Entitled or justified? Gamers criticize DayZ for raising price and pushing back release
PC gaming has one of the most volatile fan bases in video games, with gamers shifting from adoring fans to blood thirsty mob at the speed of tweet.
The developers behind zombie survival game DayZ found out first hand yesterday how fast the pendulum can swing when they announced that the final release of the game had been pushed back to 2016. At the same time, they raised the price of the Steam Early Access version of DayZ by 15 percent.
Steam Early Access follows a similar concept to the way the insanely popular Minecraft was developed. Gamers pay for an early version of an unfinished game, in turn funding its further development.
The concept seems a win-win. The developers get the financial backing they need to complete their game, and the gamers get to play something before anyone else and take part in the creation process.
The main criticism of Early Access is the lack of accountability for developers to finish a game or deliver on their promises. The game Towns, for example, sold over 200,000 copies before being abandoned by its creators earlier this year.
The other internet hate machine
After the price hike and new release date were announced, several popular threads popped up on Reddit discussing the changes, with most of the top comments being extremely critical of DayZ for raising the price of a game that is over a year from being completed.
Dean Hall, the lead designer of DayZ, actually deleted his Reddit account over some of the toxic comments that were directed at him and his game.
Hall posted to Twitter: “Deleted my Reddit account. Never coming back. You won, internet. You won.”
One reason some gamers reacted so negatively to the price hike is because the game then immediately went on sale for the previous amount – a 15 percent increase followed by a 15 percent discount.
It is possible that this change could be considered false advertising and subject to legal action, but it would have to be proven that the developer did this intentionally to mislead consumers.
Many other games such as Watch Dogs and Dead Island are also currently on sale on Steam, so it is likely that the discount and the price increase were unrelated.
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