War Z developers hit back at Steam criticism and DayZ fanboys

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Following the hostile response to the release of The War Z on Steam yesterday, Hammerpoint as hit back at their critics. A lengthy forum post reads:

I really hoped that we’ve been communicating to community our development plans really well, but apparently some people are still have questions. First of all – “Foundation Release’ means that we feel that game reached state when we can drop “Beta version” designation. It means that our system are mature enough to represent BASE for future feature development and expansion.

As we’ve noted several times in a past – online games in general, and The War Z in particular – are not boxed products – it’s a game service to our users. We start with a basic set of features and we keep adding more content and features working together with community to make sure that game is going into direction our PAYING customers want. Ie – if you have bought the game, and keep playing game – your voice will count.

Okay I can say “I don’t know’ and I’ll be right – I don’t know for sure, but at same time I have some ideas. As far as you know we’re doing surveys asking our players what they like and what they don’t like about our game and service. We’re doing it once a month.

We’ve did our last survey yesterday. It got us over 100,000 replies – so we can safely say statistically it represent what our players think. We’ve got an overall approval of 93% !!! That’s INSANE number. 40% just like game as is, 50% like game, but feel it needs more polishing and adding some new features ( yes – server rentals  ). 5.5% played game, didn’t like it and only 1.5% of respondents – some of the are guys who been recently banned – said they hate game.

Statistically speaking we can just say “okay, who cares about that 1.5%”, but we really like to know what those guys are thinking. Because there’s another set of numbers :

– 30% of our players played DayZ
– 70% of our players never played Dayz
– 5% of our players never heard about DayZ before they started looking into The War Z

This means that most of our players are new to the “genre” of zombie survival game. They either like zombie games, or they like MMO’s or they like survival games. They do not play The War Z because they’ve been fans of Dayz or even played it.

I think there are a few groups of players who don’t like us for what we’re doing :

1) Extreme DayZ fanboys. I really envy to Dayz creators for having such loyal players, yet I don’t think we can do anything – yes we’ve announced game right before DayZ mod reached it’s prime and it started losing popularity after that. And yes – The War Z and DayZ themes are similar. Heck – both projects are using same reference to other products in their titles )). So – if I’ll be a Dayz fanboy – I’ll be royally pissed off at The War Z. Especially since they won’t be able to do anything about it, all they can do is to spread lies and false information about game. They just love to omit obvious facts and bend words.

2) Players that got a different game from what they expected. One example of this – is whole PVE vs PVP discussion. When we asked our players – we’ve got very interesting results – half of players want unrestricted PVP, half want to eliminate PVP aspect of the game and keep game strictly PVE. Problem that can’t be solved by us.

And it doesn’t help obviously that The War Z got super popular despite any negativity that those people try to spread. I mean – game IS a big success for a small indie, self funded development team. It’s nowhere near success stories like Minecraft, but at same time we’re just two months old – we’ve launched first public alpha of the game on October 15th.

You can read the full post by Hammerpoint in their forums but is appears the community has got the developer rather upset.

The bottom line is, the game is quite incomplete at this stage and should not have been advertised the way it was on Steam, before the description was changed by Hammerpoint.

The constant changing of goal posts, advertising features that do no exist in the version for sale and the criticism from players over the past month on game updates is what has really annoyed the gaming community. Pointing the finger at fans of another game is a little much.


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Paul Younger
Founder and Editor of PC Invasion. Founder of the world's first gaming cafe and Veteran PC gamer of over 22 years.