Games as a Service? It has now been four weeks since the official Anthem Twitter has tweeted anything self.

[Demacabre]

God, I absolutely despise this new weaponisation of crunch as a dismissal of criticism, it's so gross.

It's not on the people buying the products to alter their spending habits and outlook so the giant publishers don't feel the need to abuse their workers, it's on the giant companies to not abuse their workers in the first place.

If Anthem is a game that either doesn't update with the regularity it needs or forces its workers to crunch to do so, then that is very very good grounds to criticise games as a service as a whole. From day 1 Anthem has sold itself as a game that would grow and improve over time, and that claim has absolutely made them money and earned them critical slack. So if they're now in a place where they either don't follow through on what they sold the game on or abuse their workers, then that just means that EA shouldn't have made the claims they made in the first place. We've already heard about the awful working conditions those game had, and they existed far before anybody even could start criticising the game.

To try and blame the issues in the industry with crunch on the people least responsible for it is baffling to me, and when you pull out that edgy " no one actually cares about crunch, they're just pretending to" all you're doing is delegitimising the current push to improve the conditions that people who work in the games industry often have to suffer through.

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Well said.

We have been getting a whole lot of pro corporation edgelords lately who's "GOTCHA!" or bad faith comparisons are transparent as fuck.

 

[Screen Looker]

With the exception of two maintenance-based retweets, there's been nothing. (From reddit)

this comment hits home:

""we'll talk when we have something to say" is not professional nor even logical response for a game that is all about community and live service. "

https://twitter.com/anthemgame?lang=en

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I mean, the twitter account previously did not communicate anything of substance anyway.

 

[Deleted member 40102]

Bioware is really fuckin up a lot lately.... sad to see such a good studio going down the drain.

 

[TheYanger]

It's not abandoned though. Austin are still dedicated to the game.

I mean it's obviously not going at all well, the roadmap is in the bin, and hardly anyone has any reason to play currently... but it's simply not true to say the game is abandoned.

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I'll let them say that themselves, thanks. Ubisoft didn't just shut down siege, for example, with no updates for months. Or The Division. They plainly said what was wrong, what the effects would be, and when they would and wouldn't be able to communicate.

 

[Love Machine]

God, I absolutely despise this new weaponisation of crunch as a dismissal of criticism, it's so gross.

It's not on the people buying the products to alter their spending habits and outlook so the giant publishers don't feel the need to abuse their workers, it's on the giant companies to not abuse their workers in the first place.

If Anthem is a game that either doesn't update with the regularity it needs or forces its workers to crunch to do so, then that is very very good grounds to criticise games as a service as a whole. From day 1 Anthem has sold itself as a game that would grow and improve over time, and that claim has absolutely made them money and earned them critical slack. So if they're now in a place where they either don't follow through on what they sold the game on or abuse their workers, then that just means that EA shouldn't have made the claims they made in the first place. We've already heard about the awful working conditions those game had, and they existed far before anybody even could start criticising the game.

To try and blame the issues in the industry with crunch on the people least responsible for it is baffling to me, and when you pull out that edgy " no one actually cares about crunch, they're just pretending to" all you're doing is delegitimising the current push to improve the conditions that people who work in the games industry often have to suffer through.

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Thank you for this.

 

[Demacabre]

An article on this by a Forbes "Senior Contributor"

 

[Bundy]

F2P should be the next big step, no?

 

[Carlius]

It'll be at e3

 

[Lunaray]

Learning from the Valve school of communication.

 

[DevilMayGuy]

It rapidly changed from a live service game to a dead service game.

Gamers: crunch is unacceptable, we should boycott every game which had crunch.

Also gamers: hey, this game didn't have an update since one month? It's absolutely unacceptable! We deserve more.

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Really stupid post

 

[Kunka Kid]

God, I absolutely despise this new weaponisation of crunch as a dismissal of criticism, it's so gross.

It's not on the people buying the products to alter their spending habits and outlook so the giant publishers don't feel the need to abuse their workers, it's on the giant companies to not abuse their workers in the first place.

If Anthem is a game that either doesn't update with the regularity it needs or forces its workers to crunch to do so, then that is very very good grounds to criticise games as a service as a whole. From day 1 Anthem has sold itself as a game that would grow and improve over time, and that claim has absolutely made them money and earned them critical slack. So if they're now in a place where they either don't follow through on what they sold the game on or abuse their workers, then that just means that EA shouldn't have made the claims they made in the first place. We've already heard about the awful working conditions those game had, and they existed far before anybody even could start criticising the game.

To try and blame the issues in the industry with crunch on the people least responsible for it is baffling to me, and when you pull out that edgy " no one actually cares about crunch, they're just pretending to" all you're doing is delegitimising the current push to improve the conditions that people who work in the games industry often have to suffer through.

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You've already gotten a few of these, but great post. Summed up my feelings much more eloquently than I could.

 

[Komo]

F2P should be the next big step, no?

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I mean it is basically dead atm. So it needs f2p to make it back up.

 

[Bundy]

I mean it is basically dead atm. So it needs f2p to make it back up.

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Yep. But it needs more content as soon as possible.

 

[Komo]

Yep. But it needs more content as soon as possible.

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Yeah it's pretty barebones, but like I should mentioned nobody should take Bundys post as crunch it's more like the games literally on the chopping block and it needs content to survive.

 

[Bundy]

Yeah it's pretty barebones, but like I should mentioned nobody should take Bundys post as crunch it's more like the games literally on the chopping block and it needs content to survive.

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Yep :)

 

[Eoin]

F2P should be the next big step, no?

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Quite possibly yes. There's a strong argument that the next step is for it to be added to the EA Access Vault when that service begins on PS4, since that might help push both Access on PS4 and Anthem, but if the aim is purely to benefit Anthem then I think making it free is the step that they have to take. I'm not sure they're brave enough and I'm not sure that they'd have the content to keep it going even as a free game, but I don't think it has any real chance of surviving as a paid game and I think a push from Access would be a temporary reprieve.

 

[SofNascimento]

God, I absolutely despise this new weaponisation of crunch as a dismissal of criticism, it's so gross.

It's not on the people buying the products to alter their spending habits and outlook so the giant publishers don't feel the need to abuse their workers, it's on the giant companies to not abuse their workers in the first place.

If Anthem is a game that either doesn't update with the regularity it needs or forces its workers to crunch to do so, then that is very very good grounds to criticise games as a service as a whole. From day 1 Anthem has sold itself as a game that would grow and improve over time, and that claim has absolutely made them money and earned them critical slack. So if they're now in a place where they either don't follow through on what they sold the game on or abuse their workers, then that just means that EA shouldn't have made the claims they made in the first place. We've already heard about the awful working conditions those game had, and they existed far before anybody even could start criticising the game.

To try and blame the issues in the industry with crunch on the people least responsible for it is baffling to me, and when you pull out that edgy " no one actually cares about crunch, they're just pretending to" all you're doing is delegitimising the current push to improve the conditions that people who work in the games industry often have to suffer through.

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Nicely put.

 

[poklane]

F2P should be the next big step, no?

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EA Access first probably

 

[Azurik]

Game should get a small boost when it hits ea access in July on Xbox and ps

 

[NoctisLC]

F2P or EA Access wont solve any issues with Anthem. The same terrible scaling and loot systems will cause any new player surge to die just as quickly if they don't address it first.

 

[WarrenD]

There was an update this morning. Added a few missions to the game.

 

[Jobbs]

Bioware is really fuckin up a lot lately.... sad to see such a good studio going down the drain.

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Considering the last couple of games they've put out.. I'd argue that it's not a good studio. They obviously have some really great artists and programmers in their ranks, sure, but as a whole the studio is not good. They don't design or put out good games anymore.

 

[Deleted member 40102]

Considering the last couple of games they've put out.. I'd argue that it's not a good studio. They obviously have some really great artists and programmers in their ranks, sure, but as a whole the studio is not good. They don't design or put out good games anymore.

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Yeah they were good though I agree with that.