Game Developer Revokes Game License over Bad Review but Later Apologizes

cageymaru

cageymaru

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Indie game developer HOF Studios revoked the Steam key of a Itch.io "First Access" backer for the game Depth of Extinction because the customer left a bed review. To the developer's credit, he quickly reversed his bad decision and sent the backer a new key. What was his reasoning for revoking the game license?
He said that he was unprepared for how negative reviews would impact him emotionally after spending 3 years working on the game. He profusely apologized for his bad judgement to the user and to the community. While he surely shouldn't have revoked the key in the first place, it was very refreshing to see that he took responsibility for his actions and made his customer and community happy again. Many people and corporations nowadays aren't willing to apologize for their mistakes.

This game was my whole life for three years, and I was unprepared three weeks ago for how the launch and first wave of negative reviews would impact me emotionally. I reacted poorly to a negative review by a person who had purchased our alpha key on a different platform. I took the review personally. My response of revoking the key was wrong and I will not try to explain it away, but will take full responsibility. I gave them a new key the next morning after they emailed me and I also apologized to them over email. Here's a further apology to anyone else who is offended by these events - I am truly sorry for my actions. I'm hoping that I can use this incident to continue to grow and mature as a human and as a game developer.

 
Darunion said:
And people wondered what would happen when the kids who always got trophies and never told they did something wrong grew up. Well here we go. Devs can rage quit too.
Click to expand...

Nah, I doubt those kids would be so introspective as this developer to quickly realize how much in the wrong they were.

Interesting PR tactic though.
 
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Presumably the review was done through Steam, in which case it should be flagged as "early access review" and people should take that with a massive grain of salt considering the often very unfinished nature of early access games.
 
Well regardless of how you want to look at it, because of his "blunder", his game is probably selling faster than it was before simply because of "publicity". Hes likely already made up for devoting 3 years to this game and then some because of this.

If there is anything to take away from Donald Trump being president its this: "Bad" publicity sells more, and gets your name out there faster than being "good". You just have to appear to be "less bad" than your opponents.
 
I wonder why a dev even has the access to revoke a key. Seems like that should be a Steam staff thing...
 
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