Summer of 58, released last month, has been well-reviewed on Steam, with an overall “Very Positive” rating and loads of fans leaving nice comments, giving particular praise to its atmosphere and jump scares. But as a short experience—it can be completed in around 90 minutes—that’s left the game vulnerable to Steam’s blanket two-hour refund policy.
As part of its plans to cut 1,900 jobs, Microsoft has reportedly shut down operations at Bethesda France, letting go roughly 15 people
"MIcrosoft leaves Bethesda do what they know how to do best" ... close! Oh the irony ....
(Citation from a week old article)
Bethesda France was made up of roughly 15 people... they couldn't of being doing much
Bethesda France mainly did publishing and marketing within the region
that's a shame for you to say that, i'm sure Elite loves hearing what you just said.
Bethesda France focused on publishing and marketing in the region. And 15 people lost their jobs as part of the closure.
I wonder if this is part of Microsoft's strategy to abandoned physical media or possibly gamepass advertising makes their roles redundant you don't need to market a game as hard when the majority of players get the game as part of a sub which already promoted upcoming games
It's France too, there's a high likelihood only 1-2 people on the team even had an Xbox.
Tbh Microsoft I think Bethesda being 3rd party same with Activision would probably more competitive than thus scenario imo
I think it would have been better for all parties really especially gamers
The recently purchased Activision French offices might take over all the licensing and marketing for Microsoft in France from now on.
Saad from eXputer: "I'm glad I don't have to choose between Square Enix, Atlus, and FromSoftware due to bad release windows and Shadow of the Erdtree."
Atlus is releasing their game one week before Erdtree, SE is releasing theirs one week after.
HZD released four days before Zelda, HFW released one week before Elden Ring.
It seems to me like they are still releasing their games too close to Erdtree.
Sony has recently published a new patent that wants to dynamically handle the games' difficulty and gameplay based on the player's emotions.
This is something I might use. Sometimes I play some good games but they don’t have difficulty option and are a little too easy.
cool idea
cool idea for horror games especially
the way it's explained here sounds like it could never be forced hopefully, so that's ok with me
This is the problem with Steam's refund policy. Personally, I think it should be based on how far you got in the game. Valve can see that someone has completed a game, they can also see the achievements a player has unlocked. If a player completes a game, or gets more than halfway through, they should not be allowed to refund it.
A lot of the smaller, cheap indie games can be completed in less than two hours. The refund policy cripples them. This developer didn't even make enough money to fund their next game, because people refunded after giving positive reviews. That's fucked up.
Ooftah. If its only 90 mins then make it free and ask for donations. There are many other games that last much longer where that refund policy is greatly justified.
I just glanced through all 322 reviews. She's exaggerating heavily here, about 4 out of 322 of them are marked with product refunded and only a single one was a positive review. Beyond that, the vast majority were over the 2 hour limit or just under it. According to the dev herself, she states that the developer themself has their own report on refunds and she claims that 70% said the game is short, passed and returned the game. Which seems off to me because it is statistically impossible with the info presented and considering the game's highest peak was 93 players. Even if there were 6000 players it is statistically impossible for 70% of them to refund it unless it was some organized key reselling by scammers like what happened with Division 2 on EGS. Regardless, the issue here is that these people who refunded it, most likely never would have bought it if there was no such refund system in place. This whole thing comes off as some attempt to start clout to snowball at Steam. Already I see 3 threads on the discussion area of the game on Steam just dogpiling Valve or the customerbase. This is not the first time this has happened nor will it be the last time and it's not uncommon especially if you glance at some of these indie devs twitter accounts.
One interesting piece of info I noticed is a week ago, the game had about 50K+ twitch viewers watching streamers play the game, but it dropped off and it never translated into actual sales. I don't know if that has something to do with this but it's convenient timing.
Stop making stupid indie games then.
Jeez, AND it's on sale currently. AND whatever the dev makes is minus 30% to Steam. I've started the developer a GoFundMe and will try to contact them directly through their twitter if it gets any donations.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/...