Wild Card, the studio behind famed (and still in development) survival game ARK recently released the aptly named scorched earth expansion... Normally this would not be cause for any rising of eyebrows.
But seeing how the core game is still not released, a paid expansion does sound a bit weird. Especially as this can look like using money people paid to develop the game to make something people need to pay for again. Creating a interesting double dip effect. Now i do not think it is quite as heinous as some very (very very very) vocal fans on the games steam page, but rather i feel it is a short term publicity suicide and a future thorn in the side of the games marketing. A really unfortunate move seeing as the game up to this point had done pretty much everything right... Or as right as one can when one is crowdfunded. Now this will be mostly forgotten in a few months but will also be one of these things that detractors will bring up every time they need something to bash the game over.
Now this i just my own theory but i think they might have needed the fresh cash that this expansion might bring, and that this injection was worth losing some customers over. The game as a pretty fanatical core fan base and many will get this no matter what, So it will absolutely do good things for the company coffers. It will be interesting to see if this will be but a fart in space or something that will slowly erode the fans trust, the next couple of moves from Wild Card will be crucial and i hope they have a plan for this. Because if they did this unaware of what the backlash would be (seeing the name of the expansion i doubt that) they are in deep shit right now.
Time will tell.
I am going to round off with saying that i will miss Chris Metzen on the upcoming BlizzCon but that i do not feel that his retirement is not earned. Heck he created such wondrous worlds.
So Chris, enjoy the good life with the family.
Take care and be safe.
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