It is an unusual topic to discuss here but probably not a bad idea to cover for a gaming community.
For months meanwhile I observe a development in the gaming industry which actually reaches back many years.
It is absolutely nothing new but I got the feeling that it reached its peak recently.
What I am talking about is greed and a general disconnect with the players. We are not talking about big secrets here. The game industry is based on big money.
Games get more and more complex and take many years of development where hundreds if not thousands of developers work on a single game. The production of a AAA game these days easily consumes a few hundred mio $.
Revenue has to be met to cover the costs and if possible make profit. In my eyes there is nothing wrong with that. There usually hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand people working on such a game for many years and they deserve to get paid for their work.
But we also face the situation that companies want to maximize profits with minimal efforts and shady business practices. This is an increasing trend meanwhile.
Electronic Arts
Lets face it... EA is the prime example of this for many many years.
EA is a publisher that has bought many game developers (companies) in order to make money by releasing sequels to already existing games. The EA sports titles allow the company to sell the same game every year again with very little effort for the developers but with huge chances of monetization.
EA earned a bad reputation... eventhough you have to admit that the quality of the games is not bad (generally speaking).
There is nothing wrong buying an EA game from time to time. EA is selling games because a large amount of players like them. There is a demand for such games. So I don't think the general EA bashing is always justified.
But then there are the moments where EA decides to mess up completely by being greedy. Really the best example of this is the Star Wars Battlefront lootbox debacle that I believe not only caused angry players but also legal consequences in late 2017, early 2018 due to the gambling nature of it, which violates laws of multiple countries.
And later in 2018 Battlefield V was announced and released which caused the next controversy.
In my eyes... the game deserved better. Battlefield V is better than its reputation. It is one of the first games that supports RTX (eventhough it is a bit flawed) and provides a a solid gameplay experience.
I guess main problem is how the marketing for the game was done. The trailer was not well received since it provided a too action driven view on the WW2 scenario and in the end felt a bit like a Call of Duty game. Another point of critic appears to be the focus on character customization which didn't really fit into the game/trailer. Last but not least did EA dare to put a women into the game. Seriously, who cares? Well, some players cared and in my eyes they are wrong. It is a design choice I wont blame EA or the developers for. As a matter of fact females exist in every war and it is not unrealistic to assume that some of them were able to hold a gun.
The only thing EA did wrong here is the arrogant response to the critics. "If you dont like it then dont buy it".
Yeah true, and thats exactly what the players did. Despite being a good game the sales numbers have not been that good.
Battlefield V is a marketing failure and this shows how disconnected big game publishers are from the players that are supposed to play these games.
I guess we better don't even talk about what happened to one of the biggest and best game franchises of EA/Bioware.
Mass Effect
I have a love/hate relation with Bioware... they can produce incredible products, just to ruin them a few years later.
Hello Games
But while I am defending the developers a bit, lets also mention another company which got bad reviews in the past years. Hello Games with its No Mans Sky.
Lets face it, the game was a mess when it was released and the developers disappeared for months after the release due to the negative feedback from the players.
All the stuff went so far that there were fraud investigations, death threats against the developers, etc.
To be fair Hello Games is a pretty small company with a very ambitious project. That however does not justify the unfinished product they delivered after making bold announcements.
Today I need to say that Hello Games completely messed up the initial release of the game, probably also by making false advertisement for it. The line to fraud is pretty thin here.
However, Hello Games did something nobody expected in the past years. They delivered big updates with fixes and contents. They delivered DLCs for free, turning the game bit by bit into what they originally have promised.
Is No Mans Sky a good game now? Well, that is a matter of taste. I can imagine that players enjoy this game today.
It certainly is significantly better than it was after the official release.
I personally face this case with mixed feelings. I am absolutely convinced that developers where not honest with their customers but I am at least willing to acknowledge their try to repair the done damage.
Other game developers released unfinished, broken games before and then released costly DLCs which finally fixed the problems and delivered the promised content.
Hello Games did this for free.
Credit is given where credit is due.
Activision/Blizzard
Lets move on to a company which despite its size and product portfolio was able to keep a positive reputation so far.
Blizzard Entertainment.
Blizzard caused one of the biggest controversies of the past months.
Known for games such as the Warcraft francise, Starcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm etc. the company usually delivered quality content, creating big fanbases around their games. The community support and communication usually can be described as good.
And once a year there is the BlizzCon where the newest games get reveiled.
In 2018 a new Diablo game was teased prior such a BlizzCon and the players expected to finally get a Diablo 4 trailer as highlight of the BlizzCon.
The expectations were high.
Announced was Diablo Immortal... a cheap mobile game... developed by a chinese company that took their already exising game engine (on which multiple Diablo clones where released before) and put a few Diablo assets into it.
That was not the announcement the players were hoping for, especially not as the highlight of the BlizzCon.
A few aspects need to be considered here.
BlizzCon is a convention for PC players (mainly). So these PC players expected to get a PC game and not a cheap mobile game. I am not sure what Blizzard thought their target audience would be.
But ok, that wouldn't be the problem if Blizzard would have announced this mobile game and then right after it a Diablo 4 for PC.
"We have this fancy mobile game here but we also want you to know that there is a new Diablo for PC in development. We don't have a trailer yet but want you to know whats comming up." (just an example)
I guess everyone would have been happy. But nope... just the mobile game (that nobody ever wanted).
The people that visit the Blizzcon pay money with the expectation to get a certain high quality product. And in the end they got something that is not even targeted for the main gaming platform they are on.
That is like writing an essay and getting it back with the comment "wrong topic".
Next problem is the fact that the developer of the new mobile game (NetEase Games) has a bad reputation for producing cheap Diablo clones and being overly ambitious with implementing microtransactions. The least word a PC wants to hear is microtransactions. We live in a time where games already cost 60$ (or even more). Remember what you paid for games 10 years ago?
Overall that BlizzCon won't be remembered for their game announcement but for the reaction to this game announcement.
Blizzard got booed at their own convention and had to answer comments like "Is this an out of seasons april fools joke?".
Eventually in this uneasy moment, one of the Blizzard guys on the stage responded with "don't you have mobile phones?"
My take on this mess is:
Yes, I just like many others have a mobile phone. I use it to call people, take photos and write messages. From time to time I also play a game on it (that happens once every few months).
Despite having a good quality battery which still last pretty long I know for sure how much energy a game can draw from it, which means that playing an online Diablo on it regulary is not even an option.
I also have a PC... with a big high-res screen that is significantly better for my eyes than the (dunno) 5 inch screen on my mobile phone. The input on PC is significantly better than any mobile game controls ever can be.
Im also not really keen to see a Diablo that only can be played utilizing microtransactions, ingame ads and other terrible ways of monetization.
I think this BlizzCon will be remembered.
Nobody will talk about the years before but this specific BlizzCon is what players will remember.
Blizzard... or... maybe I better should call it Activision Blizzard messed up and ruined a good amount of its positive reputation (not that Activision ever had a good reputation before).
And I personally think that Activision is to a large degree responsible for it.
Activision is known to be a greedy publisher that is trying to squeeze every $ out of its customers.
After the BlizzCon the shitstorm didn't stop.
Diablo fans voiced their anger buy downvoting the newly released Diablo Immortal trailer on Youtube.
Today I has ~27.000 upvotes and ~723.000 downvotes which is a clear indication dissatisfaction.
But the main problem here is that in the early days when the trailer was released, somehow more than 100.000 dislikes were removed and negative comments also disappeared. I guess large companies such as Activision can convince Youtube to delete negative critics and manipulate the market this way.
This manipulation was noticed by people that no longer were able to find their comments and the Youtube stats eventually showed the amount of missing comments and dislikes.
Players are players and responded by posting more and more comments to the trailer.
"delete this Blizzard"
"this is my 36th comment... 35 deleted so far"
I am not sure what is worse... creating negative feedback or trying to hide it via shady manipulative practices.
Activision/Bungie
And that leads me to the most recent even on the gaming market. A game I regulary play and therefore I am very interested in this event.
Last week Bungie (the developer of Destiny and the original Halo) announced to part away from Activision.
Once again I have mixed feelings about that.
Bungie as developer originally owned the Halo francise but then parted with Microsoft (as publisher) and Microsoft was allowed to keep Halo as product.
So every Halo that is developed since is not related to Bungie anymore.
Then Bungie cooperated with Activision to create Destiny.
Activision provided 500mio $ and Bungie had to follow a very strict contract to develop a game within 3 years (eventually it took longer) and release a major addon every year (and/or a sequel every few years).
Certainly not a bad deal for both companies.
Bungie got money to develop the game and Activision in the end got a high quality game.
The problems start when the publisher demands certain release cycles which cause time troubles with the developers. This could lead to cut content (which happens in case of Destiny) and lower quality. The pressure for the developer is pretty high.
My personal take on this is that this is not neccessarily a problem. As a matter of fact Activision gave money and expected revenues within a specific timeframe. There is nothing wrong with that.
I might not have the usual player perspective on this as I can see the situation from both sides... the company and the player that I am.
Activision provided 500mio $ and of course they would like to get that money back somewhen. So they clearly said what the developers (Bungie) had to do.
I did a rough calculation based on a few numbers I researched a few months back.
Destiny 2 has about 8 million registered accounts.
It is hard to tell how much players have paid for the game. An average AAA game costs about 60€ these days when newly released. But meanwhile Destiny 2 is a bit older, many players got the game at a discounted price and the base game was even given away for free a few weeks ago.
For simplicity reasons lets assume the average costs for the base game are 35€. That are 280mio$.
Lets also assume that about 50% of the players have bought DLCs... for simplicity reason we assume they have bought the Season Pass (containing these DLCs) for year 1 and year 2 for 40€ each (the costs at release are higher, but due to discounts I assume a lower price). Another 320mio$.
On top of that there is merchandise and microtransactions. To be honest I have no idea what the profit margin is here. I would consider 50mio$ high.... but could be wrong with that number.
If we assume that these numbers are halfway representative (they might be wrong) we get to 650mio$ revenue.
Based on a leaked document Bungie is allowed to keep ~25% of the net revenue (the contract is a bit more complex, dealing with annual bonuses for meeting certain goals and penalties when not meeting certain conditions).
So 75% go back to Activision. 75% of 650 mio = 487.5 mio$. (this calculation once again is oversimplified since net revenue already considers the running costs)
I don't think that my assumed numbers are correct but I think they are not too far away from reality.
Probably Activision got their 500mio$ invenstment back... but I don't think that there has been large profit margin for them.
At the end of 2018 Activision stated that they are not 100% satisfied with the performance of Destiny 2 Forsaken (the big year 2 DLC) and that they seek for new ways of monetization.
Activision also announced that they intend to cut costs in the following years.
What do I want to show with this rough calculation?
Bungie and Activision will part away and this might have more implications than from the players perspective are visible.
1. It could mean that Bungie is the initiator of this procedure because they want to break free from the evil publisher which forced them to a strict release schedule and to implement microtransactions.
2. It also could mean that Activision is the initiator of this procedure because Destiny a product that is underperforming and caused more costs than revenue.
Just alone the fact that Bungie is allowed to keep the right on the product (Destiny) is very telling actualy.
It could mean that Activision is not interested in keeping Destiny for various reasons. e.g. Activision might consider Destiny not lucrative enough. Activision also would need to find a new dev team to continue such a francise. Costs that Activision current can not afford. I can even imagine that there are additional payments involved from Bungie to Activision to compensate the loss of the product (pure speculation).
What could that mean for the game?
Will Bungie get rid of the microtransactions? Probably not. Players got used to it and I don't think that Bungie will change anything.
Will there be changes to the release cycle? Probably yes. Bungie can break free from the restrictive release schedule now. They can spend more time for development of quality content (if they their buget allows it).
Question is if this is what players want. Do players want to wait longer for meaningful content? Hard to tell if you ask me. Im personally not happy with the current way content is released since the December update. It does not allow players to go through the content at their own pace. I also think that there is too much grind meanwhile. But that is only my personal oppinion.
Will Bungie continue to release PS4 exclusive content? Probably if they get extra money from Sony. That would be sad for the PC players but is not changing the way it currently is.
Another big question is how Bungie is going to publish Destiny in future on PC. I am not sure if Battlenet still is an option after cutting ties with Activision/Blizzard. Maybe Steam? Maybe an own launcher?
Bungie had to rely on other companies to develop the PC version of the game and some of the big DLCs. Companies which are owned by Activision. What will happen to the PC version in general? How would Bungie be able to produce all the content without further help?
Many open questions and much room for speculations.
Is Activision to blame for mistakes in the past?
No doubt that Activision is greedy.
I am sure that Activision as publisher put a lot of pressure on the developers. I am sure that microtransaction were not Bungies idea. At the same time it is hard for me to believe that all mistakes done are Activisions fault.
I guess the future development of Destiny and Bungie as its new publisher will show how bad the influence of Activision really was in the past.
Activision - meanwhile under fraud investigations - had to deal with a huge drop of their stock market shares when the announcement of Bungie breaking free from Activsion was announced.
I guess that indicates one of the main problems of the gaming industry.
We as gamers are not the customers of such large companies. We are the assets.
The real customers are the shareholders.
Rare/Microsoft
Rare used to be a good developer... but that has been many many years ago.
With Sea of thieves they had the chance to return to old glory.
But they messed up.
A beautiful and stylish game but without purpose... without meaningful content but full of repetive tasks and an expensive item shop.
Much was promised... but in the end not much delivered.
I feel a bit sad and ashamed that I preordered this game.
Certainly the idea behind the game was good and the quality of the content also was not bad, but a game should have more than a single-themed repetive gameplay.
A game needs an purpose... players need something that creates a motivation to play.
If there is nothing to do in a game it wont matter how good it looks and how good it feels moving around in it.
For the pricetag of a AAA game players at least should be able to expect more than Rare delivered.
This game was a matter of false advertisement in which the players which participated the Beta got the impression that the final product would be more than just the Beta content.
But there was not more.
Unknown Worlds Entertainment
Before we get to the last topic, Id like to point out a personal experience that might not be greedy or abusive... but still a bit disappointing.
I am a big fan of a indie game called Subnautica.
I bought it in 2016 when it was in early access, supported it with feedback and bug reports.
In January 2018 the game was officially released.
My hopes were high that the problems and issues that I reported earlier would have been fixed with the official release. But that was not the case. The game has performance problems some parts in my eyes wrongly coded.
I continued to investigate into problems after the release because I think the game deserved getting fixed.
Subnautica is based on the Unity engine so it is not too difficult for me to find problems and even suggest possible solutions. I found multiple objects in the game which very obviously caused massive performance problem to the players and reported these problems,... even gave feedback of how to fix these problems.
We have 2019 meanwhile. One year passed by.
No fixes... no improvements.
But instead I got an email one month ago announcing the new standalone DLC for Subnautica and the console version of the game.
I am not really pleased about that mail for multiple reasons.
Content of the email was that the developers stated that the feedback from the community allowed them to fix known issues. As a matter of fact this is not true... none of the issues have been fixed. No patches were delivered.
The console version, one year after the release of the PC version contains the same problems and bugs that the game had one year ago. The same problems we had on PC have been ported to console 1:1 with the result that the console version due to the worse hardware runs even worse. It certainy is fun to play with only 10FPS, right? Probably no big deal when savegames stop working after 100 hours of playing, right?
In my not so happy mood after receiving that email I put together a lenghty summary of all the problems and issues the game has since the early access, how the developers told us that these issues would be fixed with the official release... how that never happened and how I received an email telling that our feedback has lead to fixes which we actually never got. I also pointed out that the poor quality of the console release is direct result of one year of ignorance. I published this stuff on multiple locations.
The good part about small game companies is that you can get in contact with the developers, especially when you point out the obvious just loud enough.
I had a discussion with one of the developers which allowed me to point out the problems and possible solutions.
I don't know if this will lead to improvements. I was told that a good amount of the problems I described have been already fixed but the patch has not been released yet.
Well, I had this discussion about 6 weeks ago... and I am still waiting for a patch to arrive.
Until that happens I personally consider the new DLC a joke based on a broken foundation.
Don't get me wrong... Subnautica is a great game (at the Joystick Awards 2018 it was voted to be the PC game of the year). But some bugs can turn a great game into a nightmare and my hopes in a standalone DLC are not justified by the current state of the main game.
And at this point I also like to point out that I have a problem with the term "standalone DLC". If it is standalone then it is a completely new game... a sequel. But not a DLC for the main game. Period!
Are these kinds of problems (releasing a console version of a game, knowing that the problems of the PC release one year ago have not been fixed) ignorance?
Is it a general disconnect with the playerbase?
Is it greed?
I don't know, but it does not feel right and my personal motivation to buy that "standalone DLC" faded away after one entire year of no support.
Bethesta Softworks
The last topic is a real bummer.
Nothing dominated the gaming news more in the past 2 months than Bethestas Fallout76.
One game review brought it to the point by stating "I give it a rating of: don't fucking buy this game".
But lets go through the mess step by step.
Bethesta meanwhile is a pretty large game developer and publisher.
Famous for games like Fallout 3+4, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, etc. But also in charge of other game studios such as ID games (Doom, Wolfenstein) or Arkane Studios (Dishonered).
There are probably more than 50 games released so far and actually with a good bunch of Game of the Year Awards, Bethesda gained an overall good reputation.
Of course Bethesda also had the reputation of releasing buggy games but usually that was accepted by the fanbase since the products could compensate these flaws with other features.
Fallout76 was announced as an online game based on the Fallout 4 tech (with a few improvements). Story wise it is the prequel to all the Fallout games but I doubt that players really care because the game has no real story.
When announced it was said that it is going to be the best and biggest Fallout experience ever for the players... with x16 the details of the previous games.
What the players got was a empty buggy world, without any real story to experience, without any NPCs... without any real purpose.
Modders soon figured out how the developers simply copy/pasted content from previous games to create Fallout76... and with that they also copy/pasted all the bugs and problems from these singleplayer games into a multiplayer environment. The developers did not even bother to remove internal comments from the game code stating that the code was taking from Skyrim.
The animation system regulary breaks, the game environment glitches, the graphics broke... everything looked cheap, broken and unfinished.
On top of that are the multiplayer problems that were introduced. Highly unstable servers, unbalanced gameplay, glitches that made players invincible, a net code that allows players to read other players IPs and with that make these players vulnerable to DDos attacks.
I could go on to talk about all the technical problems the game is facing at the moment up to the point where players easily can cheat to create items out of nothing and then sell them to other players on Ebay.
But let's take a look the reasons for all the mess.
Certainly the game engine is to blame. A game engine which is old... very old. Bethesda used this game engine +10 years ago and improved it when required. What Bethesda never really did was to fix bugs in this game engine.
So bugs which already existed in Morrowind also exist today in Fallout 76 (e.g. your movement speed depends on your frames per second which is really bad for a MP game).
Another problem are poor design choices such as having 0 NPCs in this world. That means 0 NPCs you can talk to and get quests from (there are creatures you can fight). This made the game appear empty, devoid of purpose and flair.
You could say "OK Fallout76 is a bad game, so what?".
The problem is not that Bethesda released a bad game.
The problem is how Bethesda scammed players with this bad game.
Players which preordered the game had the chance to take part in a closed beta. Thats nice and cool. Not so good was that this Beta test was just a few days prior the official release. So whatever bugs players would experience would never be fixed in time. As a matter of fact 2 months after the release these bugs still have not been fixed (even more bugs were introduced). Participating in the Beta certainly was no joy at all. Not only were the servers only available at ridiculous times. They also were highly instable and the Bethesda launcher all of a sudden decided to delete the entire game. Players had to redownload everything and and patches so far were delivered with huge junks of files but only very little changes to the game.
Another problem of the release was that Bethesda was not really honest about the content and quality of the game. The game looks old, the graphics outdated, the gameplay is overcomplicated and broken. Balance, a word that never was applied to this game.
Players wanted to refund the game. BUT... instead of releasing the game on Steam like other games before, Bethesta released it exclusively on their own launcher and therefore did not have to care about Steams refund policies. Steam has pretty fair terms regarding refunds and Bethesda of course knew that. Bethesda also knew that the game is bad and that player would want to refund.
Players which wanted to refund Fallout76 were now told that refunds are not possible if the game was purchased online. The game btw. only is available as digital download... so no refunds at all (even when the game is not working or has been falsly advertised). As far I am informed there are currently fraud investigations running against Bethesda.
The original price tag for the game was 60$. The price for a AAA game. Players which preordered the game based on the false advertisement had to pay these 60$. When the game released and everybody was able to see what terrible quality it was the price tag in the first week after the release dropped down to "only" 40$ (probably still way too expensive for a game that feels like an early access version of an indie game). Guys, don't preorder games.
Bethesda not only sold the regular game. They also sold a 200$ collectors edition that comes a big powerarmor helmet in stylish a canvas bag. Surprisingly Bethesda didn't deliver what was announced.
That stylish canvas bag was replaced with a cheap nylon bag without notifying the customers prior shipping. Interesting is that Youtubers which advertised the game got the good quality bag (of course for free).
When people complained about this false advertising, Bethesda gave a pretty arrogant and ignorant reply.
They ran out of material, which was too expensive anyways and they are not going to change anything. Period!
For the lower quality product they were willing to give the players 500 of the ingame currency, which is the equivalent of 5$ real money (which is not enough to buy even the cheapest item in the very expensive ingame store).
So players had to pay 200$ for something that was not the way Bethesda advertised it and they got a lousy excuse and 5$ back (which they can not even use since its an ingame currency and not even enough to buy anything).
Bethesda produced one questionable incident per week since the release of the game.
Modders soon found out that Bethesdas claim that they don't want to have lootboxes in their game has been a lie. An update reveiled that Bethesda has actively updated a hidden part of the game containing pay2win lootboxes.
Then it was time for Christmas... time give something back to the players... or take more from them.
Bethesda did a nice holiday scam by selling Christmas themed content (a costume and some emotes) at a discounted price. Lets be a bit more specific here. The costumes were sold for 2000 of the ingame currency which was supposed to be 33% of its original price and the Emote bundle was sold for 1200 which was supposed to be half the original price.
There are multiple issues here.
These items never were discounted at all. It's like a shop that doubles the prices one week before giving you a generous 50% discount. You still paid the full price. A scam method applied to these Christmas offers.
The Christmas outfit (a Santa costume) like I mentioned had a discounted price of 2000 and an "original" price of 3000. In real money that is 20$ (discounted) or 30$ original price.
Would you buy a single cheap looking item which is only worth using during the Christmas season for 20-30$ when the full game (you know, everything else in this game) costs 40$?
Full price for the emote pack has been 24$ ("discounted" 12$). That emote bundle contained 12 emotes which were already in the game (for free) just this time with a tiny new Christmas themed icon. No new animations... just a tiny new image.... for 12$.
Christmas, the season of taking, the season of greed.
I think the next controversy was related to a 80$ bottle of Fallout themed Rum.
For 80$ you would expect a very very very special flavored Rum or a very very very special looking glass bottle.
Announced was a Nuka Cola style bottle like you can find it in the game but with dark color and the people really expected to get at last a special shaped glass bottle.
In reality they got a normal bottle of ordinary rum inside a 3d printed plastic case, which indeed has the shape of a Fallout Nuka Cola bottle.
80$ for a bottle of rum (which by reviews had a terrible flavor) inside a cheap plastic case which probably didn't cost more than 5$ to produce.
Bethesdas reply to the critics were Bethesda like. They wrote that this product took them at least 100 hours to engineer, is much more special than a special shaped glass bottle and that they are proud of this product.
Honestly I doubt that it takes +100 hours to "engineer" such a cheap 3d print. It is a scam product of a company which scammed its customers with every product since the Fallout76 release.
One week later...
Thousands of Fallout76 players got banned.
Reason: they hat cheatengine installed on their PC. No, no, no... they didn't use cheatengine to cheat in Fallout76. They were just banned because they had this tool installed on their PC. You don't even need this tool to cheat in Fallout76... the game engine is so broken that it allows cheating literally everywhere without the use of any tools.
Should the existence of such a tool be a reason for a ban?
In my eyes not.
As a matter of fact the Crossfire server scans connected client PCs for cheat tools (cheatengine included). We do the same as Bethesda did... but with a tiny but important difference. A ban is only issued when such tools are actively used in combination with the game. The pure existence of such tools somewhere on the HDD is no reason for a ban.
One week later...
Players use a bug in the game engine to duplicate ingame items and sell them on ebay.
How did they do that?
Well, the developers have been stupid enough to leave their development room (a test environment where all items of the game can be found and tested) in the game. Players found out how to access it, took the items and transfered them to different accounts before getting caught. How stupid can this game company be?
Don't they know that you at least put a shield bubble around it that can only break using a Ragnarok railgun?
I could list so many other problems of Fallout76... problems related to the game... many other issues where Bethesda tried to scam customers.
Fallout76 is the biggest shitshow on the net right now.
Nothing about this game is good and everything Bethesda does causes troubles to the customers.
Every week there is a new scandal around that game and whatever reputation the developer once had is ruined.
Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield are in development now... based on exactly the same game engine... developed by the same scam artists.
This is not the end of the controversy.
The week is not over yet... and the next week most certainly will have new awful surprises.
All the stuff above appears like the whole gaming industry is a disgusting mess.
Well, it has become hard to ignore that entire genres have been poisoned by microtransactions, lootboxes and unfinished products.
Some big players on the field deserve their bad reputation and it does not seem to get any better.
But game developers apparently are still interested in delivering quality products.
In 2018 I really enjoyed playing a bunch of games.
Jurassic Park Evolution was a rock solid experience.
Surviving Mars kept me busy for some weeks.
Assasings Creed Origins (I have not tried Odyssey yet) brought new inovations to that franchise. Ubisoft, despite its love for microtransactions, at least delivered content worth the money.
Recently X4 Foundations (with all its bugs) was able to catch my attention.
My hope that CD Projects devotion to quality leads to a great Cyberpunk 2077 is unbroken.
Not everything is lost in the gaming industry... but the big players definitely have screwed up in 2018.
