It's a sad turn of events but I'll be honest it didn't surprise me to say the least for a number of reasons. Long time lurker here, guess this is a good time for a bit of an SR necrology.
Tbh I have a lot to thank to the SR reboot when it comes to helping me understand conservative ideology a bit better and understanding how the current weird, vicious cultural zeitgeist is ruining entertainment products by ripping away their identities and filling up the missing space with something that they think will appeal to an imaginary "wider audience" that most of the time simply doesn't exist. And it's so insane to me that even admitting failure is controversial at this point.
I always liked Josh, I think that he did some really cool streams but frankly this notion that the game would have turned a decent profit years down the line and how that's fine is just strange. Deep Silver / Volition obviously made this game with the goal of extending the SR audience and what they actually managed to do was shrinking it to the point that SR 2022 became a franchise killer the like we haven't seen since Duke Nukem Forever.
What made things worse (and this is absolutely why some people are celebrating now) is how DS / Volition handled the bad reception to the terrible pre-release marketing materials. Volition always had people rooting for them because SR was always the "little guy" compared to Rockstar's megalomaniac GTA games, they always had a relatively small but passionate community that showed off these games to their friends and wanted them to succeed. Not anymore thanks to "haters gonna hate" and the marketing team figuring that generally antagonizing the entirety of the "old" audience is a way out of this mess. It wasn't, it just made things worse and it essentially destroyed the community too.
As a Duke Nukem fan I can still head into any of Duke Nukem or retro FPS community and just have fun with people talking about the game. Sure, the occasional weirdo who thinks that DNF had merits or that it was good will turn up, those people exist, we accept them, we just agree to disagree with them in general. SR communities on the other hand? Yesterday I was banned from the "official" SR Discord server for tackling and defending the argument that yes, the game that killed a 30 year old studio was a flop.
How did my argument look like? Strange degenerates who usually have "they / them" as their pronouns and say that they are underage on their profiles (shouldn't even be on the server) called me everything, I didn't even insult them back and then out of nowhere I get banned. Last year, another SR server? I left because I got dogpiled after articulating the same point with the added "mistake" of telling a moderator that I think that the community deteriorated and that the most active members just insult people they disagree with while not being able to form a coherent sentence even if their lives depended on it. How can moderators and admins act like dumb, misguided shills on servers that are supposed to build a community? Why insult people before you ban them? Why support degenerate behavior?
I'm not the only one with stories like this, quite the contrary because this is the audience DS / Volition attracted and this is the kind of behavior they fostered by simply banning everyone who disliked the pile of trash that came out last August. If you attract that kind of audience and support vicious people then the so called "general audience" will get weirded out and just leave or worse: will root for your failure because YOU riled them up, dear publisher and developers who enabled all this.
Yes, SR 2022 was a bad SR game because it robbed the franchise of its identity and even without that it was an unoptimized, buggy mess at launch that literally didn't work in co-op. More importantly SR 2022's marketing campaign became a prime example of how NOT to do marketing and this is partially why I'm not happy about Volition shutting down. I can't say that I feel sorry for them, realistically this company haven't made a hit in a decade so it had to end in some form eventually. No, what I'm sad about is that I'm pretty sure that everyone over at Deep Silver who were responsible for the game's marketing and the previously mentioned vile, disgusting form of community "management" still have their jobs with their collaborators still hiding in the communities that they ruined.
Tbh I have a lot to thank to the SR reboot when it comes to helping me understand conservative ideology a bit better and understanding how the current weird, vicious cultural zeitgeist is ruining entertainment products by ripping away their identities and filling up the missing space with something that they think will appeal to an imaginary "wider audience" that most of the time simply doesn't exist. And it's so insane to me that even admitting failure is controversial at this point.
I always liked Josh, I think that he did some really cool streams but frankly this notion that the game would have turned a decent profit years down the line and how that's fine is just strange. Deep Silver / Volition obviously made this game with the goal of extending the SR audience and what they actually managed to do was shrinking it to the point that SR 2022 became a franchise killer the like we haven't seen since Duke Nukem Forever.
What made things worse (and this is absolutely why some people are celebrating now) is how DS / Volition handled the bad reception to the terrible pre-release marketing materials. Volition always had people rooting for them because SR was always the "little guy" compared to Rockstar's megalomaniac GTA games, they always had a relatively small but passionate community that showed off these games to their friends and wanted them to succeed. Not anymore thanks to "haters gonna hate" and the marketing team figuring that generally antagonizing the entirety of the "old" audience is a way out of this mess. It wasn't, it just made things worse and it essentially destroyed the community too.
As a Duke Nukem fan I can still head into any of Duke Nukem or retro FPS community and just have fun with people talking about the game. Sure, the occasional weirdo who thinks that DNF had merits or that it was good will turn up, those people exist, we accept them, we just agree to disagree with them in general. SR communities on the other hand? Yesterday I was banned from the "official" SR Discord server for tackling and defending the argument that yes, the game that killed a 30 year old studio was a flop.
How did my argument look like? Strange degenerates who usually have "they / them" as their pronouns and say that they are underage on their profiles (shouldn't even be on the server) called me everything, I didn't even insult them back and then out of nowhere I get banned. Last year, another SR server? I left because I got dogpiled after articulating the same point with the added "mistake" of telling a moderator that I think that the community deteriorated and that the most active members just insult people they disagree with while not being able to form a coherent sentence even if their lives depended on it. How can moderators and admins act like dumb, misguided shills on servers that are supposed to build a community? Why insult people before you ban them? Why support degenerate behavior?
I'm not the only one with stories like this, quite the contrary because this is the audience DS / Volition attracted and this is the kind of behavior they fostered by simply banning everyone who disliked the pile of trash that came out last August. If you attract that kind of audience and support vicious people then the so called "general audience" will get weirded out and just leave or worse: will root for your failure because YOU riled them up, dear publisher and developers who enabled all this.
Yes, SR 2022 was a bad SR game because it robbed the franchise of its identity and even without that it was an unoptimized, buggy mess at launch that literally didn't work in co-op. More importantly SR 2022's marketing campaign became a prime example of how NOT to do marketing and this is partially why I'm not happy about Volition shutting down. I can't say that I feel sorry for them, realistically this company haven't made a hit in a decade so it had to end in some form eventually. No, what I'm sad about is that I'm pretty sure that everyone over at Deep Silver who were responsible for the game's marketing and the previously mentioned vile, disgusting form of community "management" still have their jobs with their collaborators still hiding in the communities that they ruined.
