DayZ creator Dean Hall says he's pissed about The War Z, the controversial zombie game that seems have cloned a ton of DayZ's elements, including theme, genre, and title.

Writing on Reddit yesterday, Hall said the accused clone "hasn't made [his] life very pleasant":

I am angry about the WarZ. I'm very angry. I'm quite hurt personally because anyone can see how similar the words are, and while the average gamer knows the difference individual people don't. I've had family members/close friends mistake the difference and confront me about what they believed was unethical behavior they thought I was making. I really don't think anyone can understand just quite how exasperated that can make you feel when you've gambled everything on something, put your whole self and reputation on the line. So it hasn't made my life very pleasant and I disagree entirely with the conduct and how consumers have been treated.

I think the word "scam" is such a loaded word that isn't really relevant in the discussion, much like the word "terrorist" is a very loaded word and very much dependent on point of view.

Hall recently announced that the standalone version of DayZ would go into closed testing soon.

Rocket AMA [Reddit via CVG]

The man behind The War Z has apologized to his fans for some of the controversies that have entangled the much-maligned survival horror game over the past couple of weeks.

In an extensive letter that tackles some of the game's well-publicized issues—like misleading Steam descriptions and community mismanagement—War Z boss Sergey Titov says he'll be hiring new staff, changing the War Z forum's policies, and "[providing] better communication" in the future. He also apologizes for his missteps.

Here's the full letter he sent to War Z players today:

Dear fellow Survivors,

It has now been more than two months since we launched public access to The War Z. We've definitely had our ups and downs, and I thought that this Holiday break was the right time for me to try to step back a little and think about our journey since it started. This may be a little long, but I would appreciate if you could stay with me for a few minutes as I try to go over the highlights of the game as well as some of the hurdles and controversies, how we have addressed that and what our plans are.

First of all a very big and sincere "Thank You!" to all of you. We are really proud of the community we have formed with you guys. Every day we have hundreds of thousands of players on our servers, and this is a life-changing event for the team and me. We are blessed to have you as members of the community and we are well aware that without you the game would be nothing. Along with that thanks, though, I need to admit that we failed to effectively communicate some of our plans and actions to both our existing players and to our new prospective players. This failure to communicate resulted in some very negative feedback from some members of our community, but while it might be easy to label them as "haters" or some other dismissive term, in all honesty this is my fault. I became arrogant and blinded by the early success and quick growth of The War Z, our increasing number of players, numbers we were getting from surveys, etc., and I chose not to notice the concerns and questions raised by these members of the game community as well as others. This failure is entirely on my shoulders and if anything I owe thanks to that vocal minority and admit that I should have paid attention sooner. I chose instead to concentrate on the bigger picture – my dream of turning The War Z from being a game developed by a small indie team into a large online venture, instead of addressing small things first and staying focused on the game issues. At the end my arrogance led us to the moment, when all those small things finally caught up and created a "perfect storm" that affected all of our community members. For that I'm truly sorry and apologize to all of our community as well as the larger PC gaming community that is not yet playing The War Z.

I do not take this situation lightly, and last week events were especially humbling for me. I've experienced a range of emotions, most of which centered on regret for not having addressed some of the issues differently than we did, but we can't change the past. The only thing we can do is to be sure that we won't repeat the same mistakes in the future. I have realized that as the leader of this ship, I missed all early warnings that were saying, "Your community is not as happy as you think they are, you need to alter course." I was too focused on how great we are and how a small independent team got their first game to over 700,000 users in a two-month period. Though that is something to be very proud of, allowing that to overshadow the existing community and their satisfaction was poor judgment.

I want to give you some insight into what our plans are for the future, but before we get to that, I'd like to clear the air with you on several important topics.

Community management and moderation – the problem

Even since the early Alpha launch, this game has always cultivated a large and loyal player base that is very active in the game. Again, thank you for this. Unfortunately, we weren't prepared for this large success and the way we managed the community was not the way it should've been. We relied too much on forum moderators, whose primary role was to punish those who break rules, not to engage the community and guide conversations into productive discussions about problems. There wasn't enough presence of the development team on forums, there wasn't enough updates on development of UPCOMING features. We failed to communicate our position and messaging on the outside platforms such as Facebook, twitter and various online websites, and when we did this we chose to rely more on arrogance rather than being humble and trying to understand why people were saying negative things. We chose to tune out negative reactions to the game, not paying enough attention to them – and this, again, is my fault. We chose to rely too much on numbers – percentage of refund requests, number and dynamic of our daily and monthly active users, etc. Well, in hindsight – those things probably work well for more casual games, but the hardcore PC gaming community is much different and can be very vocal about what they feel. Even when the percentage of players with negative comments is small, as the community grows, even a small percentage can add up to be a very significant absolute number. And it's not just a number – those are real people with real issues they are having with the game. OP Productions (publisher for War Z) and me personally have failed to address those issues effectively.

Community management and moderation – the solution!

We're changing our community management procedures and rules right now. We're going to reevaluate publishing and marketing team performance, and I will make sure that Hammerpoint Interactive developers will have a much stronger voice when it comes to community management and we won't rely 100% on OP Productions to single handedly handle this. Lots of changes will be happening very fast in the weeks to come. One of the ideas that I proposed was to select 10 players from around the world who can represent the player community and invite them to our offices in Los Angeles, to meet the team, check out what we're doing, and share with actual developers their concerns, wishes and thoughts on the game. We also will involve community, to a much higher degree, in the process of making our next map for The War Z (called "California"). We'll be discussing many of the aspects of the map with you and asking for feedback.

We're revisiting our forum policies; we're going to bring on an additional community management team, additional moderators and we'll train them how to respond to things properly. There will still be restrictions on harassment, trash talk, etc. But we'll make sure that every opinion is heard. At the same time, I must also be cautious: we cannot address all issues and there cannot be only one voice. Please accept that. With hundreds of thousands of players playing, talking, chatting, voicing their strong opinions, there will always be diverging opinions. And some issues that are minor ones are sometimes brought to light by very vocal channels. I would even say there is sometimes a beginning of controversy because the game is now so popular. So there is sometimes a distortion between the severity of the issue and the attention it gets. But we will clearly implement steps to better listen to the community.

What is Foundation Release?

The most asked question of the last week was "is this the final release?" My answer has always been that for an online game a "final" release means that the game is dead – so there's really no such thing, you never stop developing, making changes to and adding new features to the game. This is how we came to call the current version of The War Z "Foundation Release." We launched the Foundation Release on December 17, 2012 as our first-stage release that we use as a foundation to build upon. It does include the core features and a fully playable environment. This is our version 1.0, and of course we will continue to improve that version as time goes on. Did we rush to get it done? That is a tough question, but to answer honestly I think that we all pushed very hard to be first to market and in time for the holidays. Our entire team was working late, long hours to iron out issues and include as many features as possible. This is part of the reality of being a smaller, independent game developer. If we had a larger team and more funding we may have done things differently, but I'm not sure. I don't think it was a mistake because our numbers have been strong since day one and, even with the recent negativity, our metrics are really solid and we've been continuing to grow. The negative opinions are always the most vocal, but most players are really enjoying the game and we've been attracting more and more daily active players every week. A lot of the gaming journalists that have been playing the game have also given us some great feedback. I realize that we will take a few hits from some of the traditional gaming press in terms of review scores, but I'm hoping that even they will consider that this game is a living project that will continue to evolve as time goes on. We are very proud of our Foundation Release, and we do stand behind it like we have stood behind any previous version.

What's on the Horizon?

As for what will happen next with The War Z? We're currently evaluating the relationship between Hammerpoint and OP Productions. I firmly believe that Hammerpoint should be playing a more prominent role in publishing/game operating process. We're in a process of adding new key members to our team, bringing on guys who have much more experience operating and growing successful online games and I know this is going to make a huge difference in terms of development. We'll be making some big decisions in terms of leadership for both companies and I will personally change how I handle many things. Above all we will continue to develop and make this game the best that it can be.

I know that to some people my words won't matter much. I understand that. I hope that will change as we move forward and deliver the features that our players have been waiting for. I can promise you that from now on things will be much more transparent, and we'll provide better communication and engage our community to discuss upcoming features way before they appear in the game.

I do believe that we aren't even close to uncovering the true potential for The War Z, and I hope that in the coming year, we'll be able to regain trust from people who were alienated by our actions and we'll be able to move forward and grow the game together.

Thank you for reading all this, thank you for supporting the game and thank you for helping us to change and realize what's important as well as what is not.

I hope you are all having a happy holiday and I wish you the best for the New Year!

Sincerely,
Sergey Titov
Executive Producer, The War Z

Over the past few days, I've received tons of tips and e-mails about the trademark for controversial zombie game The War Z, which seems to have been suspended in November after a claim from Paramount, the studio behind World War Z.

Depending what the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office does next, the people behind The War Z could be forced to change the game's name.

So I reached out to War Z creator Sergey Titov, who told me that he doesn't think it's suspended.

"This is our actual trademark," he said, sending me a link to their trademark filing. "I assume what you see is one of the preliminary applications since it said that it suspended because other application exist."

However, when I checked out the trademark status on the link he sent me, it took me to a listing that says the trademark has been suspended: "An Office action suspending further action on the application has been sent (issued) to the applicant."

Titov hasn't been able to clear up the discrepancy just yet.

"I've sent email to our lawyer who filed application and working with uspto to provide more details on all this," Titov said, "so as soon as I'll hear back I'll forward you more details."

I'll keep you updated as Titov shares more information.

The War Z has quickly become the week's most interesting, and hilarious, news item. Between the bad press, the worse press and the fact the game's been taken down from Steam, most of you are probably yet to actually play it.

Well, over the past few days, I've been playing it. So you don't have to.

Seriously, don't take this as an Official Kotaku Review™, but... from what I've played, the game is awful. Animations are janky. There's a distinct lack of user prompts or directions. Some textures look like they're from a 1990s flight simulator. The zombie AI is comedic.

Pretty much all of which you'll get a sense for in the above video, which for reference is all from a single playthrough. One of the few I've managed without being instantly killed by a human player.

Sure, the game can change. It can improve. After all, it's still in testing a "foundation release". Question is, after all this mess, whether anyone trusts the developers that it will, or if they do, if anyone will care.

UPDATE - Bummer, seems there's some compression problems with the vid when uploading. I've swapped in a YouTube version that's a little better. Apologies (though you'll still obviously get the gist).

As promised, the strange saga of War Z just keeps getting stranger. Turns out this promo screen for zombie survival game, which was pulled from Steam earlier today, was plagiarized from The Walking Dead.

A Kotaku reader sent over the following image to show off just how much of this War Z title screen was plagiarized from other sources: (Click to expand.)

It looks like the top few photos are from fan zombie gatherings (assuming they're not from actual zombie invasions). We couldn't track down the bottom-left photo—I think it's from Shaun of the Dead?—but the bottom-middle one is straight out of The Walking Dead.

The bottom-right photo, which was mirrored for the leftmost female zombie in the War Z image, is also from The Walking Dead.

For a clearer comparison:

Will this story ever end? Stay tuned.

Controversial zombie survival game The War Z has been removed from Steam.

Although there's still a listing for the game on Valve's digital distribution service, you can no longer buy it.

Fans have been clamoring for the game's removal from Steam since it was released on Monday. Many gamers have criticized the game for its misleading description, controversial microtransactions, and forum censorship. For more on the War Z debacle, check out our full roundup.

Update: In response to Kotaku's request for comment, Valve issued the following statement:

From time to time a mistake can be made and one was made by prematurely issuing a copy of 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.

Update 2: In response to Kotaku's request for comment, War Z boss Sergey Titov also sent over a statement:

We're making sure that our Store page is 100% correct this is why.

Bottom line – our end goal is to have satisfied and not angry customers, so this is more important for us than everything else.

This week's wildest story is the story of The War Z, a new Steam game that has caused a great deal of controversy for numerous reasons.

Update: This afternoon, The War Z was pulled from Steam.

Fans have come out criticizing the zombie survival game for misleading advertising, suspicious microtransactions, and forum censorship. Meanwhile, The War Z's developers have defended themselves, telling us that "93% of [their] customers like the game."

It's a bizarre mess that we've been following closely and will continue to follow as this week goes on. Here's everything we know about The War Z so far.

Controversy led the developers to change the game's Steam description.

Following yesterday's controversy—during which a giant thread on Reddit alleged that War Z's Steam description was full of lies—the people at War Z developer Hammerpoint Interactive have changed the game's Steam description to be more accurate. Hammerpoint no longer claims that the game has player skills, maps sized up to 400km, or private servers. (Private servers, the description now says, will be available "soon.")

Hammerpoint boss Sergey Titov also issued something of an apology to fans, saying that he was sorry they misread the description.

War Z looks a hell of a lot like Day Z.

The comparisons are impossible to avoid: from the name to the subject matter, it's easy to see War Z as a ripoff that sets out to cash in on Day Z's popularity. But while Day Z, a massively successful zombie survival mod for Arma II, is completely free, War Z costs $15 on Steam—and thanks to some newly-installed microtransactions, it could cost you even more.

In an e-mail to me, Titov addressed this controversy. (Spelling and grammar have not been altered.)

"As soon as we've announced game – we've received our share of hate from some of the DayZ fans accusing us of just ripping off DayZ concept to make a quick money," Titov wrote. "While over time, especially after game have been launched publicly players been able to see that those two designs are pretty different, there're still DayZ fanboys out there who just can't accept fact that similar concept doesn't mean being copycat... Interesting fact – only around 30% of our player base we have right now actually played DayZ. And 15% of our players never heard of DayZ before they started playing The War Z. This confirms that we've been able to attract new players to the survival/zombie war genre of the game."

Lots of people have been banned from War Z, both during the beta and the current release.

"Not too long ago, Hammerpoint banned roughly three thousand players, without providing any proof whatsoever, and blatantly lying about their anti cheat system being flawless," one Kotaku reader told me in an e-mail yesterday. "Today, they went back on their word, saying that a small amount of the bans were not legit, but still leaving a ton of people [banned], and almost 96 hours in queue from their support without any answers at all."

Several other War Z players have also e-mailed me over the past few days to complain about bans. A different player said he was banned a few days ago, then unbanned last night along with hundreds of others. "I've never hacked, or purposely used exploits that were in the game," he said. "They unbanned hundreds of players three days after the fact without saying a word between the events. They have been lying to the public non-stop."

Titov also addressed this during our conversation, telling me via e-mail that he thinks a lot of War Z players are lying. (Again, spelling/grammar are unaltered.)

"We also are pretty aggressive banning people who use cheats and hacks in a game," Titov wrote. "Those guys normally have paid $10-20 to purchase hacks that offered them'no hack detection guarantee' – naturally they're being extremely pissed off when we've detected their hacking activities and banned their accounts. Those guys are very active in spreading false information and lies about game."

You're not allowed to make posts on War Z's Steam message board about why you quit.

The rules, as laid out by a moderator who goes by the handle Kewk, are a little intense:

Some crafty players have found ways to circumvent this.

Check out this message, screencapped by a NeoGAFfer.

(Stumped? Try reading it vertically.)

A Valve moderator is investigating claims that people have been wrongly banned from The War Z's message board.

As the moderator writes:

Several users have raised concerns about censorship or other posters being banned unfairly. We take these complaints seriously and are investigating the issue.

If you have specific examples of what you feel was unfair or incorrect moderation on this forum, please post them in this thread (or on my profile) and we'll have a look. There has been a lot of traffic in this forum - a new topic every minute for the last day and a half, with thousands of replies. All that makes moderation a very difficult task.

Thousands of people are signing petitions to protest The War Z.

Some of them want full refunds for the game.

Others demand that Valve take the game off Steam.

(I've reached out to Valve to ask if they plan on doing anything about The War Z, and will update should they respond.)

The man behind The War Z helped make one of the worst games of all time.

It's called Big Rigs, and it was immortalized by Alex Navarro in this entertaining GameSpot video review. Sergey Titov was the lead programmer on Big Rigs, according to a number of write-ups on the game.

Titov most recently worked on League of Legends at Riot Games, which makes it interesting that...

At one point, the War Z's terms of service linked to League of Legends.

Although the TOS has since been changed, several months ago, it linked out to League of Legends, which seems to imply that at one point, parts of War Z's terms of service were ripped from Riot's online game.

One Kotaku reader sent in this screengrab:

The Terms of Service come with one rather interesting line.

ONCE YOU AGREE TO THIS TERMS OF SERVICE AND THE END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR THE GAME (THE "EULA") AND SERVICE FOR THE GAME COMMENCES, YOU WILL NO LONGER BE ELIGIBLE FOR A REFUND FOR ANY AMOUNTS OR OTHER CONSIDERATION PAID BY YOU FOR THE USE (OR FUTURE USE) OF THE GAME CLIENT OR THE SERVICE.

Expect to see more and more strange things as time goes on.

The War Z mess has been rather crazy. Quite a few people seem to be unhappy with the game, and a number of readers have contacted us with strange details and stories about their experiences with it. We will of course continue to follow this story and keep you updated as more details come out about this strange situation.

UPDATE: More craziness!

Here's a post on The War Z's forums from Titov asking people to vote for the game on Metacritic, where it currently has a user score of 1.5/10.

And here's an article from PCGamesN, who measured The War Z's first map, Colorado. On the Steam description for The War Z, the developers say that Colorado is 100 square kilometers. PCGamesN's Steve Hogarty determined that the map is actually... 9.7417 square kilometers.

The roll out of zombie shooter The War Z is one hot mess. Yesterday, gamers on Reddit were pissed about the game's misleading description on Steam. And now, the game's maker, Hammerpoint Interactive, is saying it wasn't the description's fault. Oh, no, it was yours.

"I'm sure that a few players may be upset, but I can assure you that based on what we're seeing, the number of people who post bad comments are a small percentage of people who actually bought the game," Hammerpoint Interactive's Sergey Titov told GameSpy, echoing what he also told Kotaku.

However, Titov went one step further by saying, "I'm sure there'll be people who will look into small details and will say ‘no I was mislead' where in fact they imagined something to themselves without checking details first."

"I think there's a difference between false claims and perception of the text. There's no such thing as 'fully released' for online game. As far as I'm concerned The War Z is in a stage when we're ready to stop calling it Beta. This is a basic version—bones to which we're going to add more and more 'meat'—features and content in the coming months and hopefully years."

As the Reddit screengrabs show, the text and those discrepancies don't appear imagined:

Hammerpoint can add all the meat it wants, but many gamers feel like they've gotten a false bill of sale. The outrage online has been so vociferous that the Steam description was updated:

Well, sorta.

On the game's forums, Titov issued this apology (it's his second; here's the first):

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 [SIC] 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 !

This bit deserves a reply: "We also want to extend our apologies to all players who misread infromation [SIC] about game features." It's not us, it's you.

On the game's forums, some are accepting the studio's apologies, thanking the developers. Others are simply not having it. DeadlySwordz writes, "So you waited till a bunch of people bought your game and made some money first before addressing this? Wow. Good thing I didn't buy and never will." Kingkilla15425 added," It wasn't a misrepresentation, it was a blatant lie. But good job fixing it anyways."

"No one misread anything," writes Snedsdawg. "The information you posted was false, it's as simple as that. Don't try to pin this on us, it was your error, not ours."

Besides launching suspicious microtransactions, Hammerpoint is directing unhappy customers to Steam for a refund. You know, those unhappy customers that supposedly misread the original Steam description and got bad infromation.

Steam purchase page issues [War Z Forums]

A Shocking Interview With The War Z Developer On False Steam Store Claims [GameSpy via MCVUK]

The pitchforks are out. Gamers are furious with the developers of The War Z, a game that seems to have made it to Steam without many of the features that developers have promised for it.

Right now, an item on the front page of Reddit that accuses The War Z's developers of "blatantly [lying] about included features" has accrued close to 2,000 comments, most of them taking issue with the game. Other gamers have taken to message boards and Steam to complain about The War Z, which was released yesterday.

One Redditor captured the game's Steam product page to point out which listed features are not actually in the game:

Many people in the Reddit thread have harsh words for The War Z. Redditor nadrewod writes (emphasis added):

Basically, WarZ is a reskin of War Inc. made to ride on the coattails of Day Z, but the dev team (Hammerpoint Interactive) has been charging people to even play the game (something DayZ doesn't do [yet: it is releasing as a standalone game at some point in the future, but for now, it is just a free ARMA II mod]), and hasn't updated much in the past few months. There have been some controversies (admins on the forums and subreddit changing/deleting posts and banning users for mentioning hot topics like the ex-moderator Devin), and the game doesn't even look that good.

Meanwhile, DayZ, a free mod (which seems to only make money from merchandise, and possibly donations), has been updating the game fairly frequently, was the first one on the market, has been highly praised across the board by many critics for its various features, has had over 1,000,000 unique players, and has been praised by the makers of ARMA II (partially because it has been driving their sales, since DayZ currently requires a copy of ARMA II to play).

Redditor Johan3043 writes:

I bought it on release and i feel so robbed, this game REALLY sucks so hard compared to DayZ. Save yourselves 15 bucks and wait for DayZ Standalone.

The War Z Team Offers A Defense

I reached out to Hammerpoint Interactive, the folks behind The War Z, to get their side of the story. In an e-mail, Hammerpoint general manager Sergey Titov told me that he sees the complainers as a vocal minority. (We've cleaned up his e-mails for grammatical errors.)

"We're constantly running surveys to ask our players what they think – how we're doing," Titov said. "As of right now over 93% of our customers like the game, with over 40% saying it's perfect and around 50% saying it's good, but they'd like to see more polishing and features. Yet, 4% don't like the game and decided not to play it, and 3% hate the game... My point is that absolute majority of our players are supporting us, yet, yes, players who don't like the game will be very vocal about it."

Titov also responded to a few specific complaints from the Reddit image:

On the game not being listed as Alpha or Beta: "Because it's not an Alpha or Beta. We've launched 'Foundation Release' for Steam on Monday (see attached press release)."

On the missing hardcore mode: "There's a hardcore mode that you can select when you launch the game, yet most of the players are not using it. Single biggest difference between Normal and Hardcore is that once you die in Hardcore, your character won't be revived and will be lost (permadeath)."

On the lack of promised private servers or skills: "We're updating our Steam page to provide more information on this, but basically both features are coming soon.

"First thing players will get is private server rentals. They'll be able to rent both public and private (password-protected) servers – both Gameworld (ie Colorado map) and Strongholds (smaller maps that basically allow them to use those servers as "home base").

"Our plan was to launch server rentals around the end of December-early January and we're still on track to do that.

"And we're testing skills right now with small select group of players. As soon as everyone is satisfied with balance and design, we'll push it public. I honestly can't give a solid timeframe for this to happen, since it largely depends on how our player community reacts on our initial version of the skill tree."

On Reddit's claim that there's only one map, and that it's 72km: "The Colorado map, our first map to be released, is over 100 square kilometers."

On the max server limit being 50 rather than the promised 100: "I don't see 'LIE' in saying 'up to 100 players per sever' and having the current limit at 50 players. We've just lowered the number of players per map down from 70 based on requests and votes from our players. Ie - we've had 70 players per server - which was what we felt was the 'comfort level' for this map, but when we asked our players about it, the majority voted for 50 slots per server. So we did exactly what our community and our players asked us for."

Gamers are never shy about voicing their opinions on what they'd like to see in a video game, but when a developer puts promises in writing that aren't delivered upon, these situations can get ugly—particularly when people are asked to spend money on a game that doesn't do what it says it will.

We'll keep you updated on this story as time goes on.