Devs should not be "forced to run on a treadmill until their mental or physical health breaks", says publisher
www.eurogamer.net
Manor Lords' publisher has hit back at claims the game is an "interesting case study in the pitfalls of early access", …

This really does not sound healthy. The game is released, for a certain amount of money. If people don’t like what they get for their money, they simply should not buy it.

But by now gamers have been so trained to expect to endless content treadmills and all their ilk like mtx and battle passes that publishers/developers get egged on if they don’t work on their game 24/7 and forever.

  • scopsEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    I just had flashbacks to Dead State. It was a AA title written by one of the guys from Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines so I was watching it closely during development.

    Suddenly, it went from EA to full release. I was surprised, but picked it up without reading many reviews.

    I enjoyed the game and put maybe 15 hours into it, but then I had to move and had to pack up my PC for a few weeks. By the time I got settled and booted it up, it had gotten a massive patch which fixed a ton of bugs, filled in missing content like item descriptions and a bunch of other polish that would typically be done during pre-launch.

    Meanwhile, one of the devs had gotten into a high profile pissing match with the community over accusations they had rushed it out the door. I normally try to sympathize with devs over a reactive community, but I couldn’t help feel like I got punished for buying the game at launch and experiencing those relatively non-replayable opening hours in a non-optimal (Dead) state.