If you are a player of The War Z, you may want to check your Inboxes. Sergey Titov, the Executive Producer on the game has sent out a mass mailing to those who have purchased the game.
In the mail, he addresses a few of the major concerns regarding his behavior and the inaction of the company. He also offers up apologies to the community.
Calling the events of the past week "humbling", Sergey says that while they can't change the past, he hopes to "not make the same mistakes in the future". He goes on to detail the problem and solution with community management and moderation, saying that they will now "reevaluate publishing and marketing team performance."
To that end, they plan on working more closely with OP Productions to have a more hands-on role with the publishing side of the game. He also touches upon the concept of the "Foundation Release" and admits that they may have rushed its release on Steam.
For those who are not an owner of the game or now signed up for their mailing list, you can read the full open letter to The War Z community on the The War Z forums.
In the mail, he addresses a few of the major concerns regarding his behavior and the inaction of the company. He also offers up apologies to the community.
"This failure to communicate resulted in some very negative feedback from some members of our community, but while it might be easy to label them as “haters” or some other dismissive term, in all honesty this is my fault. I became arrogant and blinded by the early success and quick growth of The War Z, our increasing number of players, numbers we were getting from surveys, etc., and I chose not to notice the concerns and questions raised by these members of the game community as well as others. This failure is entirely on my shoulders and if anything I owe thanks to that vocal minority and admit that I should have paid attention sooner. I chose instead to concentrate on the bigger picture – my dream of turning The War Z from being a game developed by a small indie team into a large online venture, instead of addressing small things first and staying focused on the game issues. At the end my arrogance led us to the moment, when all those small things finally caught up and created a “perfect storm” that affected all of our community members. For that I’m truly sorry and apologize to all of our community as well as the larger PC gaming community that is not yet playing The War Z."
Calling the events of the past week "humbling", Sergey says that while they can't change the past, he hopes to "not make the same mistakes in the future". He goes on to detail the problem and solution with community management and moderation, saying that they will now "reevaluate publishing and marketing team performance."
To that end, they plan on working more closely with OP Productions to have a more hands-on role with the publishing side of the game. He also touches upon the concept of the "Foundation Release" and admits that they may have rushed its release on Steam.
Did we rush to get it done? That is a tough question, but to answer honestly I think that we all pushed very hard to be first to market and in time for the holidays. Our entire team was working late, long hours to iron out issues and include as many features as possible. This is part of the reality of being a smaller, independent game developer. If we had a larger team and more funding we may have done things differently, but I’m not sure.
For those who are not an owner of the game or now signed up for their mailing list, you can read the full open letter to The War Z community on the The War Z forums.
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