Infestation: Survivor Stories

» see infestationmmo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A store page is a spec sheet you pay for before you can check it against the build. That is the whole reason this one is here. The game underneath is not interesting, but the document that sold it is one of the clearest records anyone has of what a storefront was willing to print in 2012.

Hammerpoint Interactive built it, Sergey Titov produced it, and it arrived on Steam on 17 december 2012 as The War Z. The timing was not an accident. DayZ had started as a mod for a military simulator earlier that year and had turned into the most talked-about thing in PC gaming without ever being a finished product, and everyone with an engine and a few months wanted a version of that.

The Steam description promised several large maps and servers that held a hundred players. Buyers found one map, and independent measurement put it at roughly ten square kilometers against a claim of more than a hundred. A skill-point leveling system and the private servers were on the page too, in a state that did not match the wording.

Valve removed the game from sale on 19 december, two days after it went up, and offered refunds to people who asked. Nothing quite like that had happened to a paid Steam release before. It was back on the store on 26 february 2013 with the page rewritten.

~ the dossier ~

~ the rename ~

Paramount was making a film called World War Z, and their lawyers had a view about a survival game called The War Z. On 20 june 2013 the game became Infestation: Survivor Stories, which is a title that sounds like it was assembled to avoid a trademark, because it was.

Between those two events the forums were breached. On 2 april 2013 email addresses and IP addresses came out of the database, with character names attached and the passwords hashed. Payment details were not in the dump, which was the only good news available that spring.

~ the part that keeps getting left out ~

It sold. That is the fact that survives least well in the retellings. By january 2015 the publisher put lifetime sales at 2.8 million copies, which is more than most well-reviewed games of that period managed, and it did that after the removal and after the breach. A store page can be wrong in public for years and still work.

~ the long tail ~

The servers went off on 15 december 2016. By then the code had already been licensed onward: a Swedish outfit called Fredaikis AB rebuilt it as Infestation: The New Z and kept a version of it alive, and Free Reign Entertainment had shipped a spiritual successor named Romero's Aftermath in september 2015. The corpse got more sequels than most games get patches.

i did not buy this one, and the reason is dull rather than principled. In 2012 i was twenty eight and working, and my Steam habit did not extend to paying for something described in the future tense. What kept me reading about it afterward was the engineering shape of the complaint. Nobody argued the game was bad, exactly. They argued that the specification did not match delivery and filed the diff in public. A storefront acted on it. That had not really been a thing you could do to a game before.

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