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Although this is interesting, I feel like Sergey is glossing over the thing that hurt their reputation the most — the way they handled the negative response to
by chc 12y ago
Although this is interesting, I feel like Sergey is glossing over the thing that hurt their reputation the most — the way they handled the negative response to the game. Reading here, you'd think they were sort of oblivious to the negativity, but instead they developed a reputation for being overly defensive. Criticizing the game would reportedly get you banned on The War Z's Steam forum. And when people started calling attention to the inaccurate description, rather than saying, "Oh, shoot, we messed up," Sergey went and did an interview with GameSpy where he basically defended many of the inaccurate statements, said that people "imagined" and "misread" the description, and kept trying to argue with the interviewer over things like whether "up to 50" is the same as "up to 100." Most likely he was just stressed and didn't really know what to say, but it really came across badly.
If they'd responded with the maturity shown in this piece, I think things would have gone very differently for The War Z. The game already had its troubles, but it probably could have gotten past that. But nobody wants to buy a troubled game from a developer with a reputation like that.
- colin_jack 12y agoYeah when this game came up before someone pointed out one of his other games was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rigs:_Over_the_Road_Racing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rigs:_Over_the_Road_Racing
- oxide 12y agothe entire article is one minimizing gloss after another.
- ibelimb 12y agoThe biggest thing that's missing from this article to me is there's no explanation at all why the game was rebranded to Infestation. He wrote the article out as "we made mistakes, we learned" but if you learned and adopted why did the name have to change?
- chris_wot 12y agoDunno, seems pretty clear to me: That said, The War Z was a terrible choice of name, as it naturally invited comparisons between our game and DayZ. In the run-up to launch, we thought we hit all of the important PR milestones: early demos, a press tour, regular asset reveals, hands-on previews, etc. Even so, we made a big mistake in not listening to the vocal minority of our community who thought the name was terrible. Handling our community communications differently would have alerted us to the major mistake we were making in choosing a name that was so close to our main competitor’s game.