The game director for Days Gone wants gamers to know that developers would really, really appreciate it if you bought their games at full price — a nice sentiment, though the way it was delivered really left something to be desired.
John Garvin, the director, expressed these sentiments on David Jaffe’s podcast. Jaffe asked whether the recent release of the game on PlayStation Plus had boosted the profile of Days Gone at all. Garvin responded with a take he warned would be incendiary: “If you love a game, buy it at f*cking full price. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen gamers say ‘Yeah, I got that on sale, or I got it on PS Plus.” When Jaffe asked how gamers are supposed to know they love a game without having played it, Garvin said, “You don’t, but don’t complain if a game doesn’t get a sequel if it wasn’t supported at launch.”
Garvin says a number of other things in this interview, including that Sony appears to care more about Metacritic scores than anything else. He also made a few oblique comments about “political correctness” and “social justice warriors” that sound like they might have been aimed at The Last of Us, though I’m not exactly sure.
One wonders if his anger is a bit misplaced. If the reports have any basis in fact, Sony decided against a Days Gone sequel, not because of sales, but because reception from both audience and critics was tepid. Days Gone was a perfectly acceptable game, but it wasn’t Uncharted or God of War. I’m not ordinarily one to side with the big, faceless corporation here, but, with middling reception and an overdone premise weighing against it, that would have to be the mother of all sequel pitches to keep me interested.
Source: David Jaffe
