Greetings Jim!

I'm ZiN, an old-school gamer, who started gaming in the 80's on a C-64, and i have a story about the most revolting developers i've seen in 25 years of gaming: Red Hook Studios.

You probably know how they Kickstarted their game, Darkest Dungeon. They falsely advertised it as a challenging, roguelike RPG, which the game is not, in my opinion. I fell for their shifty marketing and hype right away and backed them with a respectable pledge. I really regret that i did and here's why:

- Complete disregard for the purpose of early access, as a way to make a solid game, for the core target audience (10.000 backers). They most likely spent most of the Kickstarter money on marketing and advertising the game, with more lies and false hype about how awesome it is. Huge cardboard cutout booths and Alienware computers at every possible convention as well as a constant presence on Twitter and in the channels of Twitch broadcasters, all the while explaining delays in development due to how much time attending these took for them. Instead of focusing on their target audience, they want to sell their garbage to everyone on every platform. Of course, what started as a rather niche game, became a mainstream one, and the atrocious gameplay reflects that: All show, no substance. Of course if they had stuck with their original, advertised design vision, they'd have gotten far less money. So instead of being honest about it, they've deliberately went this route out of pure, unadulterated greed.

- All of this while completely ignoring the feedback of day 0 players (beta-testers) about glaring flaws in their design, basically ceasing all communication, save for excuses about how hard and trying is to make the game and how awesome it will be. Their huge egos can't cope with criticism (like who would've thought an early access game needs fixing here and there) and even made them censor feedback, and ban people who called them out on their shifty practices. One of these people who got banned was the biggest modder and beta-tester, with more than 1000 hours in the game (mostly as the result of his own mod, the base game was forgotten after 3 days) and at least 1,500 comments on the boards mostly aimed at fixing these extensive balance problems.

- Repeated delays of the release (it was August this year at first, which became October then end of 2015 then January 2016). This wouldn't be a problem. I've even suggested it, to make the game the best it can be, but instead of using this time to actually fix their broken shit, the game is just getting worse and worse, more imbalanced and tedious. They're totally resentful of their game being an trivial and boring farm-fest, so they keep implementing these so called "anti-exploit mechanics" which don't increase tactical challenge at all, but add even more tedium and randomness to the game and do not even fix the exploits they were targeting! Fixing bad design choices by adding even more bad mechanics, even though they've been told repeatedly that this isn't working. The epitome of their thought process at work is "Corpses", which literally do nothing if you ignore them and only harm you if you interact with them (a common theme with their game mechanics) and yet they believe somehow add the difficulty and tactical depth this game has sorely lacked from the start. They have since started using these corpses as a shield, constructing the narrative that anyone who has a problem with the game does so because of corpses (and heart attacks). As those features are now optional (thanks Jim), people can turn off any problem with the game. Therefore anyone still having a problem should be ignored, as they're just bent on seeing their company burn. Because this is something you should say in front of a gathering of indie developers and fans at the Full Indie convention when you want people investing in your incomplete and broken product.

- Stretch goals not getting implemented at release. They're coming soon™ after release, in a free update. Free update. That's how they're trying to sell delaying the stretch goals. Given that 90% of the 500.000 buyers don't even know that these should've been in the base game (according to the rules of Kickstarter stretch goals), this is a strike of genius marketing. But to the Kickstarter backers it just makes it even more obvious how dodgy they actually are.

- Their "community manager" is a total idiot, who sucks especially bad at the game, and doesn't know shit about it, at least watching his crappy weekly "Community Streams" and reading his forum posts makes one think so. 0 valuable information and discussion, just clowning around and trying to make the mainstream, casual consumers feel smart by sucking even more at the game than them.
Oh by the way, some of their fanboys (probably their buddies) can insult and bait anyone without repercussions or warnings on the boards and reporting them either has no effect, or you get a warning for "abusing the report feature". Of course, critics with the same attitude get one warning and a swift ban after the second such post.

- Tasteless, unprofessional posts and tweets explaining how their family members dying delay development and more. (like this)

- Their newest stunt is drawing shitty "comics" about the "heroes" in their game, which is still a bare-bones, imbalanced mess of an RNG walking-simulator. Looking at this "comic" even the quality of the otherwise excellent art is becoming noticeably worse in a kind of rushed way, at least to me. (compare the old art like the Crusader or the Vestal with this)
Instead of adding much needed features and balancing / tuning their game, or you know, perhaps implementing stretch-goals - in short, doing their job - they're still trying to hype the game with this kind of bullshit, which was the last straw for me. They are more focused on making their game look good than be good.