A reader is so fed up with broken PC games at launch that he advocates a mass protest to not buy the games until they’re fixed.
If things had gone to plan I would have been playing Star Wars Jedi: Survivor right now. Having enjoyed Fallen Order I was really looking forward to it, but then I started reading the review and I realised it had happened again. Not only was the PlayStation 5 version having performance problems but apparently the PC version was doing even worse. And since I’m a PC gamer that was the version I was going to get.
I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise at this point, since it’s happened with virtually every big release for at least the last year but why is no one doing anything about it? The message from EA was as if the idea of weeks of patches was just a normal thing, that everyone expects. It is not! If I buy a game I expect it to be finished and for it to work, not be a complete unplayable shambles.
The game seems to be good, but its name is now dirt, the user reviews on Metacritic and elsewhere are terrible and thousands of people must’ve been put off from buying it. So why isn’t that incentive enough for EA and other publishers to get their act together?
I assume they must’ve looked at the numbers and realised they had more to lose from delaying a game than making sure it was finished, but I can’t believe that’s true. This game’s reputation is ruined now and nothing’s going to change that.
Whereas if they had delayed it a couple of weeks everyone would’ve forgotten there was a delay the second it was out or, even better for EA, praised the publisher for doing the right thing and releasing a game that wasn’t full of bugs.
As you might guess, I didn’t buy it and while I will probably buy it in a few months, when it’s both fixed and cheaper, I’ve half a mind not to buy it at all, as a protest. Except of course that’s not going to make any difference. The only thing that would is if we all decided not to buy it, and any other game that has the same problems.
I don’t know how we organise it, maybe via Steam or somewhere, but we need to go on strike and tell publishers we’re not buying any new PC games until we know for sure they work and that it wasn’t just thrown out with the intention to fix it later.
I’m not much for social media so I don’t really know how to do it, but if someone were to start a campaign I would certainly join it. In the meantime, I’ll just keep to my little private rebellion and refuse to buy games that don’t work and save some money along the way.
So well done EA, you were the straw that broke the camel’s back. Maybe Survivor won’t be remembered for being the best lightsaber game after all, but being the point at which PC gamers refused to buy something until they knew it was what being advertised.
By reader Clayton
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