Publisher Priorities

Twenty Sided has a healthy editorial up taking a look at Mysteries of Westgate’s recent delay in order to fix up the game’s DRM.

This is perhaps the most informative announcement I’ve ever seen in a forum. The game was complete last year, which means they were willing to miss a Christmas release in order to release the game with a more fully developed copy-prevention system. This brings their priorities into sharp relief. For contrast, allow me to point out that Mysteries of Westgate is an expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2, a title which had a thrown-together, half-finished ending and which would have benefited from a little extra time spent testing and debugging.

When gamers discover the game they just bought is buggy and unfinished, they usually respond to this treatment through the only channel available to them: They complain loudly in forums which are read and moderated by contractors who were hired by people who work for a guy who sometimes gets to meet with the representative for the guy responsible for the premature release of the game in the first place. There are so many layer of insulation between the white-hot rage of the fans and the decision makers that forums serve as a sort of soundproof vault where people are directed to go and voice their grievances. At some point PR might get involved in an attempt to calm the enraged masses, lest they hurt themselves in their ineffectual frenzy. The contrition expressed is directly proportional to the bad press they receive, which is to say: Faint and momentary.

So I’m not really surprised that publishers keep doing it. What I am surprised is that Atari is willing to lose money in an effort to harden an expansion pack against the digital cutlasses of internet pirates. Losing money? Wasn’t that the problem you were trying to solve in the first place?