"Five Nights at Freddy's World pulled from Steam"
I am ambivalent about this news.
On the one hand, I guess it's usually a good thing when a developer actually takes quality concerns into consideration and pulls a game as a result. (Of course, why Cawthon released the game in such a state in the first place is another matter entirely and is beyond the scope of this particular post, though I've certainly ranted enough about such things in the past. The question of why he can't simply patch the existing game rather than pulling it and re-releasing it, however, will be addressed below.) It's good that, in this particular case, the developer is offering refunds to anyone who wants them, no matter how long they played the game, which goes beyond Steam's own relatively new refund policy. It's good that he'll apparently be bringing a fixed version of the game back later, and making it free for all, to boot. (Hell, I may even give it a go myself, at that point.)
On the other hand, this is, quite frankly, the futurepresent of the video game industry, in a nutshell. So let's speak more generally here, ignoring the specific case of FNAFW. Let's say that a terrible, broken, piece of shit calling itself a video game is released onto Steam or wherever (and for the sake of simplicity, I'm just going to use Steam as the example) and starts getting increasingly negative reviews. Here are the three ways most other developers handle this scenario.
Case the first: The game festers forever and ever amen on Steam, garnering ever worsening review scores, leading to cries from people for the game to be pulled (either by the devs or by Valve itself) and to people wondering why Valve even allows such dreck to pollute their servers in the first place, since it makes Valve look almost as bad as the devs. The game may or may not continue to receive support from the devs, and whatever support it does receive, if any, is usually just too little, too late.
Case the second: The devs pull the game, end of story. The devs stop supporting the game entirely and just take their ball and go home, and anyone who bought the game is just SOL after that. I suppose that this, at least, prevents others from having the opportunity to flush money down the toilet, if nothing else.
Case the third: The devs pull the game, but then put the same game back up again later (which is what Cawthon plans to do, except that most other devs never do it for free like Cawthon is here). Usually, they merely slap a new title on the game and just start selling it again for full price (and more likely than not, this is done more for the purposes of "purging" all the terrible reviews that were stuck to the store page of the old version of the game than for any other reason). If a new buyer is very, very lucky, the "new" game might even have a few of the worst bugs fixed, maybe. If you were one of those unfortunate souls who bought the previous, shittier version that got pulled, however, you're yet again SOL, unless you're willing to fork over full price again for the "new" game, of course. (Unlike the first two cases, which I guess might have some vague resemblance to similar scenarios involving real world "physical disc releases," this case here seems pretty much unique to digital distribution, at least as far as I can see.)
So, in any of those cases, the consumer is pretty much fucking SOL. The way Cawthon is handling the situation here (pulling the game, fixing it, then bringing it back for free) just shines a spotlight on the terrible ways that so many other, much shittier developers handle similar situations.
With that said, I'm not trying to claim that Cawthon himself is a saint in this scenario just because of the way he's handling this, mind you. After all, he did still release a shitty, half-assed version of a game in the first place, and instead of taking his lumps with the bad reviews and merely releasing a patch, he's pulling the game entirely and re-releasing it later, most likely just to make those bad reviews go away. But then, giving the game away for free does mitigate some of that, to an extent.
In any event, though, the fact that any developer can just up and pull a game completely, simply because they were "not satisfied with the reviews and ratings it was getting," is still quite troubling in its own way, regardless of the context.
Disclaimer: I have the first FNAF game on Steam, which I got dirt cheap on a sale at some point not too long after its release, but I have invested a grand total of 0 minutes into it (at least assuming you don't count the 40 minutes or so I spent watching a SBFP video about it, or whatever amount of time I spent writing this post about it). In other words, I still, to this day, have not played a single game in the FNAF series, because while I am a fan of horror games, I am not so much a fan of jump scare games (with the possible exception of Spooky's House of Jump Scares). I'm not trying to shit on the FNAF series when I say that, I'm just saying that it's not my particular cup of tea. And while I know that this particular game is neither of those things, I still have almost no interest in it. As such I don't really have a horse in this race. My only interest in this whole thing is in the way it highlights, yet again, how really shitty the video game industry as a whole has become lately.
On the one hand, I guess it's usually a good thing when a developer actually takes quality concerns into consideration and pulls a game as a result. (Of course, why Cawthon released the game in such a state in the first place is another matter entirely and is beyond the scope of this particular post, though I've certainly ranted enough about such things in the past. The question of why he can't simply patch the existing game rather than pulling it and re-releasing it, however, will be addressed below.) It's good that, in this particular case, the developer is offering refunds to anyone who wants them, no matter how long they played the game, which goes beyond Steam's own relatively new refund policy. It's good that he'll apparently be bringing a fixed version of the game back later, and making it free for all, to boot. (Hell, I may even give it a go myself, at that point.)
On the other hand, this is, quite frankly, the futurepresent of the video game industry, in a nutshell. So let's speak more generally here, ignoring the specific case of FNAFW. Let's say that a terrible, broken, piece of shit calling itself a video game is released onto Steam or wherever (and for the sake of simplicity, I'm just going to use Steam as the example) and starts getting increasingly negative reviews. Here are the three ways most other developers handle this scenario.
Case the first: The game festers forever and ever amen on Steam, garnering ever worsening review scores, leading to cries from people for the game to be pulled (either by the devs or by Valve itself) and to people wondering why Valve even allows such dreck to pollute their servers in the first place, since it makes Valve look almost as bad as the devs. The game may or may not continue to receive support from the devs, and whatever support it does receive, if any, is usually just too little, too late.
Case the second: The devs pull the game, end of story. The devs stop supporting the game entirely and just take their ball and go home, and anyone who bought the game is just SOL after that. I suppose that this, at least, prevents others from having the opportunity to flush money down the toilet, if nothing else.
Case the third: The devs pull the game, but then put the same game back up again later (which is what Cawthon plans to do, except that most other devs never do it for free like Cawthon is here). Usually, they merely slap a new title on the game and just start selling it again for full price (and more likely than not, this is done more for the purposes of "purging" all the terrible reviews that were stuck to the store page of the old version of the game than for any other reason). If a new buyer is very, very lucky, the "new" game might even have a few of the worst bugs fixed, maybe. If you were one of those unfortunate souls who bought the previous, shittier version that got pulled, however, you're yet again SOL, unless you're willing to fork over full price again for the "new" game, of course. (Unlike the first two cases, which I guess might have some vague resemblance to similar scenarios involving real world "physical disc releases," this case here seems pretty much unique to digital distribution, at least as far as I can see.)
So, in any of those cases, the consumer is pretty much fucking SOL. The way Cawthon is handling the situation here (pulling the game, fixing it, then bringing it back for free) just shines a spotlight on the terrible ways that so many other, much shittier developers handle similar situations.
With that said, I'm not trying to claim that Cawthon himself is a saint in this scenario just because of the way he's handling this, mind you. After all, he did still release a shitty, half-assed version of a game in the first place, and instead of taking his lumps with the bad reviews and merely releasing a patch, he's pulling the game entirely and re-releasing it later, most likely just to make those bad reviews go away. But then, giving the game away for free does mitigate some of that, to an extent.
In any event, though, the fact that any developer can just up and pull a game completely, simply because they were "not satisfied with the reviews and ratings it was getting," is still quite troubling in its own way, regardless of the context.
Disclaimer: I have the first FNAF game on Steam, which I got dirt cheap on a sale at some point not too long after its release, but I have invested a grand total of 0 minutes into it (at least assuming you don't count the 40 minutes or so I spent watching a SBFP video about it, or whatever amount of time I spent writing this post about it). In other words, I still, to this day, have not played a single game in the FNAF series, because while I am a fan of horror games, I am not so much a fan of jump scare games (with the possible exception of Spooky's House of Jump Scares). I'm not trying to shit on the FNAF series when I say that, I'm just saying that it's not my particular cup of tea. And while I know that this particular game is neither of those things, I still have almost no interest in it. As such I don't really have a horse in this race. My only interest in this whole thing is in the way it highlights, yet again, how really shitty the video game industry as a whole has become lately.