Last week, I reported that Afro Samurai 2: The Revenge of Kuma had been remove from the Playstation Store and has since been removed from Steam. While details surrounding the game’s removal have been mostly sparse, CGMagazine has obtained the answers many have been seeking.
I met with the General Manager of Versus Evil, Steve Escalante during the Montreal International Gaming Summit to ask him about the game’s disappearance. His response was surprisingly candid and inspiringly honest. He said, “The game was a failure. We could not do, in good conscience, volume 2 and volume 3. So we’ve begun the process, it’s been a long process to figure it out because Sony has never really had to do this in this way, but we’re returning all the money. So across the board we’re putting out an apology saying ‘sorry about this.’”
Escalante added, “We’re Versus Evil; a company perspective, from a partnership perspective and now we have to do it from a consumer perspective. So we pulled it down, because we didn’t want to exacerbate it anymore and then we’re refunding the money.”
Escalante also noted “if you look at the reviews, it wasn’t that the game was broken or buggy, people just didn’t like it,” while in our own experiences with the game, we did note several bugs and issues. It could be argued that any game in a broken or buggy state should have never made it to consumers.
However, on the other hand, the fact that Versus Evil made the decision to pull an inferior product from the market and offer people a refund for their purchase (especially through Sony’s marketplace that basically gives you the shaft in every conceivable facet of refund acquisition) shows Versus Evil’s commitment to consumer satisfaction which in today’s game industry is a pretty great thing. It could have been very easy for them to take the money and run, leaving it in the store and in our libraries as a constant reminder of how we’d been fleeced. But the fact that Versus Evil is essentially taking Afro Samurai 2 as a loss, so we don’t have to makes their apology more sincere; hopefully they learn from their mistake and commit further to consumer satisfaction.
