The War Z Producer Comments on Games Journalism and Microtransaction Items

When The War Z first launched, people had laundry lists of complaints about it. The game wasn’t accurate to Its advertisements, some assets for the game’s marketing were reused from other game’s marketing campaigns, and there were tons of bugs that plagued its initial release. Not only that, but the game’s studio went far enough to censor complaints about the gameplay on message boards! Well now there is just one more thing to complain about, in-game loss of microtransaction items.

The War Z was pretty blatant about its policy on microtransactions. Not only were players able to pay for power, but they were also able to pay for reduced re-spawn times that could take literal real life hours otherwise. But here’s the thing -- say you drop hundreds of real world dollars on pimping out your survivor, you can still get ambushed by one zombie or get picked off by a sniper and lose all of that gear you spent money on! Of course, this has been one of The War Z’s biggest complaints against it so far.

However, according to The War Z’s creator, Sergey Titov, people actually like this brutal pace of gameplay. In a statement to Eurogamer, Titov said that he surveyed 18,000 users and the response was, “don’t change this or we leave the game.” That response seems, odd at best. Why would players elect to have a chance to lose items they spent real world money on? Titov and his team have stretched the truth before, so color us skeptical.

Titov admits at this point that The War Z sucked in its early days, but he has said that things have changed. Online games change on a weekly or daily basis, according to Titov, so he urges users to not judge The War Z based on the reviews it got three months ago. Titov also says that our current state of games journalism doesn’t really work for online games and that online games shouldn’t be reviewed just once but multiple times throughout their lifetime. To be completely honest, he does have a point, but we are still skeptical that a second review would make people look at The War Z any more favorably than they currently do.