Swinging the hammer down and busting some skulls.
Continue reading “Steam Cleaned: Valve Bans Shady Devs Star Legion and HEG Games”
Tag: developer
Here Are The Studios Working On Xbox Series X Games
None of these names being a huge surprise.
Continue reading “Here Are The Studios Working On Xbox Series X Games”
Steam Game Festival Returns In June
Steam Lays Out Plans For Bandwidth Control Mid-Coronavirus
Expect the games you don’t play to update at quieter times.
Continue reading “Steam Lays Out Plans For Bandwidth Control Mid-Coronavirus”
Steam Cleaned: Valve Hands Sunside Games A Store Ban
Steam Cleaned: Coronavirus Simulator Is A Desperate Plea For Attention
The Internet Memesters Union has brought us another floater, and it’s only a matter of time before the press throws itself on this turd.
These days the best way to get attention when putting out a low-effort game on Steam is to be bad, and I mean impressively bad. Any crew of college students can put out an unremarkable Unreal engine shooter and throw a hissy fit when it gets criticized, but in order to actually get sales you’re going to have to appeal to one of two “i’ll buy anything for the irony of it” demographics; the hentai demographic and what I have started calling the Internet Memesters Union. These groups of course go hand in hand with the “I’ll buy anything with easy achievements” and Russian trading card bot farms.
Now given that the Coronavirus has become a serious topic, it was only a matter of time before the Memesters Union jumped on board with all of its original hilarity. Coronavirus Simulator is an upcoming Steam game whose developer credits are Evil Scientists and Reptilian, and publishers are Uzbekistan Bears and Putin Team. Get it? Putin? Putin’s still funny, right? Putin!
“This time you will take on the role of a coronovirus, arriving directly from the laboratory of evil geniuses. Your task is to destroy humanity on planet Earth and spread throughout the galaxy. Modify your genome as it develops, improve your immunity to extreme conditions, and stay tuned for vaccine development!”
How quirky and random, and the only thing worth talking about in a shoddy clicker game.
But this crew isn’t the only one falling over itself to get in on the edgelord demographic as another title just simply called Coronavirus is also on its way out this month.
Coronavirus looks like it was hastily cobbled together out of a pre-built asset pack, which makes sense considering how long the virus has been a thing and that the game is coming out on February 14. Coronavirus is in development by soboleznyou which our on staff KGB agent says roughly means a message of condolences.
On the other hand if this means the Memesters Union is moving away from ‘God Emperor Trump’ games, it can’t be all that bad. At the very least I haven’t seen any images of Pepe the Frog showing up in the promo screenshots. Get ready for certain members of the press to throw themselves on these titles to scream about toxicity on Steam or something.
Early Access Fraudsters: Cyber Watch Is Cyber Shovelware
Cyber Watch is a shovelware title hastily cobbled together in the Unreal Engine and tossed onto Steam for a couple of bucks in the hopes that enough people will buy it and not refund it to make a little bit of profit. Tossed onto Steam by a ragtag group of seven named individuals, Cyber Watch hopes to abuse the fact that it is “under development” to avoid criticism while not making use of Steam’s Early Access label.
The first thing you see on Cyber Watch’s store page is:
*****NOTE*****
THE GAME IS STILL UNDER DEVELOPMENT AND IT DOES NOT REPRESENT THE FINAL VERSION OF THE GAME.THERE IS STILL A LOT TO IMPROVE AND ADD
SO IF YOU WANT THE FULL EXPERIENCE OF THIS GAME PLEASE WAIT FOR THE FINAL VERSION TO RELEASE.UNNECESSARY REVIEWS WOULD NOT BE APPRECIATED.
What you get is a barely functioning pre-alpha build of a game whose working components I have to assume were built into the Unreal engine or available as an asset pack on the Unreal store. From untextured, very basic maps to weapons that may function halfway or break your character (see aim-down-sights in the screenshot below), to “vehicles” being nothing more than untextured RC cars that sloppily plant your character mode behind it.
Cyber Watch also blasts Neffex songs through your speakers at about ten times the volume of the rest of the game.
To further cement the idea that Cyber Watch is a hastily cobbled together mess of a prototype, as of one week ago this game wasn’t actually called Cyber Watch. SteamDB’s history shows that Cyber Watch was previously titled The Battle Of Bellum up to January 1, 2020. It was previously listed for a January 18 release date before the team just dumped it on the store on January 12. The Battle Of Bellum it seems would have been a third person action adventure game judging from a prior description:
“This game is a third person shooter game.This game is full of acton and adventures.”
Prior Steam listings also have The Battle Of Bellum listed as a single player game with achievements, so it seems like the team threw out what they had at the last minute and opted instead to push a rushed featureless prototype of a shooter on the store in the hopes that slapping a “this is unfinished” sticker would stifle criticism and people would buy the game regardless. It might have worked if they had listed the game as early access. They didn’t.
It isn’t going to work. I personally bought the game to drop a review and received this response from the developer:
“THERE IS A BIG NOTE IN THE DESCRIPTION……MAYBE….. MAYBE YOU DIDNT SEE IT…..ITS OKAY ……EVERYTHING YOU ARE SAYING IS ALREADY MENTIONED IN THE DESCRIPTION……SO DONT WASTE YOUR TIME ON COMMENTING LIKE THIS”
Posting in all caps always makes you correct, and trust me there is no way anything associated with this game is not a huge waste of time.
Thankfully with the way Steam goes, Cyber Watch will be buried in the history books with the rest of the low-effort shovelware to come out on Steam.
Bloodbath Steam: Valve Burns Down The House In Mass Game Ban
(Update: It looks like a total of 833 games have been banned by Valve today)
Bloodbath Kavkaz? Nah, Bloodbath Steam.
Valve is currently in the midst of what appears to be a massive ban wave of shady Steam developers, with hundreds of games caught in the crossfire and no sign of slowing down. The ban wave began just over an hour ago as of this publishing and has been knocking out games left and right.
Chief among the ban list is Dagestan Technology, a Russian publisher of titles such as Bloodbath Kazkov.
We will update if more information become available.
Source: Sentinels of the Store
Kickstarted MMO Edengrad Is Returning Thanks To Share Sales
Everyone’s favorite crowdfunded MMO Edengrad is coming back! Or at least that’s the plan.
For those of you not familiar with the game Edengrad, this game was Kickstarted to the tune of £41k by developer Huckleberry Games who released the title into Early Access on Steam in April 2017 and promptly stopped actively supporting it in December of the same year due to an apparent lack of funding. The servers have continued running for that time period but no active updates have been deployed in over a year and a half now.
The folks at Huckleberry Games posted a very cryptic message back in December 2018 that they were coming back, but nothing emerged until this June when Wyborcza posted some news about the company. It looks like Huckleberry has sold 1.5 million Zloty in shares, approximately $395,000 US Dollars. That money, according to the article, will go toward continuing development on Edengard as well as new titles.
“The F series issue was a very important step in the company’s history, thanks to which the company will be able to continue working on our flagship product, Edengrad, and support the development of new promising projects. companies, they believed in it and together with us they want to develop it, and in return we will provide them with new, better quality, “said president Patryk Borowski, quoted in the communiqué.
Developer Huckleberry Games has been promising updates via the Steam forums for several months now, only time will tell if they can actually come through on those statements.
Black Desert Online Launches Today
Black Desert officially hits Xbox One today, says developer Pearl Abyss.
The base game can be purchased for $9.99 USD and contains instant access, with higher editions at $29.99 (standard), $49.99 (Deluxe), and $99.99 (Ultimate). The full release starts with a 55 level cap. Pearl Abyss also announced the Black Desert Partners Program, which looks to build meaning relationships with content creators.
“Launching Black Desert on Xbox One has been a long development journey and we’re so thankful for the support of the Xbox community along the way”, said Robin Jung, Chief Executive Officer at Pearl Abyss. “Through the community’s feedback and continued interest in Black Desert over the course of the past two years and multiple betas, we’re happy to be able to launch the game today and look forward to adding additional content in the near future.”
MMO Fallout 