So last Thursday, Microsoft held their most recent Xbox Showcase, which featured a couple of upcoming games (with “Fable” being the most interesting, in my estimation). Really, it wasn’t anything special, and since nothing was announced in advance regarding Bethesda games, the “Starfield” fan base really shouldn’t have expected anything from this showcase.
But after 10 months with no news regarding “Starfield” (other than an extremely short teaser trailer that gave us nothing but a potential name for upcoming DLC or an update), and no major update at all in a year, I think it was pretty reasonable for the fans to expect the “mystery” game discussed at the end of the Showcase might be “Starfield”.
Instead, it was a party game where you play as a clay pot. Seriously.
Now as most of you will know, I am an avid fan of “Starfield” and several other BGS titles. I have played “Starfield” since launch, and continue to do so at least once or twice a week. Hell, I recently started my fifth character, as I was getting a little bored of gameplay on the mid 500 levels (553, if I recall correctly). There’s just something to be said for starting a new character every 6-8 months or so.
But that’s neither here nor there.
The point is that Bethesda has failed their fans. Now you may well know that I have been a “Bethesda Apologist” for quite some time, but after so long without any real news or updates, it is simply impossible for me to continue doing so. BGS has a Community Management team, as has been proven true by their post on Twitter last March, giving us the last bit of “news” we’ve been given regarding the game. So with that in mind, I simply have to ask: What the Hell are they doing?
Community Managers are supposed to engage with the community they support, yes? I know this, because once upon a time, I was a community manager, albeit in support of a forum software suite, and not a game… but the task was the same.
So with that in mind, what is the “Starfield” CM team doing? Because they certainly aren’t engaging with the fan base, at least not on Twitter or Reddit, the two biggest outlets online. To be fair, I did find some apparent CMs posting memes on the “Starfield” portions of BGS’ Discord server. But the last time they posted anything of relevance was to wish the fans a happy 2nd anniversary of the game, last September.
Yawn
Anyway, it is true that there are times that CM’s simply can’t give any real specific news about the game they support. Either the news they have is bad, and would adversely affect sales, or they are under orders from their bosses to not discuss the future of the game until a specific time. We all get this, I’m sure… At least I do, because while there may be times you want to engage with the fan base regarding the software you support, sometimes you just can’t.
Been there, done that.
That said, sitting in a walled garden of the company’s Discord server, throwing around memes while not saying anything of relevance to your fan base is frankly cowardly. Yeah, I said it, and I meant it.
When I was a CM, the software I supported was going through a transitional phase. It was switching over to using a MySQL database from writing to an older database, but the company didn’t want to announce that yet. But they also didn’t want to spend time and money providing support to the current version, because their devs were all engaged in writing the new version of the software.
So we, the Community Management team, worked with some of the fans who had been modding their forum, to provide support for the other fans who came looking for help. We couldn’t say anything about the upcoming new version, so we just acted like we were the support devs, and kept things running.
The fans got the support they needed, we stayed engaged with them every single day, and the company got to keep their secret until they were ready to drop the big news. Unfortunately, they were overshadowed by the other big PHP forum software that also used a MySQL database (if you know, you know… this was the very early 2000’s), but whatever…
Actually, not whatever! I think the failure of the forum software I once served as a CM for makes a great example as to why Bethesda is completely screwing the pooch with their handling of “Starfield”. Simply put, when you wait too long, and leave your customers hanging with outdated software with no updates for too long, they will go elsewhere. It has been over a year since the last major update for the game, 10 months since they said anything about upcoming updates to the game (which were supposed to come out last year, BTW), six months since the last minor bugfix update, and around five months since that unexplained teaser trailer.
“The Outer Worlds 2” is a thing that exists. There are plenty of other games fans can go play right now, should they wish to get a fun Sci-Fi romp. “Starfield” isn’t the only game in town, and eventually even the die-hards like me will walk away. That’s what Community Managers are supposed to avoid, by engaging with the fans and keeping them focused on the game.
So, Bethesda… What are you going to do? More importantly, is your CM team going to actually do their jobs for once?
