Valve hauls down The War Z, offers refunds
Top-selling game on Steam (and most hated)
Valve has performed a humiliating climb-down over zombie game The War Z, pulling the game from Steam and offering refunds to players.
The game launched to two huge customer responses: it became simultaneously the top-selling game on Steam, and the most hated. This Reddit thread will give you the flavour.
After first defending the release, Valve has decided that the best course of action is to flick the debacle back to developer Hammerpoint Interactive and wait for repairs. It has called the launch decision a mistake and pointed customers to its support page, where they can file a ticket for a refund.
At launch, the developer had only managed one map in the game, and neither its promised “hardcore” play mode nor skills existed. It was, in short, the kind of software that escapes rather than being released.
According to Kotaku, the instant farce had gamers complaining that The War Z was launched without features promised on the Valve store, and they disliked its microtransaction pay-to-respawn model.
Users weren’t allowed to post to the game’s forum about why they were leaving, with the forum rules stating “do not post ‘I quit playing this game’ threads. No need for drama”.
In its apology, Valve says it will work with Hammerpoint “until we have confidence in the new build”. It will continue operating servers for the game, for players that decide to battle on while they wait for its replacement. ®
COMMENTS
Re: sadly
There are LOTS of games in the Apple app store that suck. Both free and paid. Apple just check that they run and follow the rules. They don't check to see if they are any fun to play.
Re: The only thing abut this story that is unusual is ...
<BignameMMOfromafewyearsago> was released on Steam at one point. The first I (or any of the programmers, to the best of my knowledge) heard about it was when we started getting bug reports that it didn't work.
Our marketing department, in their infinite wisdom, decided to negotiate and release the game on Steam without consulting any of the development team.
In the end, I figured out it was the Steam client that was to blame for it not working. It was processing the command line for our process and forwarding the spectacularly broken remains to us.
The only thing abut this story that is unusual is ...
......that they got a refund from Valve.
Many games on steam failed to work as per the marketing, off the top of my head Most EA games and Stronghold 3 was one of the worst ones I heard about recently.
The standard excuse is often that the distributors forced the developer to release on a particular date regardless of the state of the product.
Unfortunately the "complex software comes with bugs" lie is so universally accepted that they get away with it and just laugh at all the people complaining in the forums. To anyone who wants "that" game then my advise is to buy it retail, that way at least you can always just take it back as unfit for use.
With steam your T&C says you own nothing not even the media, this as when you buy a steam game you are just "renting" its use on the steam "service".
The steam agreement must be one of the most offensive pieces of legal cack out there intended to limit customer rights and removal all responsibility from valve and steam, have a look:- http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/
You must agree to this to play on steam as well as agreeing to allow them to sell your personal information without restriction.
Re: Dead on arrival...
They denied something? Where? It's a bit harsh to go laying all the blame at Valve's feet when they didn't develop the game. Would you blame Game if you'd bought War Z off the shelf and it was shit? I'm thinking back to Sword of the Stars 2 as an example, which was released completely broken; no-one blamed the retailers, FFS.
Had enough of El Reg's moneygrabbing bull****, I QUIT!
> They never just leave quietly and permanently
The ones who post in forums, perhaps not; they will be the ones with a significant emotional investment in a game (otherwise they probably wouldn't bother with the forums). But for every person publicly ragequitting, there will likely be many more leaving with no fanfare.
Don't assume that, just because it is noise, it is not also part of a signal.
