Beleaguered open-world zombie shooter The War Z is in more trouble as publisher OP Productions admits hackers exposed players’ personal information.

In response to the attack, OP Productions shut down The War Z’s servers and its message boards. In an open letter, the publisher confirmed that the hackers gained access to user email addresses and passwords. Payment information, such as credit-card numbers, remain secure with a third-party company.

From OP Productions’ letter:

We are sorry to report that we have discovered that hackers gained access to our forum and game databases and the player data in those databases. We have launched a thorough investigation covering our entire system to determine the scope of the intrusion. This investigation is ongoing and is our top priority. As part of the remediation and security enhancement process we will be taking the game and forums down temporarily.

In total, the hackers accessed the email, passwords, and IP addresses players used to access the game or the forums. The publisher used security encryption on the passwords, but it warns that the hackers could crack simple words.

OP Productions hired external experts and investigators to discover the flaws in its security. It claims to have already patched a “number of ways” that hackers obtained access.

“The security of your data is important to us and we want our players to be assured that we take this situation very seriously,” reads OP Productions’ letter. “We have taken steps to improve security to minimize the chance of this happening in the future and will continue to invest in improving security going forward.”

OP launched The War Z for PC in December. Valve yanked it from its digital-download store a day after its debut due to loud complaints from customers. Many pointed out that several of the promised features weren’t in the product that they had just purchased for $15. Others were disappointed with the quality of the survival game.

In late February, the publisher relaunched the zombie title. It has avoided other major issues until today.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Zynga shuts down its Baltimore studio while consolidating three others, THQ will sell off Homeworld, Darksiders, and Red Faction in its last auction, and the Android-based Ouya console will ship March 28.

You’ll also find reviews of Star Wars Pinball and Tomb Raider, as well as previews for Lego City: Undercover, Warface, Time and Eternity, and Throw Trucks with Your Mind.

News

• The DeanBeat: The Nintendo Wii U’s troubles start with a dearth of developers
• Co-creator of Counter-Strike will launch his Tactical Intervention shooter on March 28
• Sony’s 4K movie service coming to PS4, but 100GB downloads remind us why 4K is a waste
• It takes 600 people for Ubisoft to make a triple-A game on PlayStation 4
• CCP holding special Eve Online/Dust 514 event at PAX East for players to make in-game ‘history’
• German publisher Daedalic taps into the international power of adventure games
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II Revolution map pack now available on PlayStation 3 and PC (not Wii U)
• This week in the Nintendo Download: Castlevania, Runner 2, and Retro City Rampage
• Portal developer Kim Swift’s next game is exclusive to Ouya
• Ouya confirms March 28 console shipping and hires ex-Journey developer Kellee Santiago
• Scopely announces marquee game developers as mobile-platform partners
• CCP: ‘No reason we need to stop at just Eve and Dust’ as MMO passes 500K subscribers
• Official key art for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
• OnLive offers a free download with every cloud purchase of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
• With 23,000 expected attendees, GDC will drill down into everything from PS4 to free-to-play
• GDC attendee survey chronicles the explosion of indie gaming and fall of Nintendo
• The Carrot to-do list for iPhone is your new master
• Don’t play this 800-player (!) online version of Bomberman if you have work to do
• ‘The Thunder King’ trailer celebrates the imminent arrival of World of Warcraft’s latest patch
• EA’s top digital executive Kristian Segerstrale leaves
• Social-game developer Playdemic appoints ‘Fighting Fantasy’ author as new chairman
• Will Wright talks about the new SimCity
• Deadpool game rated M for jokes during violence and inflating a blow-up doll
• GameHouse bets it all on its social casino games
• Online gambling now legal in New Jersey
• Skullgirls reaches crowdfunding goal faster than any other game in Indiegogo’s history
• THQ to sell off Homeworld, Red Faction, Darksiders in last auction
• The War Z is back on Steam more than two months after Valve pulled it
• EA chief technology officer on PS4: ‘We no longer have to constrain our games’
• EA says it missed Sony’s event to maintain ‘balance’ with Microsoft — but Battlefield 4 is ‘stunning’ on PS4
• Toki Tori 2 dev explains why you won’t find any text in its puzzle-platforming sequel
• Anodyne and Surgeon Simulator among latest batch of Steam Greenlight games (updated)
• EA enables gamers to use a single identity across game platforms (exclusive)
• Goofy EA numbers that show how deeply players are engaged in games
• Blizzard debuts its StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm launch trailer on Twitch
• Wii Mini is heading to markets outside of Canada
• Uncharted 3′s multiplayer goes free-to-play
• Ex-FBI profiler: ‘We don’t see video games as the cause of violence’
• New developer Win releases Slots Craze social game backed by online-gambling company
• Online gaming giant Nexon invests in ex-Call of Duty creative strategist’s Robotoki game startup
• Sony appoints new firm to plan PlayStation media strategy
• Lombardi still with Valve — LinkedIn update made in error (updated)
• Zynga shuts Baltimore studio and consolidates three other locations
• Harris Poll: 58 percent of adults believe in a correlation between video games and violence
• Wooga: Inside the social games wonderland of Jens Begemann (video)

Mobile News

• Red Hot Labs raises $1.5M for mobile games and a platform to make them spread
• Disney Mobile launches Toy Story: Smash It! game on app stores
• Samsung offers 100% of revenue to indie developers that use its app store
• Firefox OS needs games: Mozilla is confident it can entice developers by eliminating fragmentation
• Exent launches Android game subscription service for TVs (exclusive)

Reviews

• Star Wars Pinball: That wizard is not just a crazy old man (review)
• Tomb Raider hurts so good (review)

Previews

• With 7.5M users in Russia, Crytek’s free-to-play shooter Warface is coming to the U.S. (preview)
• Lego City: Undercover is less violent than Grand Theft Auto but still just as fun (preview)
• Throw Trucks with Your Mind is the best Star Wars game ever (preview)
• Forget saving the world: In Time and Eternity, you have to save your marriage (preview)

Interviews

• Think tank Gun Media brings experts together to make games (exclusive interview)
• Bungie leader Pete Parsons discusses how studio is shaping gaming’s Destiny (interview)
• The peculiar origin of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance’s heavy-metal sound (interview)

Pieces of Flair

• Silent Hill: Revelation vs. Silent Hill 3: A visual comparison (gallery)
• Required Listening: Fire Emblem, Crysis 3, and interview with Tomb Raider composer Jason Graves

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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After angering gamers in December for making false claims on its Steam page, The War Z returns to Valve’s digital-distribution service.

The open-world zombie-survival game costs $15, although Steam users can spend more to buy it along with extra in-game credits. Developer Hammerpoint Interactive created the online game, which pits players against one another and hordes of computer-controlled undead monsters.

If that sounds familiar that’s because The War Z is nearly identical to the DayZ mod for Arma II, which has a rabid fan following. Some of the resentment against The War Z is traceable back to fans of DayZ who believe Hammerpoint ripped off the mod.

Hammerpoint originally released The War Z on December 18. Valve pulled the game the next day, and its vice president of marketing made the following statement:

From time to time a mistake can be made, and one was made by prematurely issuing a copy of The War Z for sale via Steam. We apologize for this and have temporary removed the sale offering of the title until we have time to work with the developer and have confidence in a new build. Those who purchase the game and wish to continue playing it via Steam may do so. Those who purchased the title via Steam and are unhappy with what they received may seek a refund by creating a ticket at our support site here: https://support.steampowered.com/newticket.php

Again, we apologize any inconvenience.

When The War Z first hit Steam, Hammerpoint claimed the title featured a skill-tree system, private servers, friends list, and maps between 100 square km and 400 square km. In reality, those features didn’t exist or the developer exaggerated them.

Hammerpoint is updating the title for gamers who already purchased it in December. It’s Steam page says nothing about skill trees or  private servers.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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There’s no such thing as bad press. It’s a cliché, and — even worse than that — it’s not even true.

If you want evidence that the public spotlight is a bad thing on occasion, you should acquaint yourself with the story of Ocean Marketing. As our article points out, an angry customer asked someone mildly famous to publicize a few emails he exchanged with the owner of Ocean Marketing, and it destroyed the company. Or how about this advertisement Sony ran for the PlayStation Portable, where a white woman is holding a black woman by the throat with the caption, “White is coming”?

Yeah, that was ill-conceived.

Now that it’s the end of the year, we are gonna take a few minutes to reflect on the terrible examples of game-related advertising, marketing, and public relations in 2012.

Sony says the PlayStation Vita is like a woman with two extra breasts on her back

Oh, Sony, you poor darling. You don’t know what is edgy, what is offensive, and what is just damned stupid.

Let’s recap: Sony — or its marketing partners — ran an ad in a French magazine that had a picture of a woman from the neck down with two large breasts on her chest and two more on her back. The caption on the ad, in French, reads, “Twice the touch screens, twice the sensation.” The idea is that since the PS Vita has a touch screen on the front and the back, it’s as much fun as a deformed lady with growths on her shoulder blades.

Where to begin?

Let’s ignore that this offensively compares a woman’s body to a piece of consumer electronics. Let’s ignore the juvenile stance on the touching of boobies. Let’s ignore that touch screens actually aren’t nearly as fun as this comparison suggests. But I can’t ignore that this advert promotes the idea that a woman’s back is somehow boring because it lacks bosoms. I’ve been to France. The women in that country have just as nice backs as anywhere else. I would suggest that if you feel like a woman’s back is useless because it doesn’t have breasts, then you have a bigger problem than deciding whether or not to buy a new gaming device.

Most things related to promoting Hitman: Absolution

Edgy gone wrong describes everything about Hitman.

Publisher Square Enix started off the marketing campaign for its assassination title with a trailer showing the titular hitman punching a cadre of “naughty nuns” in the face. A loud chorus of confused fans wondered why the publisher would glorify sexualized violence. When I watch the video, the parts of my brain that react to “sexy nuns” and the parts that react to bloody noses don’t intermingle in the slightest, but I also wouldn’t use the punching of women in lingerie as a main selling point for a game.

Then, earlier this month, Square Enix unveiled a new marketing website for Hitman: Absolution that invited fans to put make-believe hits out on their friends on Facebook. The fake hitman would ask for a distinguishing feature of the “target” and would present the user with a drop-down menu that included things like “her hairy legs,” “her small tits,” and “his tiny penis.”

Since you could only send the messages to your confirmed friends on Facebook, this might not offend everybody. But the marketing team was obviously going for shock value, and it did shock people. Square Enix removed the website hours after introducing it.

“Have you heard about my Kickstarter?”

A big part of marketing involves PR people pitching products to the press. They try to get the media to cover the product in an attempt to create excitement. This means we get a lot of emails about boring stuff that no one wants to read about — and nothing epitomizes that kind of email like the “Hey, have you heard about our Kickstarter?” press release.

I am all for Kickstarter. I think it’s a viable alternative to the established publisher system, but it’s not good for Kickstarter when my main interaction with it is to groan while I archive an email that pretends like a developer asking for money is news.

Now, I wouldn’t include this on a list of terrible marketing ideas if the problem only affected my inbox. Internet forums like Reddit and NeoGAF have established rules against “Kickstarter reminder posts.” That’s because developers bombard everywhere they can think of when they have a campaign. It’s understandable to a degree. They’re trying to fund their work, but annoying people isn’t going to help.

The problem is that when Kickstarter first hit the big time, the concept itself was news. That’s not true anymore. Now, if developers want to grab attention for their crowd-funding campaigns, they need a deeper hook than the fact that they’re asking for money.

The War Z debacle

As much effort as publishers and developers put into marketing their games before they release them, it doesn’t matter if something goes wrong when the game launches.

Or in the case of developer Hammerpoint Interactive’s The War Z, if everything goes wrong when the game launches.

GamesBeat extensively covered this catastrophe, but let’s recap the major events:

When the studio released the open-world zombie game on Valve’s Steam digital-distribution service, its store page noted a handful of features that simply weren’t in the game. When irate players began to demand refunds, Hammerpoint said it couldn’t do anything to help them.

This only enraged gamers further. Those customers raised hell until Valve could only respond by removing the game from its store and granting refunds to anyone who wanted them.

Now, the developer is deep in a public-relations hole that will be nearly impossible to climb out of when it’s time to rerelease the game.

Most in-game ads on mobile

Free is dope.

I love not paying for games on my phone. It means I can try out a bunch of different titles without wasting my very limited funds, but I also understand that developers need to make money.

The most common monetization solution for mobile studios is to implement in-game advertising. Many developers have generated a great deal of revenue using these ads, so it works — but it’s usually done terribly from the player’s perspective.

Let’s take the very last game that I played on my phone before I got out of bed this morning: Family Feud.

I didn’t pay for the adaptation of the long-running television game show. In between each full play session, the game halts and throws up an empty screen while it loads an ad. When the ad finally appears, it is invariably oriented incorrectly. If I have the phone in landscape mode, the ad loads vertically, and vice versa. These commercials are also ugly as Web 1.0. The advertising people don’t put a lot of effort into designing ad spots for mobile devices. Instead, they just repurpose banners built for websites and slap those into places they don’t really belong.

You end up with an ugly and confusing mess that interrupts gameplay, and then, you’re lucky if the “skip ad” button works the first 20 times that you tap it.

No one has really figured out how to do in-games ad well. Some of the Angry Birds titles place a small ad unit over a portion of the screen during gameplay, which naturally leads to users inadvertently clicking the ad. That’s good for the developer, but it’s annoying for the gamer and costly to the advertiser.

Maybe this issue doesn’t have a neat solution, but it would be nice to see developers and advertisers working together a bit harder to improve the user experience.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, THQ files for bankruptcy, gaming video giant Machinima lays off 10 percent of its staff, and we crown The Walking Dead as our 2012 Game of the Year.

You’ll also find reviews for Black Knight Sword, Mass Effect 3: Omega, and Middle Manager of Justice.

News:
The DeanBeat: The Newtown shooting will turn up the heat on video game violence — but will it make us think?
DayZ lead designer considered leaving the project
This week in the Nintendo Download: Mario, Wario, and Alex Trebek
Turn your friends into Pokémon in the next Mystery Dungeon game on 3DS
Writer McComb isn’t worried about the lack of the Planescape license for the new Torment game
Valve gives Plantronics the rights to officially brand headsets with Aperture Laboratories and Mann Co. logos
Visualizing a tough year for the retail core game industry
Rabbit pulls reimagined video chat out of its hat
THQ’s bankruptcy filing reveals new games
THQ files for bankruptcy, assets sold to investor Clearlake for $60M
Valve pulls The War Z from Steam over fan backlash, offers refunds
Nintendo’s TVii available tomorrow, but it won’t be fully functional
MeritShare finds a way to gamify employee recognition (exclusive)
Green Throttle Games launches developer program as part of play to take over living room gaming
Assassin’s Creed III glitches and issues addressed in massive patch (full details)
Dartmouth professor names Zynga’s Mark Pincus one of the worst CEOs of 2012
Get ready for great games on a thin laptop as AMD preps new mobile graphics chips
Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion coming to Star Wars: The Old Republic
Nvidia’s next Tegra 4 processor may come with 72 graphics cores
Minecraft documentary free for Xbox Live Gold subscribers this weekend
Online gaming firm Aeria Games merges with Japan’s Gamepot
The spirit of BattleBots lives on in a new robot-building game
Arktos Entertainment acquires majority stake in game studio Hammerpoint Interactive (exclusive)
Why Google predicts Microsoft’s next game console will beat Sony’s
Developer id Software releases Rage add-on next week
Game videos giant Machinima lays off 10 percent of staff
NRA blames video games for mass murders

Mobile News:
Kabam scores big with highest-grossing game on App Store for 2012
Apple freezes the App Store in advance of the holiday app-downloading bonanza
Jordan Mechner’s Karateka remake returns to Apple (iOS) devices today
Mochi Media says 86 percent of Flash game developers are expanding into mobile (exclusive)
MindSnacks’ new iPad games help you learn languages, pass the SAT
After 6M paid downloads, mobile hit Pocket God wraps up with its final, apocalyptic update
Kamcord is helping users record 7 mobile-game videos every second
With more than 20M downloads, Battle Bears mobile game hits San Francisco’s billboards
Plain Vanilla releases its multiplayer video game quiz for iOS
MediaBrix’s responsive design ensures in-game ads will always look right (exclusive)
SGN launches its MasterKey tool for making cross-platform social and mobile games
Gamevil surpasses 200M game downloads on smartphones
Exclusive: Go Ninja developer brings Shaquille O’Neal back to video games

Best of 2012:
GamesBeat’s 2012 Game of the Year: The Walking Dead
The best indie games of 2012
The best games of 2012 (GamesBeat staff picks)
The game industry’s 2012 holiday cards

Interviews:
Heroes of Newerth 3.0 adds bots, hopes to teach new players (interview)
Crytek’s chief: Nothing will beat Crysis 3′s graphics for at least two years (interview)

Previews:
Hawken’s open beta shows a thoughtfully designed mech combat game (preview)
Insomaniac’s Fuse lets you lead a team of four badass agents (preview)
Toki Tori 2′s simple mechanics reward your curiosity (hands-on preview)
Zen Pinball 2 on Nintendo’s eShop gives you a choice of dozens of pinball tables (preview)
The 3DS library gets a little weirder with these quirky eShop games (preview)

Reviews:
Marvel Heroes needs more humanity, more warmth, and more MMO
Black Knight Sword’s punishing difficulty requires more luck than skill to overcome (review)
Middle Manager of Justice is all business, no gameplay (review)
Mass Effect 3: Omega is explosive, nostalgic, and somewhat pointless (review)

Pieces of Flair: 
What sales managers can learn from the four types of online gamers
Solving a Wii mystery: The fate of the awesome toy WeeWaa
Exploring why some players are unable to initiate Halo 4′s single-player campaign
A history of bodies: Video game violence and the player
Love your free players to unlock the full potential of free-to-play games
What are your holiday gaming traditions?
Justin Bieber, Minecraft’s Creeper, and other cameos in modern games (gallery)

The War Z’s launch was a mess. It’s a catastrophe for the developer that damaged the game’s prospects for when it returns.

But this story involves another game, and its lead designer spoke out quickly about the combined effects of trying to finish his game while The War Z saga raged around him.

“I’ve been pretty depressed about the whole situation,” said DayZ designer Dean Hall in a post on Reddit. “From a personal standpoint, this whole ‘saga’ of the development made me seriously question if I wanted to be involved in the industry and I gave serious thought to cutting my losses and not being involved in the project.”

For those who don’t know, DayZ is a mod for the first-person shooter Arma II. It is an open-world survival game with zombies, just like The War Z. Many DayZ fans believe Hammerpoint saw the success of Hall’s mod and decided to do the exact same thing on their own. In its defense, Hammerpoint claims it started development on The War Z long before DayZ first came out.

So The War Z already had a bit of a reputation, one that is potentially unfounded, before it imploded on Steam this week.

On Tuesday, Hammerpoint released The War Z on Steam, and it immediately shot to the top of the sales charts. By Wednesday, with angry gamers shouting about the studio making inaccurate claims on the title’s Steam page, Valve had removed it from the store. Hammerpoint destroyed any goodwill fans had for The War Z.

So you’d think Dean Hall would be feeling pretty good. Yesterday, he did tweeted this:

“The slow man with integrity will ultimately catch the swift one who has none.”

— Dean Hall (@rocket2guns) December 20, 2012

But Hall is too busy dealing with the pressures of fan expectations to revel in the failings of competitors.

“I’ve been getting hammered by a massive amount of requests for information about DayZ’s release and interviews for my reaction to [The War Z]  - but for my own sanity, I retreated and have kept to myself,” wrote Hall. “Right now I’m just at home doing bits and pieces on the DayZ development. The rest of the DayZ team is doing the same.”

The designer noted that when he received his recent discharge from the New Zealand Army, the medical exam revealed that he now has high blood pressure.

“Some things in life just aren’t worth worrying about,” he wrote.

Hall usually updates the DayZ Tumblr blog about once a month with news. He told the fan community he would post one about the standalone games progress a few days ago, but that hasn’t happened.

“I realize that I went back on my word about releasing an update, but [I] went back into my shell for a bit last week, and I’ll come out when the dust is all settled.”

Unfortunately, The War Z riled up quite a lot of dust.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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It’s a game about survival featuring wide-open terrains, zombies, and dozens of other real players. No, it’s not the hugely popular DayZ mod for Arma II. It’s a startling similar game called The War Z — and gamers aren’t happy with it.

Developer Hammerpoint Interactive released The War Z on Steam yesterday for $14.99. It quickly shot to the top of the digital retailer’s best-seller chart, where it remained for most of today. But almost immediately, a loud and angry contingency of gamers started drowning out its success with cries of false advertising and more.

And now Valve has removed The War Z from its Steam store.

Valve spokesperson Doug Lombardi provided GamesBeat with the following statement:

From time to time a mistake can be made, and one was made by prematurely issuing a copy of The War Z for sale via Steam. We apologize for this and have temporary removed the sale offering of the title until we have time to work with the developer and have confidence in a new build. Those who purchase the game and wish to continue playing it via Steam may do so. Those who purchased the title via Steam and are unhappy with what they received may seek a refund by creating a ticket at our support site here: https://support.steampowered.com/newticket.php

Again, we apologize any inconvenience.

So, what is the deal with The War Z?

The majority of gamers that are upset with The War Z mostly take issue with a series of claims that Hammerpoint made on its Steam page about features that are no where to be found in the actual release.

The Steam page is landing where potential customers can get info about a title before they decide to spend money on it. The info on The War Z’s profile was misleading until the studio made some changes, although one of the misleading claims remained even after the update.

What were the false claims? Well, previously The War Z’s “About the Game” section on the Steam Store claimed the title features multiple maps between 100 square km and 400 square km, servers with up to 100 simultaneous players, rentable private servers, a friends list, and a skill-tree system.

Currently, The War Z only has the Colorado map which is reportedly only barely 100 square km. Hammerpoint capped all of the game’s servers at 50 players until earlier today.

The capability to rent servers, improve skills, and maintain a friends list are also all inaccessible. The War Z has placeholder buttons for these features, but they don’t exist in the game.

The lack of features is one problem and charging for an unfinished game — that the developer releases as version 1.0 — is another. But charging players for an unfinished game that is lacking features that your feature list promises are in the game is deceptive.

Hammerpoint has since updated the “About the Game” section to reflect that these features are coming in the future, although it still claimed that the live game featured 100-player servers when none were available.

Enter Sergey Titov

“I’m not sure why this is even an issue,” The War Z executive producer Sergey Titov told Gamespy in an interview. “[The] text clearly states ‘up to 100 players.’ And 50 players — [which] we have right now — is what our players [and] our community feels is comfortable level for them to play.”

Titov doesn’t believe that Hammerpoint made false claims.

“I think there’s a difference between false claims and perception of the text,” he said.

Early this morning, Titov posted this explanation to The War Z forums:

As you all know we launched the game on Steam yesterday. Okay – we’re number-one top grossing game on Steam right now – thank you guys for your support.

At the same time it was clear that there were a number of customers that felt that information about the game was presented in a way that could have allowed for multiple interpretations.

We’ve taken steps to correct this and format information presented on our Steam Store page in a way so it provides more clear information about game features that are present in the Foundation Release and what to expect in the coming weeks.

We also want to extend our apologies to all players who misread infromation about game features.

At the end of the day our goal is to serve our players as best as we can, and we love when you guys steer us into the right way of doing it !

Thank you for playing The War Z!

So, it’s not their fault for presenting information that isn’t true. Instead, it’s the gamer’s fault for lacking the ability to correctly decipher the intent of the wording.

Gamers are not happy

Things turned pretty ugly, which is likely one of the biggest reasons Valve pulled the game. Angry customers filled forums like NeoGAF and community sites like Reddit with damning critiques of the zombie title. Many of these complaints focus on the false information, but a number of gamers are also livid at the Hammerpoint’s business model.

Despite costing $15 upfront, The War Z is brimming with in-game purchases. It’s a game about survival and scavenging for items, but you can spend real-world currency on ammo, food, and melee weapons. Players can then equip a purchased weapon to a character, and if that character dies, the item remains on that dead character until it respawns.

Right now, Hammerpoint has the respawn timer set to four hours. That means gamers have to wait for four hours before they can reuse the character with the purchased items … unless they pay up. A real-world-money payment will revive the character immediately.

This cool-down timer doesn’t benefit the gameplay in any way; it is an arbitrary mechanic the developer uses to squeeze some extra money from gamers. Of course, no one has to pay anything, but it’s a bummer to buy a game only to be met with a bunch of features that don’t work and a plethora of exploitative microtransactions.

Still, the anger at this game is greater than the sum of those issues, and it all stems from the belief many gamers hold: that The War Z is a shameless ripoff of DayZ. They both feature similar gameplay concepts and mechanics, and it’s easy to confuse the names, so gamers were already suspicious. Unfortunately for Hammerpoint, the developer only made it worse with these early issues.

Before the game disappeared from Steam, many angry players took to the Internet to make their displeasure heard.

They specifically targeted Titov. Many ganged up on his entry in the The War Z wiki, where they call him a liar and other four-letter words. An angry fan compiled conspiracy theories and a timeline of events in a YouTube video with over 170,000 views. Another gamer created the War Z Scam tumblr in which he collects every piece of damning evidence — verified or not — against The War Z and its developer.

Valve submits

Since gamers were purchasing The War Z through Steam, many took to the game’s forum on the digital-download service to complain, demand refunds, and warn others about its deceptive claims. But many posters complained about unfair bans.

The moderators of The War Z’s forum are deleting the posts, so it’s difficult to confirm exactly what these folk are saying and whether a ban is truly warranted, but Steam community administrator Al Farnsworth wrote that Valve is investigating the actions of the moderators and the developers in regard to the bans on the forum.

It seems they were doing more than that. By removing The War Z, Valve validates the furor over this game. Steam will refund players who believe they were deceived and work with Hammerpoint before allowing the game to reappear on the store.

At this point, Hammerpoint had a day on top of Steam and is left with a public-relations disaster. It will be interesting to see how the studio attempts to bring the game back to market.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Arktos Entertainment Group has acquired a majority stake in game studio Hammerpoint Interactive, maker of the online zombie-killing game, The War Z, GamesBeat has learned. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the deal is likely a significant one since The War Z has gained more than 600,000 registered users since it debuted in open beta testing in October. That’s a large number of users in a short time for a paid online game.

Los Angeles-based Arktos is an up-and-coming game publisher focused on online games. Sergey Titov (pictured right), general partner of Arktos Entertainment, said in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat that his company will consolidate all of the development team, its intellectual property, and technology under the Hammerpoint brand. He said Arktos is committed to expanding in the game business through both internal growth and acquisitions, with a focus on hardcore online games that can disrupt the traditional console game business.

“Our goal is to create an online games factory,” said Titov, who is the former technical director at Riot Games, the maker of the phenomenally successful League of Legends game.

Hammerpoint Interactive is currently in making three titles, including the post-apocalyptic zombie massively-multiplayer-online game  The War Z. That game has been released on Valve’s Steam game network and it has drawn more than 600,000 registered players. Of those, more than 150,000 are playing daily. Titov said the game was financially successful and is still generating revenues. Eric Nordin is the game’s senior designer.

Los Angeles-based Hammerpoint will announce its next game in early 2013 and will release it in the third quarter of 2013. Arktos previously invested $4 million in seed money in Hammerpoint, which was founded in 2011 by a team of seasoned game developers. The War Z bucks the usual massively multiplayer online PC game subscription business model by requiring a single one-time purchase, with free content updates. Prices range from $15 to $50, depending on the kind of package you buy.

“We found the team was able to utilize our technology to develop in an efficient and effective manner, hitting milestones well ahead of schedule for The War Z,” said Titov. “We made the decision soon after the launch of War Z’s Alpha to invest more into Hammerpoint and position it as our core developer of mid and hardcore games from this point forward.”

Arktos said that the company spent about 18 months building its online games platform.

“The platform is everything you need to deliver games on PCs, consoles and mobile devices, including a 3D game engine, tools for designers, analytics and services,” Titov said. “We can deploy game servers and scale up or down as needed.”

Arktos is an self-funded investment firm and holding company. Last year, it invested $5 million in Online Warmongers, which was founded in 2009 and is the maker of the free-to-play, third-person modern combat game War Inc. Battlezone. Online Warmongers was the first game studio to publish a game using the engine from Arktos. Hammersuit and Arktos have 60 employees, not counting the number at Online Warmongers.

“When I started Arktos, I wanted to build a company with an online platform focused on mid-core to hardcore games. I also wanted to publish across mobile, PC,and consoles very quickly. We’re one of the few publishers that is focused on hardcore online games on the PC.”

The launch of War Inc. Battlezone has been very successful, the company said. Last year, Arktos sold half of Online Warmongers to toy maker Cybergun, based in Paris. At the time, we heard that the valuation was about $50 million, which would mean that Cybergun paid $25 million for its stake.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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I hope you’re not tired of killing zombies just yet. With Resident Evil 6, Zombies mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead, fans of the flesh-eating corpses have plenty of games to play this year. But developer Hammerpoint Interactive is hoping you still have room for one more with The War Z. It’s not just another zombie game: It’s an entire toolset for players to play the game the way they want to play.

“From our perspective, it’s not just a game — it’s more like [a set of tools] for players to help create their own emergent gameplay,” said Sergey Titov, the executive producer of The War Z, in an interview with GamesBeat. “For example, just two hours before our meeting, we went all guns blazing into the city … it was more like a Left 4 Dead experience than anything else. In other plays, we’ve actually taken a really cautious exploration route, [and] it was a completely different gameplay style. We think not in terms of what gameplay will look like, but more like what stages of gameplay will be [right] for you.”

Set for release this fall sometime after the beta launches in October, The War Z is a massively multiplayer online game (without a subscription fee) in which you fight against both zombies and other survivors in huge, open-world maps. It’s already a proven formula thanks to the success of DayZ, the zombie-survival mod for military simulator ArmA II that took the PC world by storm earlier this year.

However, the name and premise for both games might be too similar. Since The War Z announcement in July, some people accused Hammerpoint of simply riding on DayZ’s success, no matter what the developer said otherwise. It’s hard not to see why: With its challenging gameplay and thrilling accounts of personal experiences, over 1 million  players lived and died on the zombie-infested nation of Chernarus. DayZ creator Dean “Rocket” Hall recently revealed that a stand-alone version of the mod will be out in a few months’ time

Here’s a look at 14 of the most dramatic departures from DayZ:

You can re-create Farmville

It sounds absurd, but it’s true: Since private servers (available for a small monthly fee) enable you to tweak a large number of options in the game, one creative tester decided to use a small map of a farm to plant hundreds of vegetables. He looked for water, planted the crops, harvested them, and tried to barter and sell them for equipment.

The reason he did this? He wanted his wife, a big Farmville player, to play with him. “He was like, ‘I basically built this farm in War Z for her to play. So she switched,’” said Titov. “We hope that, from our standpoint, it will be cool if players … work on rebuilding society in this zombie apocalypse. So whatever happens there, and [how] crazy this society becomes, we’ll see.”

Timed day-and-night cycle

DayZ multiplayer servers adjusts its day and night cycles in real time, so depending on its time zone, you might end up playing in the dark if you load up the mod at 7 p.m. in California; the other option is to look for international servers to see if it’s still daylight. For The War Z’s current testing period, from sunrise to sunset, the process takes four hours — for the final release, Hammerpoint wants to keep it between four to six hours.

Multiple characters

With five character slots, The War Z encourages you to experiment with different playstyles, builds, and appearances (six to eight different character skins are available at launch). If you don’t like the way a particular character is progressing, you can delete them from that slot. The DayZ mod limits you to one character at a time.

Skill trees

As you kill zombies and look for loot while running across Colorado (the first map for The War Z), you earn experience points. You can spend these points to unlock additional character skins or increase various attributes in your individual skill trees. In DayZ, characters do not level up; the only way to get “stronger” is to find better weapons and supplies.

“It’s not like superpowers with plus-10 damage, plus-100 health or something,” said Titov. “It’s more like physical training, so you can run for longer periods of time … [other skills] make you reload faster [or] carry more weight.”

Normal and Hardcore modes

Part of the appeal of DayZ is when you die, you permanently lose all the equipment you found; if you want to play again, you’ll have to start over with almost nothing in your backpack. In The War Z, the stakes are higher in what Hammerpoint is calling Hardcore mode: Not only do you lose your items when you die, but anything you learned from your skill tree, any experience points collected, and your position on the leaderboard (separate for each mode) disappear. But if you do choose to play this way, you’ll have access to Hardcore-only servers, where you’re more likely to find rare items than when playing on the regular servers.

Normal mode is for players not willing to risk everything they’ve earned each time they play. Instead of erasing your progress when you die, it locks your character from the game for a set amount of time, ranging somewhere between 24 hours to 48 hours. So you can either wait until that time is up, or just use one of your other characters.

Customizable weapon attachments

Some, such as flashlights and silencers, come pre-equipped with guns in the DayZ mod, but it’s not possible to remove and add them as you see fit. This is doable in The War Z, where a number of attachments can be found in the world; but Titov warned that, next to guns and ammo, these parts are “super rare.”

You can construct buildings and barricades

Titov told another quirky story to come out of The War Z’s testers: One guy built a gladiatorial arena on a private server, forcing players to fight to the death. Though you won’t be able to build such large structures on public servers, you can still fortify existing buildings with over a dozen different objects, such as a wooden barricade.

You can find these as is, so you don’t need to look for supplies or tools to make them. You can also dismantle them if you have to.

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best games stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, the Xbox 360 is the number-one-selling console for the 18th month in a row, the U.S. Senate considers legalizing online poker,  and a Taiwanese gamer dies after playing Diablo III for 40 hours straight.

You’ll also find a review for Dyad as well as several video interviews with Tapjoy, Ouya designer Yves Béhar, and Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus.

GamesBeat:

The DeanBeat: What GamesBeat 2012 tells us about the road ahead in gaming

Nextpeer gives developers new ways to monetize their games via multiplayer tournaments

The War Z takes zombie-survival into the massively multiplayer arena

Tapjoy keeps looking for creative ways to monetize mobile app users (video interview)

Insomniac Games’ Pokémon-inspired Facebook title, Outernauts, is now in open beta

Startup hopes to fund a Shadowrun MMO through Kickstarter

Ouya designer Yves Béhar talks disruption and design (video interview)

Ubisoft posts strong quarterly results thanks to sales of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

China’s Tencent marches to the West in search of kick-ass games (interviews)

If RuneScape were a country, it’d have the fifth largest population in the world (infographic)

Earnings preview: Game makers to see mixed second quarter

DICE: ‘We’re in one of the best positions’ for Battlefield 4 timing

New Call of Duty: Black Ops II video says games are better than movies while touting Hollywood connection

Estonia accelerator flooded with 122 game startup applications

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD is a decent update to the original but brings along some baggage (review)

Alt-rock legend Beck contributes exclusive tracks to Sound Shapes

U.S. Senate considering legalizing online poker — and cracking down on other Internet gambling

Valve targets Ubuntu Linux operating system for Steam port

I’ve got a bad feeling about this — Star Wars: The Old Republic’s producer leaves BioWare

Pachter on the case for Call of Duty: Black Ops II on the Wii U

Casual game site operator Oberon rebrands itself as Iplay

TransGaming to launch World Poker Tour game for smart TVs

Microsoft veteran starts PeopleFun mobile game startup (exclusive)

Tom Hanks gets into the game-making business

Sony Pictures joins in on the movie-game disruption trend

Free-to-play Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances surpasses 1 million players

Intermittent Uplay outage renders several Ubisoft games unplayable

You can’t un-see these 11 video game box art clichés

Leisure Suit Larry publisher trades up to a new developer (exclusive)

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale’s roster grows by two: Adding Cole MacGrath, Jak and Daxter

Microsoft releasing a $400 Halo 4-themed Xbox 360

Marvel teams up with High Moon Studios for an upcoming game based on Deadpool

Battlefield 4 seemingly revealed by Origin

Puzzler: Match the celebrity voices to the video game characters

Dyad is a psychedelic treat for the senses with gameplay to match (review)

VentureBeat:

6 video game icons acting hilariously out of character

Microsoft: Xbox 360 top-selling console for 18th consecutive month

AMD reports weak second quarter earnings on PC market softness

Another ex-Ensemble mobile game startup, BonusXP, comes out of stealth (exclusive)

BitMonster Games startup unveils a beautiful 3D iPhone game

Zynga’s Mark Pincus discusses how mobile could disrupt the game industry (video interview)

King.com: From tournament gaming to No. 2 on Facebook (video interview)

Taiwanese gamer dies after 40-hour Diablo III session

Applifier launches video ad network to monetize Facebook games

Ouya’s video game console Kickstarter tops $5M raised so far (exclusive interview)

American McGee’s Spicy Horse launches real-time, cross-platform title Crazy Fairies (exclusive)

Zynga designers help Pulitzer Prize winners create social charity game

Mandala adds French touch to social casino games

Teen gamer developers swarm Roblox’s hackathon conference

Penny Arcade says fans can ripoff and remix past comics if it meets Kickstarter goal

Russian hacker finds a way to get in-app purchases for free (updated)

Angry Birds follow-up Amazing Alex tops app charts after just one day

Samsung brings motion-controlled Angry Birds to Smart TVs, announces massive 75″ set

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Not even the massively multiplayer online (MMO) space is safe from the shambling corpses of the undead: The War Z is an upcoming “survival horror” MMO developed by Hammerpoint Interactive, an independent Los Angeles-based studio formed just last year. Arktos Entertainment Group, a privately held investment firm, clearly believes in the developer’s vision as it has previously invested $4 million into the studio.

Set to release this fall on Windows PCs, The War Z tasks you with the immense challenge of fighting against both zombies and other survivors in huge, open-world maps (ranging between 200 to 400 square kilometers), including large, infested cities. The developers stress the inclusion of “strong role-playing-game elements” with an experience-point system that can be used to purchase new skills for your character.

Safe settlements are scattered across the post-apocalyptic world, and they provide opportunities for you to purchase supplies or sell your own. The developers also tout “unique social elements” in the game, like placing bounties on and sending help requests to other players, who of course may or may not help you, depending on their own agendas.

“The whole team is obsessed with zombie culture as well as with post-apocalyptic games like Fallout,” said Eric Nordin, the senior game designer for The War Z, in the press release. “At the end of the day, we want to ship a game that we want to play ourselves, and we’re hoping that other gamers will recognize our passion and be excited about playing as well.”

It sounds a lot like the popular zombie survival mod, DayZ, for Bohemia Interactive’s ARMA II, right down to The War Z’s Hardcore mode where death is permanent (in DayZ, this is the only option). DayZ, however, is just a side project still in alpha being managed by a one-man team, with constant updates being made almost every week. The War Z, also currently in alpha, has a full-fledged development studio behind it.

Hammerpoint bucks the usual trend of the MMO-subscription model for The War Z by only requiring a single purchase, and it promises free content updates upon release, as well as dedicated public and private servers. For those looking to get in on the action early, a closed beta is in the works.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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