Landmark’s launch on Steam last week, optimistically, should have been a positive thing. The game has been in development for a long time, suffered through the loss of its companion MMO, the sale of its developer and subsequent layoffs, and the sunsetting of a large number of titles on the launchpad that it shares. It should have been a happy moment. You can take a look at the Steam Landmark forums and see pretty quickly that optimism is in fairly short supply.
As of Sunday night, Landmark is sitting on Steam with a 39% “mostly negative” rating, of more than 1,800 reviews. The game has peaked in Steam traffic at 125 concurrent users, according to Steam charts. Threads in the forums often bring up the words “scam,” “ripoff,” and expletives we won’t go into here.
So what happened? To understand that, we need to dive into some history.
Landmark was originally sold as Everquest: Landmark, it was supposed to be the game that would serve as the basis upon which Everquest Next would be built. Players were told that they could build things in Landmark with the best of the best making their way over to the MMO. It would also allow Sony Online Entertainment to test the engine and experimental ideas.
Then SOE got spun off and became Daybreak Game Company. Games were shut down, people were fired, and ultimately we learned that Everquest Next was being cancelled. It just wasn’t fun, we were told.
So players are understandably upset. Many feel that customers were misled by Daybreak selling a game as the foundation for something that they might have known wasn’t working out and likely wouldn’t see completion. Seeing as Landmark was supposed to be a content creation platform for Everquest Next, the cancellation of the latter makes the former seem mostly pointless.
Other players are angry that Daybreak has not provided Steam keys to people who bought the game during early access, regardless of how much they spent, coupled with the fact that they suddenly announced in March that the game would no longer be free to play as the company had been advertising up until then. There is also heavy criticism of the game’s content, allegations of poor optimization, floaty combat, and little to do in-game with a number of features heavily cut or cancelled outright like player vs player combat.
For the fact that Landmark has 1,800 reviews, no one seems to be playing it on Steam. As of this publishing, the peak player count since launch has been 125 people. It is currently sitting near 1,000 on the list of most played Steam games.
Landmark’s long term viability will need to be seen.
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