Sometimes good people make bad games. Sometimes bad people make good games. Sometimes you make a middling game and make the situation much worse by attacking and annoying game reviewers who share their honest opinions. Such is the case with Hydrophobia, developed by Dark Energy Digital, a newly released Xbox Live Arcade title that has been gathering some mixed reviews.
The company's strategy for fighting back is to attack the credibility of the sites that didn't like the game, and borderline harass writers who speak out against it. At what point does damage control go too far?
Edge "clearly haven't played the game"
Edge is known for rougher than average reviews, and the publication didn't much care for Hydrophobia. "The bugs that inhabit the waters of Hydrophobia are another concern. Ranging from fatal scenery clipping to an awkward inventory display that implies a lack of ammunition until a weapon is equipped, it indicates a title either unfinished, unpolished or simply unprepared for a world of digitally delivered games..." the review stated.
Deborah Jones is the creative director of Dark Energy Digital, the developer of Hydrophobia. "Clearly, they haven’t played the game,” she told VG247. "We’re extremely frustrated by the review. We’ve got reviews that are absolutely outstanding that say they love the product... If they don’t do the review properly, they shouldn’t do a review at all."
"We believe that the game hasn’t even been played," joint creative director Peter Jones repeated.
These are serious accusations, and Edge responded that their reviewer had, in fact, played the game to completion, along with its bonus content. This isn't the only publication that had issues dealing with the fallout of a bad score.
Negative Tweets are SERIOUS BUSINESS
Jim Sterling writes for Destructoid, and he mentioned on Twitter that Hydrophobia was not his favorite game. Jones apparently saw this message, and did something odd—she called Samit Sarkar, the site's sports writer. She wanted to talk to Jim Sterling, right now.
"She was very forward, very pushy, and if you ask me, completely out of line," Nick Chester, the Editor in Chief of Destructoid, told Ars. "It's one thing to try to contact a writer or even that writer's superior to discuss content that's been run—it happens, usually in an attempt to do damage control—but it's another to bother someone's co-worker based on a tweet. We're not even talking about content we had run on the site at this point.
"She also said something to the effect of 'We've put three and a half years into this game, and you just don't get those kind of scores if the game is bad," in reference to one review—OXM, I believe—that gave it a high score and praise."
According to Chester, she demanded Jim's phone number, saying that if he was playing the game wrong she needed to correct it. "After this incident, she called again, no more than an hour later," Chester explained. "Same pressure. Same spiel. She wanted to speak with the author of the tweet now, and later emailed him with similar complaints and requests that she had leveled at Samit earlier."
Chester understands the idea of a developer wanting to defend their game, but this crosses the line of regular PR work. "Working for nearly four years on a title, it can't feel good to see it being panned. I think casually reaching out to an outlet about poor coverage is okay, and I get why it's done. It happens often, and generally goes nowhere with us," he explained. "But I think more the point, she suggested that the game was being 'played wrong.' Which is absurd."
Games need to stand on their own, and if a developer feels they have to walk writers through the game, that's not a good sign. "I also think that it shows poor judgment on their part that they're so eager to publicly stomp on any poor reviews, flat out calling them wrong and calling into question the integrity of the reviewers."
It sounds like the nightmare is just beginning for Sterling. "Oh s**t. Speaking of which, I just noticed I have half a dozen missed calls from Hydrophobia's creative director, no fooling!" he posted to Twitter this morning.
Why this is such bad news
It's hard to escape the pull of developer and publisher interference when reviewing a game, and being told that the developer needs you to play a certain way is bad news. Gamers as a whole won't have the people behind the game showing them how it's done, and neither should reviewers. Harassing co-workers of writers who tweet about games isn't going to make your case.
We've played Hydrophobia, having received a review code, and we feel Sterling's pain. It's not fun. The platforming mechanics feel terrible, the water looks like a thick oil, the voice acting is annoying. I shut it off in about an hour in order to make time for another review. Sterling didn't have that luxury; he was assigned the story and had to play every last terrible drop. Of course that made him cranky, and having talked to Jim on a few occasions, I have a feeling that telling him he played the game "wrong" is not going to improve the score. Quite the opposite.
"Just to clarify, we have been receiving some excellent reviews and reviews can be mixed, particularly when you are doing something a little bit different than the norm," Jones told Ars when we asked about her communication with writers. "We absolutely believe in the freedom of the press to make a fair and independent assessment of a game's merit. And we believe it is our role as a developer to independently provide materials to facilitate a fair and accurate review." She confirms that she did contact Sterling to ask if he needed any information on the game, and included her e-mails in her response to Ars.
It's clear that Dark Energy Digital cares about the game, but in defending it so aggressively and making claims about how reviews were written it runs the risk of becoming the story themselves, instead of controlling it.
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