Because he knew there were idiots who would pay up. And they did.

Why should people settle for mediocre 'game'play in a 'game'. If I was in it for the story, I'd be reading a book. If I'm playing a game, I want the game to be good. And while the story is a part of the experience, it isn't the only thing that a game should be doing well. Alpha Protocol deserved the poor reception it got. The story branching is very nicely handled, no doubt, but everything else around it is just bad.

Every single aspect of Alpha Protocol apart from the choices/consequences system is utterly mediocre.

It really does reflect on the mentality of the people doing this doesn't it? Reading through the summary, my impression of these people went from "hey, those are a bunch of smart guys" to "probably a bunch of socially misfit dickwads".

There's one problem though.. Amazon was the target of a concerted campaign by 'PC Gamers' who feel spurned by Activision and they dragged down the Amazon average review score as a sign of 'protest'. If you're looking for proof, go to the Amazon site linked in the post above, and filter the reviews by 1 star rating. Most of those reviews are written even before the game released. And half the reviews written after it's release basically complain about problems with using Steam and/or installing the game. Anecdotal though it may be, I've seen that most people who actually play the game end up enjoying it and saying as much. It is nowhere near as bad as some people want to make it out to be.

You do realize that makes no sense, right?

The question is, why not add support for both matchmaking and dedicated servers with a browser? I would imagine it's not *that* difficult to program in a server browser as well, seeing as how companies have been doing it for more than a decade. It might require some more resources, but dedicated servers will almost always offer a better experience than a listen server and that's why it's worth it. Whatever benefits matchmaking may bring to the table are also available for the end user.

Indeed. And the game is still unfixed, 5 weeks after release. I also get the feeling that this particular article downplays the problems (only 1 design mistake and 1 architectural problem?) that the product continues to face.

what possible reason can they have for releasing dlc on launch day and not including it on the disc. what a bunch of greedy fucks ea are. i find it's a disturbing trend these days where devs talk about their dlc plans even before the game has launched and they try and justify the fact that it's not free by saying that the dlc is a separate software project, with it's own budget and resources etc. at least those 'dlc' patches come out 6 months after the game so you can perceivably imagine that it was created after the game shipped (although it's proven that that is not always the case). but here, dlc on launch day?? come on...