is that winning the lawsuit is heavily slanted against the plaintiff, especially when dealing with a public figure such as himself. The plaintiff is required to prove, beyond a doubt, that their reputations were harmed as a result of the allegedly slanderous material. In order to prove harm, Romine must provide quantifiable damages.

Romine claims he has been falsely accused of:

Stealing artwork
Stealing assets
Flipping projects with no work put in
Doxing
Had products misrepresented with intention to do damage
Of illegally using another companies name
Conducting illegal business activities
Impersonating someone
Being incompetent and unable to perform my job

For the record, Digital Homicide was caught stealing assets and artwork which Romine admitted to in his interview with Sterling and blamed on being a new developer, the same interview containing a thinly veiled threat of doxing, and we have covered here on MMO Fallout that Digital Homicide has used multiple company names in the past, including one of an established developer.

As is custom here at MMO Fallout, we will be offering regular updates as they become available. I may space out coverage depending on how quickly the case proceeds because access to the documents is not free and can very quickly add up and get expensive depending on how many there are and how long each document is.

Kickstarter Fraudsters: Free MMORPG By Vermeulen Peter

Kickstarter Fraudsters is a new column here at MMO Fallout where we look at the worst of crowdfunding, particularly in gaming, with people who expect public funding for projects that they have absolutely no qualifications to reasonably create. I use the term fraudster because it fits like a glove. Many of these creators have never worked in the industry and likely barely handle the budgeting of their own personal expenses let alone having the knowledge to plan a multi-year development cycle for a massive video game project.

You’ll find throughout this series that a lot of these projects fall into essentially the same pits in terms of making the project look good, and

The first campaign we are going to discuss is Free MMORPG by creator Vermeulen Peter. Now this guy wants over sixteen grand to fund an MMO that has no title, no screenshots, or artwork to speak of. It does have a low resolution screenshot from a Dark Age of Camelot video that he pulled off of Youtube. Just in case the campaign lacking in the most basic of details isn’t sketchy enough, we’re going to show you a screenshot from another game and say “ours is going to be like that.”

Hopefully Vermeulen isn’t one of those gamers that thinks creating video games is easy because he’s played a bunch of them and thinks he can do the same thing but with none of those filthy capitalist ideas.

So i love gaming, and i know a lot of people do. But i hate the pay to win concept that’s been going on more and more these days. But also the pay to play. Thats only good if u can play all the time u get.

This is a statement that tends to come out of the most deluded sections of the gaming community, those who not only demand their media completely free but who regard content creators as effectively indentured servants here for our enjoyment and perhaps a smidgen of ad revenue if we feel generous and shut off our ad blockers. Perhaps Vermeulen should look up the numerous indie developers who thought that they could release their game for free and rely on ad revenue only to find out that it doesn’t pay a living wage let alone enough to sustain the servers.

I want to create an MMORPG based on Dark age of camelot (hence the foto) that is 100% free to play. No advantages can be bought, not even looks ingame.

You have to wonder at what point Vermeulen looked at the Kickstarter draft and said to himself “this makes complete sense.” The idea here is that he is going to crowdfund a game that is completely free and has no in-game monetization system. Even if you back the Kickstarter campaign, you get absolutely nothing. Not even a poorly made T-Shirt or wristband. If you back at one hundred Euros, you get alpha access to a game that has no more details than “it’s like DAoC.” Can I pay by check?

So what is the incentive to pledge? You can spend money and get nothing, or not pay anything and wait for the game to release after which everything will be free anyway. This is the problem with Kickstarters that treat the system like it’s a charity: They think anyone will care about a project that wants something in return for nothing. If you’re going to give everything away for free, good luck convincing people to pay you. Either your project releases anyway or it fails and they lose nothing, there are certainly enough free games available that your absence will not be missed.

Generally you want to give people a reason to pledge to your campaign, like a discount or swag. Everyone loves swag, you’d be surprised how many college students you can convince to sign up for a credit card by offering them a free beer cozy.

The more I read this, the more convinced I am that this campaign is funding a Dark Age of Camelot private server, and I’m not just saying that because none of the money is going toward actual game development:

All money is to get the hardware, startup the internet connection, and get legal software. Afterwards i will get my income with selling add space on my website.

I also have bad news for you, Vermeulen: Funding your game server through website ads is a failed proposition, not least of which because your intended audience who want everything for free and refuse to actively fund your game in any fashion? Those people are also likely using ad blockers. You also have to give people an incentive to visit the website, because once they have the client there isn’t much reason other than to check patch notes every now and then. Compare to a game like RuneScape where, out of the eighty thousand concurrent users logged in right now, forty five of them are using the forums.

The plus side of campaigns like this is that they are overwhelmingly likely to fail with maybe one or two backers total. If you’d like to waste your money and receive nothing in return, you have until the 23rd to back this campaign.

[Column] EA Access Is A Pretty Good Deal

EA Access is a side-service available for Xbox One that trades a subscription for access to numerous Electronic Arts titles. $5 monthly or $30 annually grants access to the EA Vault, a number of full games, and ten hour trials of games that recently released or in many cases haven’t been released yet. There are other perks that have shown up, like a 10% discount to EA titles when buying digitally, occasional sales, and more likely on the way.

As someone who doesn’t exactly play many of EA’s games, I bought into the annual subscription with some doubts. After a few months of using the service, I am confident that it has paid itself off between the free games and free trials, and I wanted to offer my experience because a cursory glance around the web shows numerous people having the same reaction I did: “A subscription to play EA games? What a ripoff!” As I’ve learned covering MMOs, the very presence of a subscription service tends to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths, especially when stacked on top of another subscription (in this case Xbox Live).

And let’s be clear about one thing, I’m not saying that this service is for everyone. For some, EA Access will objectively offer nothing of value, and I make that clear in my points below. For everyone else, it’s a matter of weighing costs and benefits, and I promise not to dive into the though processes of “at $2.50 a month, you can’t afford not to subscribe!” This article specifically covers the Xbox version of EA Access.

1. If You Like Sports Games…

Let’s be fair, the girth of sports titles in the EA Access vault is because Electronic Arts knows exactly how quickly sales drop after a new Madden or NHL game releases, but if you’re a sports fan on a budget then $30 a year to play all of the previous year’s sports titles isn’t a bad deal at all. Right now a subscription gets you access to Madden 16, FIFA 15, NBA Live 15, NHL 15, Madden 15, EA Sports UFC, Madden 25, and FIFA 14. Three football, two soccer, one basketball, hockey, and MMA fighting.

The inclusion of Madden NFL 16 to the list last month is probably a sign that you won’t have to wait until the next game in the series is out in order to keep up with your sports rosters, you’ll probably just have to wait for the sales to diminish to within the margin of error. If you consider pricing, $30 for a year to play a number of sports titles, so long as you’re willing to be six or seven months behind the latest release, isn’t a bad deal. If you do buy the current sports titles, EA Access gives 10% off of those Ultimate Team packs that sell so well according to EA’s reports.

In addition, you have UFC 2, NBA Live 16, FIFA 16, NHL 16, and Rory Mcilroy PGA tour available as ten hour trials, so in addition to the previous year’s sports titles you also have access to a fair amount of play on the current list of games to give you an idea on whether or not you want to buy up. And look at it this way, by the time Madden/NHL/FIFA 17 comes out, 16 will probably be playable in the vault for free.

2. 10 Hour Trials

I was surprised to see EA offering ten hour trials on some of their newest games, since it clashes with the push on opening day/week sales being the most crucial to a title’s success. Having some form of trial system makes sense, Playstation Plus offers full game trials in the realm of an hour or so to give a nugget of gameplay and then cut it off while the momentum is still going. And while you might assume that the trials are of older titles or EA Partner games, the list is populated by Star Wars Battlefront, Need for Speed, Unravel, and Plants Vs Zombies 2. In fact, many of these games are pushing ten hour trials before launch day.

A 10 hour trial is risky business; it’s more than enough time for many gamers to burn out on a title they would have bought and lost interest in the same time frame, with the only difference being EA loses on a $60 sale. The presence of very new titles showing up on EA Access can groom customers into putting off pre-ordering to wait for the demo, thus harming game sales even further. Finally, it means that the game has to engage the player on a level that, after the ten hours, they are still willing to go out and pay full price for the title.

I suppose in a way that the game trials could at least improve sales further down the line. Someone who plays the game through the end of the trial period must have liked something about it, otherwise they would have stopped playing by then, and that person might see the game months down the line at $30 and pick it up. It isn’t a full priced sale, but it is a sale nonetheless. Or they’ll just wait for it to hit the EA Access vault.

For me, this function saved me the money of buying Star Wars: Battlefront. After playing a good eight hours of the trial, I’m glad that I didn’t throw down any real money. Sure EA lost a sale, but they saved themselves a disgruntled, disappointed customer for future games.

3. The Vault

I’d be willing to put money down on Dragon Age: Inquisition being a big factor in many EA Access purchases, at least considering the game was added to the vault less than a year after its launch and happens to be the only game apart from Titanfall and Popcap’s games that isn’t part of an annual franchise. The list of titles in the EA Vault are games that the hardcore fans already picked up on day one, meaning the subscription is a way to pick up some revenue from the moderately interested.

Currently the vault includes Madden 16, Battlefield Hardline, Dragon Age: Inquisition, NBA Live 15, FIFA 15, NHL 15, Madden 15, UFC, Titanfall, Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, Peggle 2, Need for Speed Rivals, NFL 25, FIFA 14, Battlefield 4, and Plants Vs Zombies. Many of the games on the vault are showing up less than a year after launch, as low as six months and likely well before they hit $30 retail.

The downside is that EA’s vault happens to target a very specific demographic: Shooter and sports fans. If you have no interest in Battlefield/Titanfall or EA Sports, there is literally nothing here for you outside of a couple of Popcap games that can be bought cheap elsewhere and Dragon Age: Inquisition that can likely be picked up pre-owned on the cheap. Since many of the EA Sports titles abandoned the PC platform years ago, they’ve been replaced in the Vault library with the full Dragon Age and Dead Space series, as well as Sim City and This War of Mine. If it weren’t for the annual $30 price being unavailable on PC, I’d say it was a better deal than the Xbox One version.

On another hand, many of the games in EA’s vault play better with the knowledge that you didn’t pay (specifically) for them. No, I’m not technically playing Battlefield 4 for free, but as part of the bundle there isn’t a specific value to attach and say “I spent $x for this?”

4. Sales

I put this one low on the list because it targets a smaller, but growing audience if you read sales numbers: If you buy multiple EA games at launch every year and don’t mind buying digital, EA Access is a bargain. 10% off of digital orders means you’re paying off your annual subscription after five games, not considering any expansions or microtransactions you buy in between, and also not factoring in the free games added to the vault.

Diving Into Arc’s Daily Quests, Price of Zen

Earlier this week we learned about Arc 3.0, the latest client update for Perfect World’s library of MMOs. When Arc 3.0 launches, players will be able to complete daily quests to unlock Arc points which can then be redeemed for Zen, Perfect World’s real money currency. But how much are you going to have to grind in order to get that sweet payment? Let’s find out.

According to the above screenshot posted on the Arc 3.0 blog, the bare minimum of Zen (500 Zen worth $5 USD) Zen package will run you 5,000 Arc points. Each level requires 600 experience, and each level grants 500 Arc points. In other words, you need to level up ten times in order to afford the $5 package. With example daily quests running upwards of eight days, you could be looking at quite the time investment for these rewards.

The good news is that the dailies seem to be minimally invasive, simple ideas like log in eight days in a row or just play a specific game on the list. It would be irresponsible and poor business for Perfect World Entertainment to make it too easy to obtain Zen with as little work as the daily quests already seem to ask for, as people would simply use that as a source of income.

Still, we’ll have to see how the quests go when the Arc client launches.

[Column] Black Ops III And Genius Marketing

Call of Duty is one of those franchises that never sees coverage here at MMO Fallout, for obvious reasons. With that in mind, I need to take a moment out of our regularly scheduled programming to discuss the marketing genius behind the Black Ops III multiplayer starter pack, and to also explain why this concept needs to become a semi-regular promotion and also make its way to consoles. Activision is taking its marketing with a one-two punch that should, if all goes well, give a nice boost to sales on the PC.

First, what am I talking about. Nearly ten days ago, Activision introduced the Black Ops III Multiplayer Starter Pack for a paltry $15 on Steam. The pack is exactly what it sounds like, access to multiplayer with some restrictions. No campaign, no zombies, and you can’t prestige, play custom games, access mod support, no Dead Ops Arcade, or Nightmare mode. Tit for tat, this is as barebones as it gets: Ranked multiplayer. If you decide to upgrade to the full game, your $15 is taken off of the total price.

The package makes absolute sense on PC, where Activision has to contend with a tidal wave of established competition that is either free to play or damn near close. In order to make real headway on PC, Activision must rely on the Steam platform where established titles like Counter Strike: GO dominate the genre and the charts. It also makes sense if the company wishes to remain viable on the platform as a whole. At launch, Black Ops III averaged 24 thousand concurrent players on PC. Two months later, in January, that number had dropped to 14 thousand.

And help this game needs, since outside of Team Deathmatch and Domination, the game modes on PC are virtually abandoned at non-peak hours. Even on weekends, and after the release of the starter pack, it isn’t out of the ordinary to see multiple game modes stuck at 0%, with no one playing or willing to join to spark some traffic.

So by reducing the price of entry to $15, Activision brings in all kinds of players who would have otherwise not purchased the game, as you can see by the glut of players in the match above that only own the game because of the pack. Even if 90% of these players eventually quit without buying anything else, they still contributed $15 more per person than they would have had the pack not existed. In all likelihood, Activision views the pack as an easy point of entry: Those who would have waited for a heavy Steam sale to buy the game will likely stick around and even purchase the full game upgrade, while those who had just enough interest to toss in for the starter pack are salvaged customers.

The increase in population also gives incentive and boosts the likelihood that existing players will continue playing, and hopefully buy the season pass and customization pack if they haven’t already.

But, not to let this campaign die, Activision is ending the promotion with the second part of their one-two punch, a free weekend. Think of the free weekend as a boost to the stepping stone that is the multiplayer pack. Free weekends are like a sample station at the grocery store. They attract people who have no interest in buying the full product and, through the power of free stuff, hope to change their minds. So you play a few rounds of Black Ops, have a bit of fun, and oh hey the game is on sale for $40. Too much? Why not just keep playing the multiplayer for $15 and decide if you want to upgrade later? Cool.

So by that logic, the starter pack acts as something of a negotiating tool, with the full game upgrade splitting the cost and making the whole package look cheaper by comparison. Sure, you’re still paying the sale price of $40 total, but you put down $15 and start playing over the weekend, and then the sale is coming to an end but you can still upgrade to the full game for $24. Twenty four bucks for zombies, campaign, and everything else you’re missing? What a deal! At least, that’s the intended thought process of the promotion.

The promotion, and the availability of the starter pack, are gone come this week, so I have to say I am very interested to see where Activision goes with this type of package. There has been speculation for years now of Call of Duty cutting up its game modes into separate but cheaper packages, and there is no doubt that the numbers from this short lived campaign are going to be run through a gauntlet and have a heavy influence on the franchise’s future marketing.

Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

[Column] Brutal Force, And Why Gamers Notice Everything

Brutal Force isn’t available for purchase on Steam, it hasn’t been since its store page was removed many months ago. According to Steam Charts, the game is mostly forgotten: 0 plays this past month, one person the month before that, and an all time peak of 5. The developer (Enterchained) website no longer exists, and their only presence on Desura hasn’t been updated in five months.

The idea of an indie game showing up on Steam and subsequently making fading into obscurity isn’t surprising, after all the indie gaming industry is not unlike the restaurant business in that 60% fail in the first year and 80% fail within five years. That statistic is for restaurants, and I’d be willing to bet that it is higher for indie developers.

Brutal Force is a perfect reminder to other indie developers, and AAA for that matter, that gamers see everything. As Gabe Newell said in a 2013 Nerdist interview with Chris Hardwick:

One of the things we learned pretty early on is ‘Don’t ever, ever try to lie to the internet – because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.’

Back in July, Brutal Force’s base price was lowered to $4.99 USD, and in August the game saw a price cut of 75% to $.99. A few hours after the sale went live, the price was hitched to $1.99 yet still carried a 75% off rate. Several hours after that, $3.24 with (you guessed it) a 75% off label. You can see at this link that the game is already 99 cents base price when it goes on sale but stays the same, only to jump to $7.99 and go on sale for $1.99, to jump to $12.99 the next day and dip to $3.24 on sale.

Raising the price of a product right before putting it on sale is illegal in the US and Europe, plus other countries. In the US, at least, a retailer must have sold the item at the price that they hiked it up to for a reasonable amount of time prior to the new sale. To use Brutal Force as an example, Enterchained would have had to sell it at $7.99 for a “reasonable amount of time” in order for the price hike during a sale to not be considered deceptive.

The game has long since been removed from Steam and exiled to the furthest corners of the internet also known as Desura. The developer no longer seems to be in business, as their social media accounts have been deleted and their website is gone. The only remnants of Enterchained that will remain behind are the masses of bad PR floating around Reddit and other websites discussing how the company tried to pull a fast one and ultimately lost.

[Not Massive] The Ship And Tossing Away First Impressions

(Editor’s Note: As I was gearing up to publish this, the news broke that Blazing Griffin is pushing the release date back to deal with the exact issue that this article covers.)

The Ship Remastered is set to go into Early Access on Monday, and while most developers do their best to get a game in working order before putting it out to the public, Blazing Griffin will be taking a new approach of making the game unplayable for most customers. You see, when the game does go live on Monday, it will do so with neither online play nor bots, meaning if you have no one to play with on a LAN, you have no reason to purchase the game, at least not at first. Assuming all goes according to plan, and the developer keeps up with its schedule, online play will hit the game after a few weeks.

There is little doubt in my mind that launching a game into Early Access with the most important function not yet implemented is going to do some early and likely irreparable damage to Blazing Griffin’s status, between the bevvy of negative reviews that will no doubt pop up to the number of people who will purchase and then very quickly apply for a refund, after giving said negative review. Regardless of Blazing Griffin’s reasons for launching this early, it is pretty irrefutable that early negative impressions can outright kill a game in early access, and in a business format that already has a negative public image, can kill the funding for a game before it even has a chance to succeed.

What more, the very real concern of killing off interest in the game with a misstep right out of the gate is something that Blazing Griffin should be well acquainted with, having tried and failed to grab community interest in a The Ship game just a few years ago. Back in 2012, BG attempted a Kickstarter campaign with a goal of merely £128,000 to create The Ship: Full Steam Ahead. The game just broke eighteen grand from about six hundred people. The Ship on Source only retains its tiny community because you can’t walk two feet without tripping over ten free copies of the game.

As a game that will function primarily over online multiplayer, The Ship absolutely relies on a healthy, active community in order to remain viable in the market, and once people start jumping ship (no pun intended), the population effect tends to snowball. Yes, Blazing Griffin stands to obtain some useful information from launching in Early Access with just LAN, but they also stand to lose a lot more in the long run from the people who will either see the lack of online and put the game on their ignore list, or those who buy the game and refund it within the two week window because online hasn’t been added yet, only to never look back.

I say this not to trash The Ship and Blazing Griffin, but as a long time fan of the series that would like to see its next iteration not fall into the same pit as its predecessor: A dead community leading to a defunct developer, and that doesn’t help anyone.

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