The year has started with an impressive string of boneheaded moves from game publishers. The particulars are different, but they're connected by how predictable, and therefore avoidable, they were. Here are the biggest recent hits on the 2024 wall of shame:suddenly insisted that its millions of PC players make and connect PSN accounts to keep playing. The requirement had been previously announced, but caught the Steam audience by surprise.
The simplest explanation is that these decisions were made by people who were too out-of-touch with players to foresee these very foreseeable outcomes. And I do think they were foreseeable, not just with the benefit of hindsight. WeAt the heart of all these controversies, I think, is that people really hate it when they feel like the terms have been changed under their feet after they've already become invested in a thing.
The Fallout 4 patch was the least acute of these recent events, but didn't have to go down like it did: the short notice and no beta period took the ground out from under a modding community that had grown used to stability. Tarkov's snafu was the worst: There's no world where promising all future DLC for $150 and then later defining DLC so that it doesn't include a new mode wasn't going to cause a riot.