Firewalk and Sony have a lot of blame to shoulder in this. And hopefully, there are some lessons learned here.
They made decisions that actively hurt the chances for this game to be successful.
And I'm not saying let incels win, but there is really no reason to be openly advocating on social media with your real name that's attached to where you work and there is no reason to be so blatantly agenda driven in game design.
All you do is put a target on your back and this game was always going to have a target regardless of the cultural elements of it. You have people who are ingrained in other games who don't want to see people leave. You have people angry at sony on steam for the PSN requirements. You have Xbox fanboys who hate Sony and blame Sony for where Xbox is today. You have Sony fanboys who don't want sony making live service.
That's a lot to overcome for any game. They're going to have to hope this game scores in the 90s in order to try to overcome some of the natural backlash, and it'll probably end up in the 80s instead.
A campaign mode may have been a bridge to assuage a lot of hate.
My guess is they'll have to take this F2P and try to monetize the game in a different way, but even that might not help at this point.
They made decisions that actively hurt the chances for this game to be successful.
And I'm not saying let incels win, but there is really no reason to be openly advocating on social media with your real name that's attached to where you work and there is no reason to be so blatantly agenda driven in game design.
All you do is put a target on your back and this game was always going to have a target regardless of the cultural elements of it. You have people who are ingrained in other games who don't want to see people leave. You have people angry at sony on steam for the PSN requirements. You have Xbox fanboys who hate Sony and blame Sony for where Xbox is today. You have Sony fanboys who don't want sony making live service.
That's a lot to overcome for any game. They're going to have to hope this game scores in the 90s in order to try to overcome some of the natural backlash, and it'll probably end up in the 80s instead.
A campaign mode may have been a bridge to assuage a lot of hate.
My guess is they'll have to take this F2P and try to monetize the game in a different way, but even that might not help at this point.