Bethesda's Unfortunate Review Policy.

[MAXTAC]

I think it really hurt this title tbh, and that is unfortunate because the game appears to be excellent from the 6 hours or so I've invested so far. At the least, it has definitely affected it's opening week sales.

I think 3 major factors contributed to this game not getting the sort of sales it probably deserves, especially on the pc platform.

1) Bethesda's anti consumer review code policy; How could this not hurt the title? People wanted to believe it would be good, but not even a scant handful of reviews available at launch meant many would not take the risk.

2) Arkane's previous title, Dishonored 2. This sounds ridiculous honestly. To say that the dev's absolutely awesome previous game was cause for concern. Truth is though, despite adoring the game, and getting all its achievements etc, it's performance was a constant irritation (that frame pacing!) for me and I imagine many others. PC gamers were justified to be wary of the studios next game, at least from a technical standpoint.

3)The lack of a PC demo. This was the thing that honestly made me most concerned. The fact that they released the demo on consoles but not PC made me think that they likely had something to hide. The truth is the game is fantastically optimized, and releasing it's demo on PC would have made many consumers feel assured that Arkane's vows of correcting D2's missteps were not empty words. Arkane have stated that they couldn't release a demo for both pc and console because of the resources required, and so chose console. Given that the PC version of D2 was met with by far the most criticism (despite being far superior still to the console versions) I think this was a huge error and they should have prioritized showing off the performance of Prey on PC as early as they could. Oh, and the whole Steam refund = demo argument they provided was pretty weak imo, but not without merit.

Anyways, how do others feel? Do you love the game but feel it will underperform for these reasons, or other reasons like marketing etc? Should Bethesda drastically rethink their policy regarding reviews? I definitely think so.