May 11, 2024 • 21 mins
Could the gaming industry’s fiery disputes be a call to arms for players worldwide? That's what we're tackling as we mount our soapbox to address the uproar surrounding Battlestate Games' Escape from Tarkov. Our latest episode zeroes in on the studio's contentious decision to introduce a costly new game edition, which has sparked allegations of fraud and false advertising. We dissect how the promised season pass of the original Edge of Darkness edition got shuffled aside, fueling gamer rage. Furthermore, we delve into how hackers are running rampant in the game, and how BSG's response—or lack thereof—is casting serious doubts on the studio's future.
Amidst the chaos, we align with the gaming community, sharing their collective reactions to the disheartening pay-to-win scenarios cropping up in Escape from Tarkov. With voices like Moist Critical and Angry Joe leading the charge, the community's influence is undeniable and fiercely potent. The episode doesn't stop there; we also shed light on how Sony and Arrowhead Studios are navigating the stormy seas of controversy with Helldivers 2, dissecting the enforced PSN account linking and regional player exclusion that's left gamers in an uproar.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode
of the Ink and Bytes podcast.
I think I've opened up everysingle episode like that, but
today I'm grabbing my soapbox,I'm dusting it off and I'm going
to stand on it tall and proudonce more, because we are going
to be talking about some of themost wild gaming stories that
(00:21):
I've ever seen and experienced,in some cases in a very long
time.
In particular, out of the manystories that we could probably
talk about, these two are veryrecent, one of them relating
Escape from Tarkov andBattlestate Games, also known as
BSG.
I'm going to be saying BSGpredominantly instead of
(00:42):
Battlestate Games, because ittakes way too long, be saying
BST predominantly instead ofBattlestate Games because it
takes way too long.
And then Helldivers 2, moreparticularly, or more whatever,
sony and the move that theypulled on the game.
Yeah, I really haven't had avideo game episode in a while.
I haven't stepped on my soapboxin a little bit, and this kind
(01:02):
of ties in nicely with theepisode I had with my good
friend chris.
So check that out if you wouldlike to, uh, get some context, I
guess.
But, as always, if you enjoythis episode, feel free to check
out my ko-fi and we're justgonna jump right in and get
through this wild.
This month has been crazy.
I can't even like quantify it.
(01:22):
It's been absolutely wild.
But anyway, let's get in there,let's talk about it, let's just
psychoanalyze this shit.
I'll see you on the other side.
So we're going to start withBSG and to understand fully why
(01:51):
the world or I shouldn't sayworld the internet exploded, and
I mean literally most of thegaming internet blew up over
this.
You're going to need a littlebit of context.
So Escape from Tarkov is what'scalled an extraction shooter.
To be more specific, eft wasthe first extraction shooter and
it was the first extractionshooter that really blew up.
(02:14):
It was in early alpha.
For a long time it went to openbeta and were theorized to get
a 1.0 release this year, butpersonally I don't think the
company is going to be around intwo years.
But we'll see.
But in order originally to gainaccess to the alpha, you would
have to buy the.
I believe it was the highesttiered edition of the game,
(02:37):
because all of the other onesare just pre-orders and there
are tiers of the game.
You can buy the standardedition, the left-behind edition
, the prepare-for-escape editionand after that there was
another edition called Edge ofDarkness, which was the biggest
edition of the game.
That gave you a possibility toget into the alpha, so on and so
(02:59):
forth, and each one of thesetiers have progressive rewards
and the highest one, like I said, edge of darkness had the most
rewards possible.
One of them in particular wascalled a season pass.
It said access to all currentand future dlcs in parentheses,
season pass.
And that was the uh, that wasthe, the flow for a very long
(03:20):
time and the game kept growing.
It kept getting better.
I gained a pretty substantialhardcore following that stuck
with it.
And bsg and nikita is verynotorious for not really being
that communicative with thecommunity.
They're not really thattransparent.
They were only recentlystarting to get better with
(03:42):
their community by havingemissaries that are community
members that actually talk withNikita and are dealing with the
stew directly.
So the community is heard.
They have like Sherpas thatteach people the game.
So they recently startedgetting better.
But BSG is notorious for notmaking good decisions and we
have bouncing madness.
(04:04):
And we have bouncing madness.
They do stupid things likeadding the fountain raid status
to things, making the game evenmore harder than it needs to be.
But then fast forward to liketwo weeks ago at this point, and
that's when they made the worstdecision they've ever made in
their entire studio's history.
Hackers running amok, they'rein like every lobby.
(04:25):
Nikita was on an interview.
It seemed like some greatthings were going to be
incorporated to the game.
I mean, hackers were neverreally addressed anyway.
Basically, nikita said hackersare too difficult.
Leave me alone.
I think we're past the point ofusing that as an excuse if
you're the most hacked game inexistence.
But they went silent for awhile and then on friday morning
about two two-ish weeks ago Ibelieve it was a new video was
(04:48):
released from Battlestate Games'YouTube channel and this was a
trailer for a brand new editionof the game this awesome
cult-looking thing and, oh mygod, it's $250, or $100 if
you're upgrading from the Edgeof Darkness edition.
And they basically committedfraud.
That's where we're at the newedition Escape from Tarkov.
(05:13):
The unheard edition literallytook EOD.
That was taken away from themarket a month prior.
It was no longer for sale, andthen they incorporated
microtransactions shortly afterthat.
The unheard edition basicallyis a giant middle finger to the
community because they basicallymoved the season pass that Edge
(05:34):
of Darkness had over to theUnheard Edition, which I'm not
an expert in the legal systemand I'm definitely not an expert
in the legal system in Russia,but that seems to me very
fraudulent.
In false advertising, amongother things, they give you the
biggest stash size if you don'tpurchase a stash upgrade because
oh yeah, trey, remember when Isaid there's microtransactions,
(05:55):
you can the biggest stash size.
If you don't purchase a stashupgrade because oh yeah, that's
right, remember when I saidthere's micro transactions, you
can upgrade your stash for 40bucks.
That doesn't even give you anaddition to the game.
That's just straight up morespace.
You have expanded pockets.
You have all these otheradditions of, basically, screen
pay to win.
But the worst thing, next to thefact that they removed the
season pass from EOD and broughtit up to the unheard edition
for $250 base and 100 if you'reupgrading from EOD is they put
(06:20):
access to a PVE co-op mode withpersistent progression.
Progression will not reset withwipes, so an official single
player mode that everybody hasbeen begging for for years now
locks behind a two again a 250or 100 price tag.
That was really the biggestnail on the head.
And I will say, fortransparency, did I buy this
(06:43):
edition?
Yes, I did because I like thecolor blue and I like the coal
in the game.
So I was basically directlytargeted.
But I, you know, I made a videoabout it right when I bought it
.
I got my, I got my money'sworth out of it, so you know.
But, like, right when everyonewas done investigating that the
(07:03):
like, their reddit blew up,their discord blew up and it was
just downhill from there.
They then, during that same day, a few hours later, they didn't
decide to respond to theircommunity.
They didn't respond to anyemails asking why the people who
have eod aren't getting thisstuff, because single player is
clearly a dlc, not a feature.
(07:24):
That is a whole, nother topic.
But instead of communicatingwith their community and digging
themselves out of the grave,they have done the well-known
double down and their communitymanagers were literally
screenshotted saying that solosingle player is not a DLC, it
(07:44):
is a feature.
If you Google what DLC means,it means significant content
added to the game.
Single player mode issignificant content added.
It's just content added to thegame.
That's what DLC is.
But Nikita and BSJ as anentirety literally went on
record to say I guess weunderstand DLCs differently than
you.
It's not a DLC, and they stuckwith it.
(08:06):
They did a fabled andwell-known double down and then
that same evening they releaseda post on Twitter saying that
they were bashing theircompetition.
Another game that's coming outis called Arena Breakout and
it's basically a free talk-off.
That seems a lot more casual.
And BSE went out and bashingthem, calling them out for
(08:27):
plagiarism and saying it's goingto be a bad game, instead of
dealing with the giant fireunder them.
Fast forward 24 hours and we gotto witness the unheard of
triple down.
Nikita went out on reddit andreleased a statement, basically
adding more pay to win featuresand not really apologizing.
(08:48):
It was they.
He decided to say that eod willbe able to get access to the
single player EOD is Edge ofDarkness, by the way but they
would only get access to it forsix months.
Eod would also get access tothe primary matchmaking queue,
but only for six months, and itwas a bitter message.
It was very clear that Nikitadidn't care and was so
(09:10):
unconnected disconnected withhis community that he honestly
thought it was going to be okayto do this.
I can't imagine everyonesitting in a meeting agreed with
this.
I just feel like Nikita said todo it and threatened the people
because there's no way anybodythink that's a good idea.
But don't worry, we're not doneyet.
(09:32):
The next day we had theworld-famous triple or quadruple
down the unheard of never donebefore quadruple down where he
tried to apologize again and itdidn't work.
Just tried to add more thingsto it, tried to come out and
adjust things and it just it wasreally really bad.
(09:54):
Come out and adjust things andit just it was.
It was really really bad.
And at this point, why this isso monumental and why I'm even
talking about it is one it'sdefinitely fraud.
They quadruple downed bychanging the website so it would
hide all of the evidence thatthey committed fraud, and people
found this out through usingthe Wayback Machine, and the way
(10:14):
back machine allows you totechnically time travel back in
time on the internet to see whatpages were like before they
were updated.
It categorizes everything andpeople found the evidence.
They scrubbed in the web pagesthey changed to make it look
like they didn't do anything.
It was so big, in fact, thatcontent creators that are really
popular, like moist, criticaland angry Joee and a lot of
(10:34):
other gaming personas actually,who have no ties at all with eft
.
They never talked about it,they never made content about it
.
They never most.
Sometimes they might not evenheard of it.
They have no, they're not inthat circle or in that corner.
They actually came out makingvideos against bhg and adding
their voice to the community.
It was wild.
(10:55):
I've never seen that before.
I would never expect MoistCritical to come out and talk
about how scummy it is.
Bsg, in literally three days,ruined five years of goodwill
and completely smeared theirpublic image.
And after all of that, nikitafinally did something relatively
okay and removed some of thepay-to-win features, like the
(11:20):
Mark of the Unheard, which makesenemies' AI not shoot you from
a certain distance, and madethat only in the single-player
mode and also made the distresssignal, which literally would
allow you to call your friendsinto your specific raid if you
got into a fight, basicallymaking pvp even more unbalanced.
He made that item earnable andnow eod is getting access to
(11:40):
single player completely.
So there's some things that hedid that were good and he did,
and the devs did some firefirefighting.
But the last thing I will sayis and I said this to everyone
who I talked to about it weshould not forget, as a
community, that BSG pulled this.
I don't think anyone's going tolet them forget, because if we
(12:03):
forget then they're going tothink that they can do it again
and that they'll get away withit, because now they know people
are going to fund, as the memesays, their exit strategy.
Because a lot of people thinkthis was just a one last ditch
ever to make money before theypull the plug, because they
probably ran out of money.
Their financial reportsapparently didn't look too good.
But we shouldn't forget thishappened so we can hold them
(12:25):
accountable for their actions.
And when, if 1.0 comes around,I have a theory that Nikita is
going to try to pull somethinglike this again with a mega 1.0
edition, and we gotta keep thattorch lit and be ready for it,
because this was not a good move.
So we'll see how the futureprogresses for PSG.
But that wasn't the only bigshitshow that happened.
(12:48):
Within a week of each other.
There was one more massiveincident that had nearly the
same effect and unfortunately ithappened to a really good game
had nearly the same effect andunfortunately it happened to a
really good game hell divers 2.
If you haven't played helldivers 2, I highly recommend it.
You probably heard of it atleast once because the internet
is.
It's basically like another'sbalder, another balder's gate,
kind of.
That's how big it was, how manyripples are sent through the
(13:12):
industry.
It's a third person actionhorde shooter that kind of came
out of nowhere, and what I meanby that is the first game was a
top down arcade horde shooterand it sold relatively well.
It wasn't really considered asuccess and the game actually
technically died, with only afew veterans playing the game
and keeping the servers active.
(13:33):
I have a whole blog about this.
I kind of had two blogs aboutthis, about the game in general.
So if you want to read more andget a deeper dive, check out my
blog at the-world-buildercomand then slash blog and you'll
be able to see my catalog andyou'll be able to find it.
But the Helldivers 2 came outand it was a complete genre
(13:53):
shift.
It blew everybody away.
The graphics graphics lookedgreat.
It was just genuinely fun.
There was no.
Even though the game is liveservice, the live service isn't
forced down your throat.
It's one game that does liveservice perfectly well and the
warranted.
When the game launched therewere a lot of server issues.
Millions of people were tryingto play it.
(14:15):
Not too many people could playit.
A lot of crashes and stuff likethat, but nothing like a lot of
games have now.
It was still bad.
They had a war room and theyjust weren't prepared for the
success that this game had,because it is one of the number
one selling games of the year sofar.
And one of the things that didbroke broke.
That did break was the PSNaccount linking and because they
(14:39):
wanted to get people into thegame, sony said to arrowhead
studios it's okay, you don'tneed to do the the playstation
network linking right now.
We want people to get into yourgame and sony helped them with
their servers and so on and soforth.
They let engineers over.
So the account linking wasturned off.
And to play devil's advocate,before we get into what happened
, we all technically knew thePSN linking was a thing.
(15:02):
It just got turned off and itwas off for months.
So still, that doesn't make itright, but we did all kind of
get a warning about it.
But as the game got morepopular and more people played
it and Sony seen the sales thatwas going on and it became
stable and stuff was going well,they were like they knocked on
(15:23):
the door and they looked atArrowhead and they were like
it's time to pay up, your timehas come, and they forced them
to re-enable the account linking.
And what this did was, for one,it stopped anybody who didn't
have a PSN account from playing,and it also made it so
countries that don't have accessto PSN actually were not able
(15:47):
to play at all.
If they bought it, they werelocked out completely and the
game was removed fromstorefronts in many countries.
Now the entire internet blew upagain.
People who were freaking outabout EFT now ran over to this
Sony Helldivers 2 issue,reloaded and ready to go.
The Steam reviews for Helldivers2 was the highest I've seen
(16:11):
overwhelmingly positive.
There were hardly any badreviews because there was hardly
anything wrong with the game,and it went from that to
overwhelmingly negative in likea few hours.
Hundreds of thousands of overlyoverwhelmingly negative reviews
screaming at Sony, and I feelreally bad for Arrowhead because
they were contractuallyobligated to reinforce this
(16:33):
account linking feature.
But they also got a lot offlack, and recently I just
learned that there werecommunity managers actually
encouraging people to leavenegative reviews.
So that was kind of interesting.
I believe that communitymanager was let go and it wasn't
willingly, as he reported andit was a 24 hours of absolutely
bashing this game's Steam reviewand if you go and look at the
(16:57):
chart it is quite drastic fromhuge spikes in blue to massive,
almost to the bottom of thechart in red.
It is actually a pretty cooldesign, to be honest.
More on that in a second.
And I've never seen a gamecompany respond so quickly or I
shouldn't say company, a gamepublisher respond so quickly
because within I think like aday and a half, even after Sony
(17:21):
started to pull the game off thestores in countries that didn't
have PSN.
They actually responded to thebacklash, which is so rare to
get these mega corporations withtheir 90 year old CEOs who
don't care and are sodisconnected from their player
base or from their audience andonly want to see numbers.
It's so rare to get them torespond to anything.
(17:43):
And they were like we hear yourfeedback, we're not going
forward with the account linkingand the internet rejoiced.
And the way that Arrowhead andits community managers and the
team handles communitycommunication is probably the
most unique thing I've ever seen, because they're constantly
funny, they're constantlytalking with people.
(18:04):
They actually issued a in reallife order, because in the game
there are major orders to takeplanets, defend things or do
specific things.
They made a real life one wherethe mission was for the Steam
review page to get fixed towhere the game rightfully
belongs and the community wasgoing to be awarded with a cape
(18:25):
and the design on the cape isthe Steam review chart Because,
like I said, it made a reallycool design with the massive
drop and the blue uprise.
Again, it might seem like reallyinconsequential that I'm really
talking about this, but howfast the publisher responded,
how fast people bonded togetherand even people who don't play
(18:47):
Helldivers, just the internet,completely rallied.
And once again, sony has addeda very gross tally mark on their
public image because nobody canreally trust them.
They didn't listen to theiraudience before they made the
decision.
So, yeah, I mean it's notreally uncommon for publishers
(19:08):
to look bad if you, if youhaven't been keeping up with
gaming news.
Xbox recently just closed abunch of studios arcane, the
people who did um prey, and evenone of the studios that did
hi-fi rush, and Hi-Fi Rush was asubstantially successful game
that sold really well and Xboxsaid it met their expectations,
and Xbox literally closed thestudio down.
(19:29):
So success is treated just likefailure.
In the publishing world, peopleare mad at Xbox too.
So there's like a lot of crazydrama going on with these
studios and I think people arekind of having enough of the big
corporations who are clearlynot paying attention to anything
other than, you know, charts,and I know at that level of
(19:49):
business that's the only thingthey can think about.
But there's a differencebetween numbers and results, you
know.
Well, kind of I shouldn'tphrase it like that, but it's
just the disconnect, you know,it's just.
It's been a very, veryinteresting few months.
That's the rundown.
That is the rundown.
I won't stand on my pedestalthat much longer.
(20:10):
I'm actually going to step offof it, but just keep an eye.
Like I ran out of popcorn, Iwas sitting back, writing blogs,
making videos about it, poppingpopcorn all the while.
It's been wild.
So thank you for hanging outlistening to me rant talking
(20:30):
about some video game stuff.
We just had a really greatepisode about cybersecurity and
we're going to have a knife fireback on soon.
So, as always, thank you somuch for listening and I will
catch you in the next episode.
Have a good one, everybody.
I can't believe I nearly forgot, but happy 10 episodes
everybody.
This is the 10th episode of theInk and Bites podcast and,
(20:53):
while I'm very new to this andI'm doing a lot of other things
on top of it, it has been anabsolute blast and I'm really
looking forward to seeing whatwe do going forward, and I can
only get better.
So, please, thank you so muchfor spending your time with me
and hearing me talk about thingsI enjoy, and let's see where
(21:15):
2024 takes us.
You.
Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode
of the Ink and Bytes podcast.
I think I've opened up everysingle episode like that, but
today I'm grabbing my soapbox,I'm dusting it off and I'm going
to stand on it tall and proudonce more, because we are going
to be talking about some of themost wild gaming stories that
(00:21):
I've ever seen and experienced,in some cases in a very long
time.
In particular, out of the manystories that we could probably
talk about, these two are veryrecent, one of them relating
Escape from Tarkov andBattlestate Games, also known as
BSG.
I'm going to be saying BSGpredominantly instead of
(00:42):
Battlestate Games, because ittakes way too long, be saying
BST predominantly instead ofBattlestate Games because it
takes way too long.
And then Helldivers 2, moreparticularly, or more whatever,
sony and the move that theypulled on the game.
Yeah, I really haven't had avideo game episode in a while.
I haven't stepped on my soapboxin a little bit, and this kind
(01:02):
of ties in nicely with theepisode I had with my good
friend chris.
So check that out if you wouldlike to, uh, get some context, I
guess.
But, as always, if you enjoythis episode, feel free to check
out my ko-fi and we're justgonna jump right in and get
through this wild.
This month has been crazy.
I can't even like quantify it.
(01:22):
It's been absolutely wild.
But anyway, let's get in there,let's talk about it, let's just
psychoanalyze this shit.
I'll see you on the other side.
So we're going to start withBSG and to understand fully why
(01:51):
the world or I shouldn't sayworld the internet exploded, and
I mean literally most of thegaming internet blew up over
this.
You're going to need a littlebit of context.
So Escape from Tarkov is what'scalled an extraction shooter.
To be more specific, eft wasthe first extraction shooter and
it was the first extractionshooter that really blew up.
(02:14):
It was in early alpha.
For a long time it went to openbeta and were theorized to get
a 1.0 release this year, butpersonally I don't think the
company is going to be around intwo years.
But we'll see.
But in order originally to gainaccess to the alpha, you would
have to buy the.
I believe it was the highesttiered edition of the game,
(02:37):
because all of the other onesare just pre-orders and there
are tiers of the game.
You can buy the standardedition, the left-behind edition
, the prepare-for-escape editionand after that there was
another edition called Edge ofDarkness, which was the biggest
edition of the game.
That gave you a possibility toget into the alpha, so on and so
(02:59):
forth, and each one of thesetiers have progressive rewards
and the highest one, like I said, edge of darkness had the most
rewards possible.
One of them in particular wascalled a season pass.
It said access to all currentand future dlcs in parentheses,
season pass.
And that was the uh, that wasthe, the flow for a very long
(03:20):
time and the game kept growing.
It kept getting better.
I gained a pretty substantialhardcore following that stuck
with it.
And bsg and nikita is verynotorious for not really being
that communicative with thecommunity.
They're not really thattransparent.
They were only recentlystarting to get better with
(03:42):
their community by havingemissaries that are community
members that actually talk withNikita and are dealing with the
stew directly.
So the community is heard.
They have like Sherpas thatteach people the game.
So they recently startedgetting better.
But BSG is notorious for notmaking good decisions and we
have bouncing madness.
(04:04):
And we have bouncing madness.
They do stupid things likeadding the fountain raid status
to things, making the game evenmore harder than it needs to be.
But then fast forward to liketwo weeks ago at this point, and
that's when they made the worstdecision they've ever made in
their entire studio's history.
Hackers running amok, they'rein like every lobby.
(04:25):
Nikita was on an interview.
It seemed like some greatthings were going to be
incorporated to the game.
I mean, hackers were neverreally addressed anyway.
Basically, nikita said hackersare too difficult.
Leave me alone.
I think we're past the point ofusing that as an excuse if
you're the most hacked game inexistence.
But they went silent for awhile and then on friday morning
about two two-ish weeks ago Ibelieve it was a new video was
(04:48):
released from Battlestate Games'YouTube channel and this was a
trailer for a brand new editionof the game this awesome
cult-looking thing and, oh mygod, it's $250, or $100 if
you're upgrading from the Edgeof Darkness edition.
And they basically committedfraud.
That's where we're at the newedition Escape from Tarkov.
(05:13):
The unheard edition literallytook EOD.
That was taken away from themarket a month prior.
It was no longer for sale, andthen they incorporated
microtransactions shortly afterthat.
The unheard edition basicallyis a giant middle finger to the
community because they basicallymoved the season pass that Edge
(05:34):
of Darkness had over to theUnheard Edition, which I'm not
an expert in the legal systemand I'm definitely not an expert
in the legal system in Russia,but that seems to me very
fraudulent.
In false advertising, amongother things, they give you the
biggest stash size if you don'tpurchase a stash upgrade because
oh yeah, trey, remember when Isaid there's microtransactions,
(05:55):
you can the biggest stash size.
If you don't purchase a stashupgrade because oh yeah, that's
right, remember when I saidthere's micro transactions, you
can upgrade your stash for 40bucks.
That doesn't even give you anaddition to the game.
That's just straight up morespace.
You have expanded pockets.
You have all these otheradditions of, basically, screen
pay to win.
But the worst thing, next to thefact that they removed the
season pass from EOD and broughtit up to the unheard edition
for $250 base and 100 if you'reupgrading from EOD is they put
(06:20):
access to a PVE co-op mode withpersistent progression.
Progression will not reset withwipes, so an official single
player mode that everybody hasbeen begging for for years now
locks behind a two again a 250or 100 price tag.
That was really the biggestnail on the head.
And I will say, fortransparency, did I buy this
(06:43):
edition?
Yes, I did because I like thecolor blue and I like the coal
in the game.
So I was basically directlytargeted.
But I, you know, I made a videoabout it right when I bought it
.
I got my, I got my money'sworth out of it, so you know.
But, like, right when everyonewas done investigating that the
(07:03):
like, their reddit blew up,their discord blew up and it was
just downhill from there.
They then, during that same day, a few hours later, they didn't
decide to respond to theircommunity.
They didn't respond to anyemails asking why the people who
have eod aren't getting thisstuff, because single player is
clearly a dlc, not a feature.
(07:24):
That is a whole, nother topic.
But instead of communicatingwith their community and digging
themselves out of the grave,they have done the well-known
double down and their communitymanagers were literally
screenshotted saying that solosingle player is not a DLC, it
(07:44):
is a feature.
If you Google what DLC means,it means significant content
added to the game.
Single player mode issignificant content added.
It's just content added to thegame.
That's what DLC is.
But Nikita and BSJ as anentirety literally went on
record to say I guess weunderstand DLCs differently than
you.
It's not a DLC, and they stuckwith it.
(08:06):
They did a fabled andwell-known double down and then
that same evening they releaseda post on Twitter saying that
they were bashing theircompetition.
Another game that's coming outis called Arena Breakout and
it's basically a free talk-off.
That seems a lot more casual.
And BSE went out and bashingthem, calling them out for
(08:27):
plagiarism and saying it's goingto be a bad game, instead of
dealing with the giant fireunder them.
Fast forward 24 hours and we gotto witness the unheard of
triple down.
Nikita went out on reddit andreleased a statement, basically
adding more pay to win featuresand not really apologizing.
(08:48):
It was they.
He decided to say that eod willbe able to get access to the
single player EOD is Edge ofDarkness, by the way but they
would only get access to it forsix months.
Eod would also get access tothe primary matchmaking queue,
but only for six months, and itwas a bitter message.
It was very clear that Nikitadidn't care and was so
(09:10):
unconnected disconnected withhis community that he honestly
thought it was going to be okayto do this.
I can't imagine everyonesitting in a meeting agreed with
this.
I just feel like Nikita said todo it and threatened the people
because there's no way anybodythink that's a good idea.
But don't worry, we're not doneyet.
(09:32):
The next day we had theworld-famous triple or quadruple
down the unheard of never donebefore quadruple down where he
tried to apologize again and itdidn't work.
Just tried to add more thingsto it, tried to come out and
adjust things and it just it wasreally really bad.
(09:54):
Come out and adjust things andit just it was.
It was really really bad.
And at this point, why this isso monumental and why I'm even
talking about it is one it'sdefinitely fraud.
They quadruple downed bychanging the website so it would
hide all of the evidence thatthey committed fraud, and people
found this out through usingthe Wayback Machine, and the way
(10:14):
back machine allows you totechnically time travel back in
time on the internet to see whatpages were like before they
were updated.
It categorizes everything andpeople found the evidence.
They scrubbed in the web pagesthey changed to make it look
like they didn't do anything.
It was so big, in fact, thatcontent creators that are really
popular, like moist, criticaland angry Joee and a lot of
(10:34):
other gaming personas actually,who have no ties at all with eft
.
They never talked about it,they never made content about it
.
They never most.
Sometimes they might not evenheard of it.
They have no, they're not inthat circle or in that corner.
They actually came out makingvideos against bhg and adding
their voice to the community.
It was wild.
(10:55):
I've never seen that before.
I would never expect MoistCritical to come out and talk
about how scummy it is.
Bsg, in literally three days,ruined five years of goodwill
and completely smeared theirpublic image.
And after all of that, nikitafinally did something relatively
okay and removed some of thepay-to-win features, like the
(11:20):
Mark of the Unheard, which makesenemies' AI not shoot you from
a certain distance, and madethat only in the single-player
mode and also made the distresssignal, which literally would
allow you to call your friendsinto your specific raid if you
got into a fight, basicallymaking pvp even more unbalanced.
He made that item earnable andnow eod is getting access to
(11:40):
single player completely.
So there's some things that hedid that were good and he did,
and the devs did some firefirefighting.
But the last thing I will sayis and I said this to everyone
who I talked to about it weshould not forget, as a
community, that BSG pulled this.
I don't think anyone's going tolet them forget, because if we
(12:03):
forget then they're going tothink that they can do it again
and that they'll get away withit, because now they know people
are going to fund, as the memesays, their exit strategy.
Because a lot of people thinkthis was just a one last ditch
ever to make money before theypull the plug, because they
probably ran out of money.
Their financial reportsapparently didn't look too good.
But we shouldn't forget thishappened so we can hold them
(12:25):
accountable for their actions.
And when, if 1.0 comes around,I have a theory that Nikita is
going to try to pull somethinglike this again with a mega 1.0
edition, and we gotta keep thattorch lit and be ready for it,
because this was not a good move.
So we'll see how the futureprogresses for PSG.
But that wasn't the only bigshitshow that happened.
(12:48):
Within a week of each other.
There was one more massiveincident that had nearly the
same effect and unfortunately ithappened to a really good game
had nearly the same effect andunfortunately it happened to a
really good game hell divers 2.
If you haven't played helldivers 2, I highly recommend it.
You probably heard of it atleast once because the internet
is.
It's basically like another'sbalder, another balder's gate,
kind of.
That's how big it was, how manyripples are sent through the
(13:12):
industry.
It's a third person actionhorde shooter that kind of came
out of nowhere, and what I meanby that is the first game was a
top down arcade horde shooterand it sold relatively well.
It wasn't really considered asuccess and the game actually
technically died, with only afew veterans playing the game
and keeping the servers active.
(13:33):
I have a whole blog about this.
I kind of had two blogs aboutthis, about the game in general.
So if you want to read more andget a deeper dive, check out my
blog at the-world-buildercomand then slash blog and you'll
be able to see my catalog andyou'll be able to find it.
But the Helldivers 2 came outand it was a complete genre
(13:53):
shift.
It blew everybody away.
The graphics graphics lookedgreat.
It was just genuinely fun.
There was no.
Even though the game is liveservice, the live service isn't
forced down your throat.
It's one game that does liveservice perfectly well and the
warranted.
When the game launched therewere a lot of server issues.
Millions of people were tryingto play it.
(14:15):
Not too many people could playit.
A lot of crashes and stuff likethat, but nothing like a lot of
games have now.
It was still bad.
They had a war room and theyjust weren't prepared for the
success that this game had,because it is one of the number
one selling games of the year sofar.
And one of the things that didbroke broke.
That did break was the PSNaccount linking and because they
(14:39):
wanted to get people into thegame, sony said to arrowhead
studios it's okay, you don'tneed to do the the playstation
network linking right now.
We want people to get into yourgame and sony helped them with
their servers and so on and soforth.
They let engineers over.
So the account linking wasturned off.
And to play devil's advocate,before we get into what happened
, we all technically knew thePSN linking was a thing.
(15:02):
It just got turned off and itwas off for months.
So still, that doesn't make itright, but we did all kind of
get a warning about it.
But as the game got morepopular and more people played
it and Sony seen the sales thatwas going on and it became
stable and stuff was going well,they were like they knocked on
(15:23):
the door and they looked atArrowhead and they were like
it's time to pay up, your timehas come, and they forced them
to re-enable the account linking.
And what this did was, for one,it stopped anybody who didn't
have a PSN account from playing,and it also made it so
countries that don't have accessto PSN actually were not able
(15:47):
to play at all.
If they bought it, they werelocked out completely and the
game was removed fromstorefronts in many countries.
Now the entire internet blew upagain.
People who were freaking outabout EFT now ran over to this
Sony Helldivers 2 issue,reloaded and ready to go.
The Steam reviews for Helldivers2 was the highest I've seen
(16:11):
overwhelmingly positive.
There were hardly any badreviews because there was hardly
anything wrong with the game,and it went from that to
overwhelmingly negative in likea few hours.
Hundreds of thousands of overlyoverwhelmingly negative reviews
screaming at Sony, and I feelreally bad for Arrowhead because
they were contractuallyobligated to reinforce this
(16:33):
account linking feature.
But they also got a lot offlack, and recently I just
learned that there werecommunity managers actually
encouraging people to leavenegative reviews.
So that was kind of interesting.
I believe that communitymanager was let go and it wasn't
willingly, as he reported andit was a 24 hours of absolutely
bashing this game's Steam reviewand if you go and look at the
(16:57):
chart it is quite drastic fromhuge spikes in blue to massive,
almost to the bottom of thechart in red.
It is actually a pretty cooldesign, to be honest.
More on that in a second.
And I've never seen a gamecompany respond so quickly or I
shouldn't say company, a gamepublisher respond so quickly
because within I think like aday and a half, even after Sony
(17:21):
started to pull the game off thestores in countries that didn't
have PSN.
They actually responded to thebacklash, which is so rare to
get these mega corporations withtheir 90 year old CEOs who
don't care and are sodisconnected from their player
base or from their audience andonly want to see numbers.
It's so rare to get them torespond to anything.
(17:43):
And they were like we hear yourfeedback, we're not going
forward with the account linkingand the internet rejoiced.
And the way that Arrowhead andits community managers and the
team handles communitycommunication is probably the
most unique thing I've ever seen, because they're constantly
funny, they're constantlytalking with people.
(18:04):
They actually issued a in reallife order, because in the game
there are major orders to takeplanets, defend things or do
specific things.
They made a real life one wherethe mission was for the Steam
review page to get fixed towhere the game rightfully
belongs and the community wasgoing to be awarded with a cape
(18:25):
and the design on the cape isthe Steam review chart Because,
like I said, it made a reallycool design with the massive
drop and the blue uprise.
Again, it might seem like reallyinconsequential that I'm really
talking about this, but howfast the publisher responded,
how fast people bonded togetherand even people who don't play
(18:47):
Helldivers, just the internet,completely rallied.
And once again, sony has addeda very gross tally mark on their
public image because nobody canreally trust them.
They didn't listen to theiraudience before they made the
decision.
So, yeah, I mean it's notreally uncommon for publishers
(19:08):
to look bad if you, if youhaven't been keeping up with
gaming news.
Xbox recently just closed abunch of studios arcane, the
people who did um prey, and evenone of the studios that did
hi-fi rush, and Hi-Fi Rush was asubstantially successful game
that sold really well and Xboxsaid it met their expectations,
and Xbox literally closed thestudio down.
(19:29):
So success is treated just likefailure.
In the publishing world, peopleare mad at Xbox too.
So there's like a lot of crazydrama going on with these
studios and I think people arekind of having enough of the big
corporations who are clearlynot paying attention to anything
other than, you know, charts,and I know at that level of
(19:49):
business that's the only thingthey can think about.
But there's a differencebetween numbers and results, you
know.
Well, kind of I shouldn'tphrase it like that, but it's
just the disconnect, you know,it's just.
It's been a very, veryinteresting few months.
That's the rundown.
That is the rundown.
I won't stand on my pedestalthat much longer.
(20:10):
I'm actually going to step offof it, but just keep an eye.
Like I ran out of popcorn, Iwas sitting back, writing blogs,
making videos about it, poppingpopcorn all the while.
It's been wild.
So thank you for hanging outlistening to me rant talking
(20:30):
about some video game stuff.
We just had a really greatepisode about cybersecurity and
we're going to have a knife fireback on soon.
So, as always, thank you somuch for listening and I will
catch you in the next episode.
Have a good one, everybody.
I can't believe I nearly forgot, but happy 10 episodes
everybody.
This is the 10th episode of theInk and Bites podcast and,
(20:53):
while I'm very new to this andI'm doing a lot of other things
on top of it, it has been anabsolute blast and I'm really
looking forward to seeing whatwe do going forward, and I can
only get better.
So, please, thank you so muchfor spending your time with me
and hearing me talk about thingsI enjoy, and let's see where
(21:15):
2024 takes us.
You.
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