In light of what has been a categorically disastrous release for Cities Skylines II, I’m compelled to ask the following: At what point did it become acceptable to ask your customers to pay $60+ to beta test your game.
I know, I know. It’s been a thing for a while now. But, honestly? I’m beyond sick of it. Every game that has come out in the last 5 years has been broken. Doesn’t matter if it is a “early access” scam or the latest AAA project. They all ship with major, game breaking issues. Not simple bugs that are annoying but will get patched with time, but bugs that render the game unplayable.
The new Saint’s Row released on the Epic store back in August of 2022 shipped with a game breaking bug that rendered you unable to shoot. I just want to repeat that last sentence. A game, who’s core gameplay is gunplay, had a bug that rendered you unable to shoot.
PC Building Simulator 2, also released on the Epic store in October of 2022, shipped with a bug that completely stopped all progress early on in the story because you couldn’t complete a job that would’ve let you rank up. Why couldn’t you complete the job? Because the part you needed to complete it didn’t unlock for two more ranks.
When Hitman released the first of it’s most recent World of Assassination trilogy, the split the game into “episodes” that would unlock every month. You could pay full price, but you’d have to wait a month to play the next level in the story. Bonus points to them for also having a bug that would lock you out of your purchased content due to server sync issues.
Which brings me to CS2. It’s a city building sim where the core gameplay doesn’t work. Road networks? Broken. RCI demand? Broken. Parking? Broken. Trash collection? Mail? Public Transportation? Power generation? Default map terrain heights?
Broken. Broken. Broken. Broken. Fucking broken.
Your core gameplay doesn’t work. But you still charged full price.
These bugs aren’t the typical open world/sandbox bugs that make the game funny. We loved that trying to park cars on the swing sets in GTA IV sent them flying across the map. NFL 15’s tiny player glitch, being able to scream Shaun whenever you wanted in Heavy Rain, the countless silly bugs and glitches in Skyrim — these types of bugs, while annoying at times, aren’t what I’m annoyed with.
It when you can’t shoot in a crime game, can’t get in a car in a driving game, or when can’t making a city in a city building game.
As consumers, we are partially at fault for this. To the tune of 5/95. Why? Because we accept it. The games get bought even after the bugs are disclosed. Despite learning that every game is likely to be completely fucked on release day, we still pre-order. We still buy deluxe editions. We still play along.
Yeah, we might take to the dev’s forums to rant and rage, but does it matter? They’ve already got our money. Now they just gotta placate us long enough for everyone to move on or for the patch(es) to come out to fix enough stuff that the heat dies down.
There is rarely ever any kind of “customer recovery”, but they know when the next game gets announced people will buy it. In the modern gaming era I can only think of a single time that a game release went so poorly that the publisher tried to make it right.
That was Ubisoft back in 2014 when the release of Assassin’s Creed: Unity was so FUBAR’d that they had no choice. If you’d purchased the Season Pass, you got to pick a free game from a list.
Since then, however, most publishers have shrugged their shoulders. Or in the case of WB Games, had an EULA that was so anti-consumer it was called out by the University of Florida’s Journal of Law and Public Policy. In that same article, they also called out Microsoft/343 for the release of the Halo: Master Chief Collection, noting that even 2.5 months after it’s initial release the game set was still horribly broken and unplayable.
Microsoft would further agitate fans of their Flight Simulator. Knowing that Steam had implemented a “no questions asked withing 14 days/2 hours of gametime” refund policy, MSFS designed their game to take nearly 2 full hours of runtime to be able to actually do anything. They accomplished this with a “day one patch” that could only be downloaded while the game was running. The patch file size was huge, leaving even those with gigabit internet connections right at the edge of the 2 hour mark. (They still use this same updating system for routine game updates, by the way. Extremely frustrating when you wanna hop in for a quick flight.)
A lot of this ramped up when publishers realized that, for the most part, consumers had no real protection from them or any real means of obtaining a remedy through the courts. End User License Agreements bar consumers from class action suits and jury trials. Many times, locking them into binding arbitration that they agree to pay for — meaning that if that firm wants to keep the contract they best side with the publisher most of the time.
This got worse when gaming started to go almost completely digital, leaving hard copies in the dust. Though, not that it really mattered at that point because laws had been passed barring consumers from returning opened software, music, or video disks.
But with the all digital era came a new level of ways to fuck over your customers. See, you no longer own your copy of the game. You own a license to that game. A license that can be cancelled at any time, with no refunds.
We see this a lot with server-based games that have been out for a little bit. The publisher decides they no longer want to maintain the server the game is using, so they shut it down. If you’re lucky, you get a patch that makes it so you can still play the game without any online aspects, but that isn’t always the case.
Another problem with this is when a legal dispute between developers, publishers, platforms, etc arise — users who already purchased the game can lost access to it as a result of a settlement or court order. And again, no refunds.
This also holds true for movies, TV shows, and music. Unless you buy a CD or DVD version, you no longer are buying the product. You’re buying a license. Mind you, that license costs the same amount as the CD/DVD. But now they get to lock you out whenever they want; or they get to rake in even more money from you when you have to re-buy the product to use it on a different platform.
Now, this is usually the part of this blog where I wave my hands in the air and say something about getting off topic. But that hasn’t happened here. My point from the start is that modern gaming, and to a larger extent – the entertainment industry as a whole, has became extremely anti-consumer.
And we just kind of let it happen.
Anyway, that’s it for today’s rant.
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