Bethesda's 'canvas bag' vs garbage bag debacle

[Delicieuxz]

This sucks for people that bought the $200 USD edition of Fallout '76 looking forward to getting the canvas bag that was supposed to come with it, and I feel bad and angry for them. At the same time, though, Bethesda's response is so surrealishly f*ed up that it's comical.

 

 

On the left in this image is what was advertised that people who bought the "Power Armour" edition of Fallout '76 would receive. On the right is what they actually received.

 

 

 

They advertised a decent-looking canvas bag, but instead sent buyers of the exorbitantly-priced top edition of Fallout '76 a cheapest-possible sh**ty crumpled garbage bag that has no resemblance to the bag they advertised!

 

And when upset purchasers of the "Power Armour" edition contacted Bethesda about it, this is what they responded with:

 

 

 

Basically, Bethesda says, bluntly, 'Well, we get to keep more money if we f* you over, so we're going to do that. No, we don't care. Thanks for asking, though.'

 

And then, as a compensation token, they offer 500 units of in-game currency to spend on micro-transactions, with those 500 Atoms not even being enough to get an character model skin that has a canvas bag on it:

 

Bethesda offers 500 Atoms to customers affected by Fallout 76 bag-gate

 

That 500 Atoms token is insulting not only because it isn't anywhere near proper compensation for not getting the advertised canvas bag that required a $200 USD purchase, but also because it's so little that it's meaningless on its own and people will have to actually spend more money in-game to add to those 500 Atoms to make even a tiny micro-transaction purchase.

 

 

And throughout it all, Bethesda fans are in a stunned state where they don't know how to react because they've been believing that Bethesda, the makers of their bland open-world action-adventure games that they spend hundreds of hours imagining things in, is a good-guy publisher/developer. Their fans are too meek about the situation to know how to react, so they're just taking it.

 

But, anyone paying attention to Bethesda over the years would know that they're one of the scummiest and greediest publishers/developers there have been, and so this behaviour is unfortunately not completely shocking:

 

 

I feel bad for the purchasers of the Power Armour edition, because that canvas bag would clearly be one of the main incentives to buy it. But, I think that the whole situation is also funny because of how surreal and blunt Bethesda's 'Yeah, we cheated you, so what? We don't give a shit' attitude is. They basically gave their fans 3 middle fingers in a row with the garbage bag, then the 'yeah, we did pull a massive bait-and-switch / no we're not going to do anything about it' support response, and then with the insulting 500 Atoms compensation which is basically a 'here you go, now stop bothering us, and also spend money on micro-transactions in Fallout '76' gesture.
 

I mean, everything about this says Bethesda doesn't respect their customers and fans, including the most loyal ones that spend the most money on their games.

 

And also, I think this is what happens when people have, for the past decade, been sucking the e-dick of a publisher and developer whose games never truly deserved it. Pretending that their faults weren't there and giving them a free pass has resulted in them thinking that they can do anything and get away with it, and their fans will not stop sucking up to them.

[Princess Luna]

That e-mail from Bethesda looks very fake to me personally.

 

But any ways Fallout is the new Assassin's Creed, a "game" made so they can have a profit to every penny from with complete disregard of the fan base.

 

Remember the Ubisoft's special limited Assassin's Creed Origins pack? it had some plastic junk and that's it, for about 800 dollars.

 

They didn't even include a game copy in it.... which was... lol.

[TH3R34P3R]

"was a prototype and was too expensive to make" 

 

simply put - bull. 

 

i'm in school for engineering... this sounds a lot like the the paradyne computer case back when the SSA needed computers and paradyne f*ed em over for over like 20 months LOL

 

ethics bethesda... or do we lack them in this world?

[TH3R34P3R]

1 minute ago, Princess Cadence said:

That e-mail from Bethesda looks very fake to me personally.

 

i agree. but it seems like something they would say.. 

[emosun]

1 minute ago, TH3R34P3R said:

i agree. but it seems like something they would say.. 

No it doesn't

no support staff would know anything about the cost of a prototype used in a promotional image or why it was changed.

[Delicieuxz]

5 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

That e-mail from Bethesda looks very fake to me personally.

Bethesda have responded to it, saying it's real but that the support team is outsourced and so the response doesn't reflect Bethesda's conduct policy. Bethesda have apologized for the tone of the response, but haven't offered to do anything different than what the response says.

 

 

 

 

[Semper]

From the limited scope of my knowledge on the subject (I'm just not all that concerned with Fallout given that my suspicions were confirmed that it is a poor game), it seems as though it's blatant false advertising. That said, has the validity of the original email been verified? It seems a bit brash for a response from a customer service perspective.

Bethesda have decided to stand in the hole as they dig this one when it comes to Fallout 76 as a whole. Tin foil hat time tells me that Bethesda knew this was going to be a disaster, hence the exclusion from Steam and their refund policy. In what should be so readily apparent to them, this is not the multiplayer Fallout experience that anyone has been asking for. This was a platform designed to sell you a Fallout 4 rehash, slap multiplayer in the title, and monetize it however they could.

When it comes to Bethesda games, I've got many thousands of hours spanned across several of their titles. They aren't GOTY material, but they're also not complete trash. Buggy? without hesitation, remarkably so. Where their games shine very well however is the very active modding community. That's where the bulk of my hours in their titles go. and once that's gone, so am I. So are a lot of people. It's why their paid mods platform for Fallout 4 (Did Skyrim get it too?) fell fairly flat on it's face as well. We support the modders through their distribution channels, Nexus for example, where the money given goes to them, not split between Bethesda and the modder. Bethesda give you the ingredients, the modding community makes the pie, makes it taste great. I'll buy the ingredients, but I'll pay the chef for his work.

[TH3R34P3R]

i will try to find the sony email my dad got back when he bought a TV from them ages ago. 

 

he bought a 720p tv when they first came out, but apparently he ordered a prototype version... paid 2k for it, and they shipped him the tier below for the same price, said well, we couldn't sell it to you for 2k, as this TV would have cost us 4k to make. sorry. the TV they sent him was worth 1200 USD

 

@emosun

[Princess Luna]

Well.... hopefully they stop milking off Fallout now then and go back making actually good story driven games like Dishonored.

 

Games as service, always online, micro-transactions and so on... aren't going to be the future simply because of how bad it is, I don't recall a game getting as roasted as Fallout 76 in a good quite while.

[Delicieuxz]

The juxtaposition of the advertised and received Fallout bags is the physical pre-order bonus version of these No Man's Sky videos:

 

 

 

 

[emosun]

25 minutes ago, TH3R34P3R said:

i will try to find the sony email my dad got back when he bought a TV from them ages ago. 

 

he bought a 720p tv when they first came out

that's going to be a very tough email to find considering they first came out in the 90s

[TH3R34P3R]

no, the big screen ones. its some weird thing that was a prototype back in 2009 or something. 

 

i don't remember exactly but i'll try to hunt down the email

 

tbh, it may have been a 1080p tv... but it only runs 720p when watching TV

[imreloadin]

Hopefully this will teach some people not to preorder or buy stupid "collectors edition" garbage...seriously, when have the extras ever been worth the money you paid?

[Sakkura]

45 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

That 500 Atoms token is insulting not only because it isn't anywhere near proper compensation for not getting the advertised canvas bag that required a $200 USD purchase, but also because it's so little that it's meaningless on its own and people will have to actually spend more money in-game to add to those 500 Atoms to make even a tiny micro-transaction purchase.

Not necessarily, you earn Atoms from in-game activities as well. Plus there are a fair number of things you can get for 500 Atoms, just not very interesting ones.

[kuhnertdm]

It really seems like this is a really small thing that gamers are using as their focal point for the greater issue, that they bought a game without knowing what they're gonna get, and it turned out bad. The whole class action thing is probably going to fizzle out when the people involved realize that all they have to go on legally is "this bag doesn't look like the picture". Yes, the game is shit, but if you bought it, knowing that Bethesda is Bethesda, and not having watched reviews or anything, then you were not cheated, legally or otherwise. You fell for a cheap attempt to get some Christmas sales. If you're smart, you'll remember this for ES6 and Starfield, instead of getting mad right here.

[emosun]

5 minutes ago, TH3R34P3R said:

no, the big screen ones. its some weird thing that was a prototype back in 2009 or something. 

 

i don't remember exactly but i'll try to hunt down the email

 

tbh, it may have been a 1080p tv... but it only runs 720p when watching TV

mm-hmm

[Delicieuxz]

11 hours ago, Sakkura said:

Not necessarily, you earn Atoms from in-game activities as well. Plus there are a fair number of things you can get for 500 Atoms, just not very interesting ones.

Still, though, any extra Atoms a player gets from playing the game to help make that 500 Atoms more useful aren't compensation.

[Noctus]

I hope they get sued into oblivion (ha)