Presented without comment.
Laughed without reading.
Read without laughing.
TL;DR
Getting past the pointing and laughing for melodramatically deleting a Steam account in protest, it looks like the article has made an impact.
The Nazi Steam group that the article pointed out has now been disabled, as has the white supremacist group. Too bad both were around for years before the article, and were even pointed out to Valve by other community members.
Working as intended I guess.
I have a problem getting fully on board with this stuff when these articles feel they need to include stuff like this
Man, they buried the lede on that one. Swing and a miss by the headline writer. I thought it would be another article on entitled Steam brats. Which is horrible too, but no reason to stop playing fun games.
Anyway, I’m glad this was enough to get someone to roll their desk down the hall to delete the Nazi group.
Oh boy! It’s been a little while since we’ve had a review score changing controversy.
This is the review for NBA 2K18 posted by TheSixthAxis:
It went up originally as a 3/10 with most of the dings coming from 2K’s super shitastic microtransaction stuff. If you’re curious, Jim Sterling posted a pretty good summary of it here.
Obviously, 2K’s PR team did not like the review. They especially did not like the way the author went all in on their microtransaction scheme. TheSixthAxis editor posted this last night:
Update: In discussion with 2K Games, we’ve temporarily removed the score pending a statement with regard to our criticisms, at which point it will be reinstated. Additionally, a draft conclusion was posted that incorrectly characterised our score as a protest vote, and has been reworded to reflect that our criticisms are rooted in the effect that VC and microtransactions have on the gameplay.
After a few hours, TheSixthAxis reinstated the score of 3/10 and posted this explanation.
So in retrospect, did I make a mistake in altering our published review? Possibly. Were there good reasons to change the review? Definitely. Most importantly, was this from undue publisher pressure? No.
The conclusion that was originally posted read, “If you’re a series fan you may enjoy what you see, and the score below doesn’t indicate the quality of the core basketball game, but rather protests how utterly invasive the microtransactions have now become.” To categorise our review and its score as a protest vote against 2K was wrong on a number of levels, and it was something I believed I had removed when editing. Evidently I didn’t or didn’t realise that my edits had not been submitted properly while travelling. Either way, it was largely for this reason that 2K’s PR team got in touch after the review was published.
Yes, they asked us to reconsider the score or shift to a “review in progress”, but I can’t state strongly enough that there was no “pressure” or threat of blacklisting made or even implied. If this were the case, the demand would have been for the review to be removed entirely, which we would not have done.* However, the word “protest” was still misplaced and needed to be removed, and it was while doing this that the olive branch of a statement surrounding planned changes and adjustments to NBA 2K18 was made. So I made the call to change the score to pending at the same time, get on my flight and hope for something remarkable when I landed.
Gameplay that’s tweaked to require real money to remain competitive or progress is a real concern, and has been since the phrase ‘pay to win’ was coined.
Nice to see that the score stands. Money-grubbing schemes should be called out, and not just by sites nobody has ever heard of.
So this happened while I was gone:
wait, Tim Rogers is making egregiously wacky videos for Kotaku now? Didn’t he used to write long self-important reviews of Japanese imports? How did that happen?
“It’s all about building the anticipation. When the box is there you’re excited at the possibilities of what could be inside,” says senior game designer Jeremy Craig. Click the ‘Open loot box’ button and the box bursts open, sending four disks into the sky. Their rarity is indicated by coloured streaks to further build the suspense. “Seeing purple or gold you start to think about what specific legendary or epic you’ve unlocked. This all happens so fast, but it was those discrete steps that we felt maximized excitement and anticipation.”
Disgusting, glad I ignore all games that have this.
I’ve only played one game with microtransactions, that being Lord of the Rings Online. I managed to stay for a few months, but it felt phony after a while.
Then you could argue it’s the responsibility of game devs to find out if the game journo is capable of playing the game. Not sure that is fair.
Also most game devs are pretty bad as hard games. Only 2 Skullgirls reviewers at an open session knew how to do any special moves.
One example: there are certain genres where a Tom Chick recommendation equals a buy. There are other genres where I consider Tom’s reviews useless for me, despite Tom being one of the best reviewers out there.
I suppose you haven’t played a lot of games form the last three years…
Yeah, me too - I do wonder how many will ACTUALLY boycott a game like the upcoming Shadows of Mordor ? Its possibly the only way to stop the practice, and it worked well enough in game like Assassins Creed, but I’m kinda fearful people will purchase this and others anyways.
No one has ever successfully boycotted a video game.
TB takes a look in the current trends of lootboxes