CheckPoint 341 - Bad Man Publishing

Stories on: ASUS, Back 4 Blood, BadLand Publishing, and Steam Reviews

Vital Statistics

Date: March 18, 2019

Written and Performed by: Brendan "Beej" Dery, Kathleen De Vere, Paul Saunders

Story Graphics: Paul Saunders

CheckPoint Graphics: Graham Stark, mangledPixel

Music: Bradley Rains

Produced by: Graham Stark, Paul Saunders

Today

Left 4 Dead may be coming back to life.

Stories

• A 70 year old Pokemon Go player is now working as a brand ambassador for ASUS. Chen San Yuan went viral several months ago with his bicycle tricked out to carry 11 smartphones at once. He later constructed a body harness to carry even more phones. ASUS saw an opportuntity here and Chen is now a brand ambassador for their new budget phone, the Zenphone Max Pro M2. As part of the promotion he now has a bike rig that carries 21 Zenphones which should afford him enough accounts to take over a gym, over throw it himself, and then repeat ad infinitum.
• Do you remember cooperative shooter Left 4 Dead? The franchise became a breakout hit for Valve 10 years ago and since then the company has capitalised on it's success by stopping all development. Luckily for the fans of the series though, Warner Bros Interactive has decided Left 4 Dead deserves a fate better than the one ironically mirroring it's title and have hired the games original developers, Turtle Rock, to make Back 4 Blood. A spiritual successor that will have the same creators, the same development team, the same zombie-shooting flavour and the same lack of a battle royale mode.
• Axoim Verge is getting it's newest physical release, on the Nintendo WiiU. Most developers figure the WiiU is well past the point of needing to release physical versions, so why do this now?
  • Ed: It is a long, depressing story, and we don't recommend you look it up. We won't repeat it here.
• Valve has announced it will start filtering out review bombs from it's online storefront. Review bombing, deluges of negative reviews that are designed to punish a games developers or publishers for reasons that typically have nothing to do with the actual game being reviewed, have long been a problem on the service but until now Valve have been content to acknowledge that there's a problem, but not attempt to actually discourage it. Going forward, Valve have announced it will no longer factor score received while people are attempting to review bomb a game into it's overall rating. To do this, Valve first uses an algorithm to detect what it calls a "anomalous review activity" and then forwards that information to an honest to god actual human, who will determine if the game is suddenly being panned if it just came out and is legit bad, or because a subreddit has decided to punish someone for being an SJW. If a title is found to be on the receiving end of a review bomb, all review scores received in that period will be removed from the games rating.

Coming Up

Dealing with constant negativity and active hostility makes developers far less likely to interact with online communities according to Bioware's community manager.

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