Deus Ex Revision is 2 days away

[Jonas]

Arguably, all consumer/producer relations are a "war". The consumer wants stuff as easily and cheaply as possible, whereas producers typically want some kind of control of their product while making enough money.

That is not even remotely the extent of what everyone wants, otherwise everything would be free-to-play mobile games. "The consumer" also encompasses a metric ton of people who are perfectly willing to pay more for high-quality and/or niche content, and people who are willing to put in quite a bit of effort to acquire products that suit their particular tastes. "Producers" also encompasses a wide variety of developers that are perfectly happy to surrender every last ounce of control over their product to the players, and developers who are purely in it to make great games or express themselves artistically.

When you label someone as "pro-developer" you're establishing a "camp" to which you can then attribute anything you like, and then you're throwing me into that camp in an attempt to make me represent whatever you want me to represent. That's not quite a straw man, but it's pretty close, and it won't be conducive to a constructive conversation (mmm allitteration).

I can totally defend what Square Enix and Caustic Creative are doing right now while for example still criticising the ridiculous pre-order clusterfuck Square Enix tried to pull on us (and thank fuck the well-deserved backlash changed their minds about that one). I can do this because there are no camps, and there is no war.

[Hassat Hunter]

Heh, kinda funny reading that right after the "waaah, clandestine is too expensive. Give us your EA game for 5 bucks dammit. Why would people pay more. I mean, we can buy 5 year old games for less, so your new game should be cheaper than that" Steam thread (I assume you know the one).

Also pretty interesting they got their mod on Steam. I once asked them, obviously blatently ignored. I suppose there's some consolidation in Aspyr making Workshop support primarily to easily add our mod to the game though, but I still wonder how Revision actually got up this prominent way...

[Jonas]

Heh, kinda funny reading that right after the "waaah, clandestine is too expensive. Give us your EA game for 5 bucks dammit. Why would people pay more. I mean, we can buy 5 year old games for less, so your new game should be cheaper than that" Steam thread (I assume you know the one).

There'll always be people like that. They think they can influence our pricing policy (which is driven by a multitude of factors) if they just voice their disapproval. To some extent that probably works. I'm not bothered by it - the price is set how it is for a reason, and if they don't want to pay full price, they can wait for an inevitable sale (like yesterday's 25% off)

[bjorn98009_91]

Also pretty interesting they got their mod on Steam. I once asked them, obviously blatently ignored. I suppose there's some consolidation in Aspyr making Workshop support primarily to easily add our mod to the game though, but I still wonder how Revision actually got up this prominent way...

Well John in the team had some previous connections with Square Enix and Eidos Montréal as he was community manager for one of their forums a while back. We started discussing a possible Steam release with some of his contacts and off it went We actually timed the release with the sale to somewhat lessen the blow for people that doesn't own the game on Steam.

[Jaedar]

That is not even remotely the extent of what everyone wants, otherwise everything would be free-to-play mobile games. "The consumer" also encompasses a metric ton of people who are perfectly willing to pay more for high-quality and/or niche content, and people who are willing to put in quite a bit of effort to acquire products that suit their particular tastes. "Producers" also encompasses a wide variety of developers that are perfectly happy to surrender every last ounce of control over their product to the players, and developers who are purely in it to make great games or express themselves artistically.

Willing to pay does not mean they wouldn't like to pay less.

It's a give and take you know? And yes, most of the time, it's a fair exchange. But sometimes you see practices which are fairly anti consumer: DRM, prevention of resale and so on. Piracy is an example of anti producer behaviour I guess.

This isn't just about video games mind you, this is more general.

I can totally defend what Square Enix and Caustic Creative are doing right now while for example still criticising the ridiculous pre-order clusterfuck Square Enix tried to pull on us (and thank fuck the well-deserved backlash changed their minds about that one). I can do this because there are no camps, and there is no war.

Filth Turncoat

There are certainly camps, but people don't always pick the "same" camp in all issues. You might be fine with Steam exclusivity, but not with the perceived loss of product that you paid for.

[Hassat Hunter]

There'll always be people like that. They think they can influence our pricing policy (which is driven by a multitude of factors) if they just voice their disapproval. To some extent that probably works. I'm not bothered by it - the price is set how it is for a reason, and if they don't want to pay full price, they can wait for an inevitable sale (like yesterday's 25% off)

No need to tell me people on Steam are idiots.

That they actually used that argument (10 year old game costs X so new game should be less than X) was plenty of proof that they don't understand even the basics of economics, much as they tried to pawn themselves of as "you should listen to us for more profitz!"

[Hanfling]

No need to tell me people on Steam are idiots.

Well, about those moddb users: http://www.moddb.com/mods/deus-ex-revision/reviews
For any game rating you would get some gaussian distribution, which fits roughly when you take out the lowest ratings. So people vote with 1% because it's steam only. That behaviour is really annoying. And those are not some single people, but 1/3 of the people who do vote, not even including people who take the steam only thing negative into account when voting. And this really does raise the question, why should I work on/release anything for free again - people treat us like Revision is a full price retail game.

[FastGamerr]

Well, about those moddb users: http://www.moddb.com/mods/deus-ex-revision/reviews
For any game rating you would get some gaussian distribution, which fits roughly when you take out the lowest ratings. So people vote with 1% because it's steam only. That behaviour is really annoying. And those are not some single people, but 1/3 of the people who do vote, not even including people who take the steam only thing negative into account when voting. And this really does raise the question, why should I work on/release anything for free again - people treat us like Revision is a full price retail game.

One of the reasons why I've been uncharacteristically aggressive at ModDB for the past few months is shitty behaviour from people who have not and will not make anything productive in their lives.

I guess in a sense it's a shame that in the end, Deus Ex still is a cult game only, because AAA games like Project CARS get the same kind of behaviour and low ratings due to butthurt entitled man-children, but since those games are actually popular, the higher ratings just keep coming in from the masses so the sockpuppet ratings are more or less buried. But in DX's case, there won't be such a mass of players since it's not a very popular game in the end.

And shamefully, the low ratings and "mixed reception" will make other people potentially interested in playing DXREV think twice and those ratings will probably stain and influence their minds while playing it. For example, DXREV was featured on the website of the most prominent gaming magazine in Finland, Pelit, and while some comments are vaguely funny in their own right "lol it still looks like crap 8=D", there are a bunch of "i don't know, check out the ratings" ones as well. It's reminiscent of the game Godhand from a few years back and how IGN's 3.0/10 rating might have ruined any chances it might have had.

(Which of course leads to the question of who the hell needs people who play games based on ratings like that without doing the research first, among other ones...)

And all this Internet drama might have had an adverse effect on the impact of DXREV's release, because while the major sites like RPS, PCGamer, Kotaku, Wired and The Verge have featured the mod, the daily pageviews on ModDB have only topped out at 8k whereas a two-bit ham sandwich theater mod like Deus Ex: Nihilum got 13.5k when many of those sites I just mentioned featured it. In fact, one of the greatest tragedies in this situation is that now DXN has a higher rating than DXREV on ModDB which it doesn't deserve at all. My OOC aggressive manner of defending DXREV has led to some people changing their 10/10 votes for DXN to 1/10 ones but even that is only a handful, and DXREV has to suffer from the situation it didn't deserve.

Which is why I've adopted Jonas' post from this thread into an eternal reminder ( http://www.moddb.com/members/fastgamerr ... ts#5545501 ) for the dxtrullz plagueing Revision, but of course rational statements like that have no way of breaking through their entitlement yolo barriers.

Of course, DXREV hasn't even been out for a week so anything can still happen, but I totally share and feel the dismay of the Caustic Creative team in this situation.

To paraphrase Dave Chappelle over this situation (except instead of people parroting "I'm Rick James, bitch", it's for the once-pretty-swell ModDB & Steam Deus Ex communities):

"Every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You people are stupid."

[Jaedar]

And all this Internet drama might have had an adverse effect on the impact of DXREV's release, because while the major sites like RPS, PCGamer, Kotaku, Wired and The Verge have featured the mod, the daily pageviews on ModDB have only topped out at 8k whereas a two-bit ham sandwich theater mod like Deus Ex: Nihilum got 13.5k when many of those sites I just mentioned featured it. In fact, one of the greatest tragedies in this situation is that now DXN has a higher rating than DXREV on ModDB which it doesn't deserve at all. My OOC aggressive manner of defending DXREV has led to some people changing their 10/10 votes for DXN to 1/10 ones but even that is only a handful, and DXREV has to suffer from the situation it didn't deserve.

To be fair, why would anyone visit the moddb page for something that is steam exclusive? There's literally nothing of value to be found there?

But yeah, the amount of people doing "1/10 protest votes" is pretty crazy.

Making it steam exclusive still seems like a bad idea though. Victim blaming? Perhaps, but have they even stated they'll ever release a non Steam version? I can see why people are upset, they've gotten hyped for this thing, and then had it snatched away at quite literally the last second for seemingly no reason at all.

butthurt entitled man-children

I find these kinds of statements pretty weird to be entirely honest. Yes, the developers can clearly do whatever the fuck they want with the thing they've developed, including deleting it or keeping it to themselves or what not. But on the other hand, is it really too much to ask that they make the effort of not having it be steam exclusive?

[DevAnj]

And shamefully, the low ratings and "mixed reception" will make other people potentially interested in playing DXREV think twice and those ratings will probably stain and influence their minds while playing it. For example, DXREV was featured on the website of the most prominent gaming magazine in Finland, Pelit, and while some comments are vaguely funny in their own right "lol it still looks like crap 8=D", there are a bunch of "i don't know, check out the ratings" ones as well. It's reminiscent of the game Godhand from a few years back and how IGN's 3.0/10 rating might have ruined any chances it might have had.

(Which of course leads to the question of who the hell needs people who play games based on ratings like that without doing the research first, among other ones...)

I didn't turn down this mod just because of the ratings, I turned it down because I'm legitimately not impressed by what I saw in the screenshots and I'm interested in other games anyway. I must say that some of the negative reviews on Steam do raise seemingly valid issues with the mod, like how it clutters levels, makes them more confusing, or breaks the atmosphere of the original levels.

[kdawg88]

They did a shady deal with a big publisher, ended up making their mod steam exclusive, inducing people to buy extra copies of the game, all of the proceeds of which go to Valve and Square Enix. So people should be ashamed of criticising that? The developer was not communicative or transparent and acted unfairly, so people called them out on it. Do you think people would even be interested in this mod if they didn't already have a copy of the game? Of course it's the developer's prerogative to make whatever mod they like and release it in the manner they would prefer, but if they expect people to play it and support them, then they have to be transparent with the players as well as giving them what was supposed to be an entirely free product. To that extent people are actually entitled to complain and show dissatisfaction. The mod would be nothing without the players who receive it.

In a broad sense there is and always will be conflict between producers and consumers over what is a fair price for a product or inversely what a fair product is for a given price. Producers by principle will to the greatest extent that they can, without losing sales or reputation, conceal as much information as possible about a given product in the ultimate interest of maximising profit. I, the consumer, live in a society where I am bombarded with marketing from producers attempting to sell me products, without giving me full information about them. It's necessary for me, the consumer, to be as informed as possible and as active as possible in holding producers to standards of fairness.

This is a marginally relevant case but the same broad principles apply - the developer acted unfairly and without transparency, and people rightly called them to account. This is not a matter of criticising the mod itself - that's irrelevant. But the developer made a very poor and dodgy decision with the release format. Even if they felt they had to release it in this manner, the best way of dealing with that would have been to let people know what was going to happen and explain why they thought Steam exclusive was best. At least then it wouldn't have been a surprise.

[FastGamerr]

I've been aware of the Steam-exclusive DLC situation since April 2014, and I still think it's a largely positive thing, especially for aspiring game devs.

That said:

I turned it down because I'm legitimately not impressed by what I saw in the screenshots and I'm interested in other games anyway. I must say that some of the negative reviews on Steam do raise seemingly valid issues with the mod, like how it clutters levels, makes them more confusing, or breaks the atmosphere of the original levels.

But on the other hand, is it really too much to ask that they make the effort of not having it be steam exclusive?

So people should be ashamed of criticising that?

All of those are perfectly valid points that don't justify waves of 1/10 ratings because some people apparently feel like their human rights are violated. Those are the only people I truly have a problem with (I don't argue over subjective preferences, I usually just make my rating and move on*), and I'm still genuinely disappointed that people like that did exist in the Deus Ex community after all. Well, c'est la vie.

The other sad factor is that people tend to look at basic ratings instead of doing the research and taking a thorough look at how the ratings are distributed (if there's, for instance, almost as many 10/10 votes and 1/10 votes, as in this case), so whatever the Caustic Creative team is gonna do next is gonna be tainted and needlessly complicated by - and yes, I repeat myself - butthurt man-children. Well done, lads.

* = Which in this case I should have done a long time ago, but the thing is that my mod DXN has two hearts like the Doctor - the other one being UNATCO Born and the other Deus Ex: Revision, which is why I've been hanging around on ModDB (and here) in my retirement years way too much. Well, not for long. ;]

[kdawg88]

I'm not advocating writing stupid messages in the comments and giving the mod 0/10, although any intelligent person knows not to take user reviews super seriously. Yet they do indicate that something is wrong, and they do stand as a way for players to express dissatisfaction - and I broadly defend their right to do that, especially when the developer is providing relatively little explanation for its actions.

[DevAnj]

All I will say about the Steam only situation is that the developers should have anticipated a lot of anger ever since they agreed to the deal. Now if they were a bit more transparent and honest the situation could have been made less worse. Beyond that, I agree with whatever kdawg88 posted. There's no smoke without fire.

[Made in China]

/*STEAM RANT
In the old days before each mod came with an installer, each mod had to be installed manually by the user with some editing of the .ini files. That's just the way shit is, because Deus Ex does not natively support mods like Skyrim.
Nowadays, this engine limitation is bypassed using Kentie's Deus Exe. Installing every mod for Deus Ex, including Revision, is almost as easy as installing any mod for a Bethesda game. If you go to ModDB, you can download the entire mod and run it that way.

However, if you want something that's easier, they've also managed to release it on Steam, so it's EVEN EASIER there. That doesn't make the original installation hard, or the Steam release superior - the Steam release is superior only because of Steam-only features (achievements and the like). Those things cannot be ported out of steam, and you could see why there's only one executable for Revision - it's the only one that incorporates the Steam add-ons. Otherwise, the game can run from the original Deus Ex executable.

To sum up, there is smoke without fire. You cannot blame others for having an easier time installing the game when your own experience installing and playing hasn't changed.
STEAM RANT END*/

OK, now, the mod isn't perfect. It does make the world more fleshed out. It does reward exploration far more. It does make Deus Ex more complete, but it doesn't achieve its goal of fully remixing it. I've only reached Hong Kong, so I can only say about the first part of the game - the layout of each area is basically the same. Whatever was on the right in Deus Ex will generally be on the right in Revision. I don't feel like I'm exploring an alternate-universe Deus Ex, but I do feel I explore a more complete version of Deus Ex.
So it might be an issue with the marketing/branding, because I'd be hard pressed not to give this mod a 10/10. It's glorious for what it is, but it isn't what it promises to be. Also, the remixed music is nice, but I found myself preferring the original in every instance. Alexander Brandon is hard to beat, so at least it doesn't fail on its own - it just pales in comparison.