The War Z Controversy refers to the controversy surrounding the release of the zombie survival PC game The War Z, developed by Hammerpoint Interactive and published by OP Productions. The game was heavily criticized at launch for buggy game play, false advertising, and trying to scam customers.
The game’s foundation release was launched on Valve’s digital distribution platform Steam on December 17, 2012, and began to do very well, arriving on the top of the Steam’s Top Sellers list. Prior to this, there had already been some accusations that The War Z was a ripoff that was trying to cash in on the success of the popular Arma 2 zombie survival mod, DayZ (which is currently being developed as a standalone release). The game was priced at $15 US, but had many microtransactions already in place for additional items in the game and the ability to shorten the respawn time for your character, which was 1 hour at the time of release but eventually changed to 4 hours. Players soon noticed that there were many features listed in the game’s Steam description that were simply not in the game. Multiple maps, 100 player servers, private servers, and the skill point leveling system were not to be found in the game. There were also reports of large scale bans being enacted on legitimate players and those who criticized The War Z in the game’s Steam forums. On December 18, the game’s Steam description was changed, but still highlighted features that were not yet in the game. The developers also apologized and unbanned all unfairly banned players and gave them all ingame currency. The game’s executive producer, Sergey Titov, was interviewed by the gaming website Gamespy on the possible false advertising in the game’s description. In the interview, Sergey attempted to defend the game, but the Gamespy interviewer asked many questions that showed The War Z was responsible of false advertising that Sergey was not able to refute. On December 19, the game was removed from purchase on Steam and Steam began to offer refunds to those who bought the game and were not happy with it or felt they had been scammed. Steam released a statement on the issue:
“From time to time a mistake can be made and one was made by prematurely issuing a copy of War Z for sale via Steam. We apologize for this and have temporary removed the sale offering of the title until we have time to work with the developer and have confidence in a new build. Those who purchase the game and wish to continue playing it via Steam may do so. Those who purchased the title via Steam and are unhappy with what they received may seek a refund by creating a ticket at our support site here: https://support.steampowered.com/newticket.php
Again, we apologize any inconvenience.”
The War Z is currently purchasable on thewarz.com, but the terms of service have been changed so you can no longer get a refund. Currently the game has a critic score of 23 out of 100 on the website Metacritc, which aggregates scores of games, movies and music from all around the internet. It’s user score is 1.3 out of 10.
There are some other controversies related to The War Z. During it’s alpha testing, the terms of service was apparently copy and pasted from the League of Legends (a popular MOBA style game) terms of service. Also, the game’s executive producer, Sergey Titov, was involved in the infamous Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, a racing game which is often regarded as the worst game of all time.