After being voted the most hated company in America you’d think EA wouldn’t have any problem making a game about an evil tyrant building power, lording it over others, abusing minions and laying waste all who oppose them. But somehow they’ve managed to make their mobile release of Dungeon Keeper… bad. Really awful.
First of all, the inevitable microtransactions that fund the free-to-play model are just horrible. Simple actions for you to wait literally hours or days, and only real money can hasten it along. Not a new concept but one taken by EA to a whole new nadir.
Fans of the original have been waiting for a re-release or a mobile release for a long time, forming a ready-made fanbase for EA to capitalise on. But rather than do that, EA are actually blaming those same fans. Quoth producer Jeff Skalski
Our intention with the mobile version was to give as many people as possible a taste of that original Dungeon Keeper experience, and for some people, that’s not the way they want to re-visit the franchise.
…and…
I think any time you re-make anything that is much beloved and has a great sense of nostalgia for people—be it a game, a movie, or whatever—people are going to be very protective of it.
That’s right, Dungeon Keeper fans, get with the micro-transaction and pay-to-play model. Stop being such reactionary Luddites.
But it gets worse… EA are apparently employing light trickery to discourage anything less than a 5-star rating of the game:
As confirmed by Gamasutra, EA has employed a rather sneaky system for rating the game. As spotted by Mike Robinson on Twitter, when Dungeon Keeper asks you to rate the game on Android and you choose to give it less than 5 stars, the game doesn’t allow you to do so, and instead asks you to message the company with your feedback.
Rather than admitting it was a bit shifty, or even just pretending it was a silly mistake, they defended on their actions:
We’re always looking at new ways to gather player feedback so that we can continue to improve our games,. The ‘rate this app’ feature in the Google Play version of Dungeon Keeper was designed to help us collect valuable feedback from players who don’t feel the game is worth a top rating. We wanted to make it easier for more players to send us feedback directly from the game if they weren’t having the best experience. Players can always continue to leave any rating they want on the Google Play store.
They might not literally be the most hated company in America, but they really do seem to be trying hard to live up to the title.