Once again From Software have released an unbelievably buggy, barely functional PC port, with Namco Bandai acting as publisher, spewing apologist excuses all over Steam.

One thing that makes this unacceptable is the sheer cheek of charging £40 for a game they must have known would fail on certain systems. Without learning from their previous mistakes, it seems it’s once again up to the community to fix a game for free, for a company who have shown the PC audience that they have little interest in their enjoyment of a game.

But, once again, this highlights the dangerous game you play if you pre-order a title in today’s market. Games are releasing broken on a frightening scale and custom skins or some extra weapons hardly justify the gamble taken by people who’re pre-ordering constantly.

That’s not to say that this wasn’t expected. Dark Souls was an absolute shambles and the reason I have no intention of picking up another From Software or Namco Bandai game. If a company can so flagrantly disregard the specific needs of their audience and market their game without highlighting the issues involved then why do they deserve any more of your money?

Dark Souls is still broken and virtually unplayable without mods to this day. That’s including the now dead GFWL From have shown no interest in removing from their game, another aspect that makes the game unplayable for many.

I simply hope that this is another nail in the coffin for pre-orders. It’s a sad thing to hope, but I hope some PC gamers out there had their fingers burnt by this and have been put off the idea of a pre-order the next time a large title comes out. I would also hope that Namco Bandai and From would learn from this, but the figures don’t lie. Midweek Dark Souls 2 was in the top 10 best sellers on Steam, that’s before it even came out.

It’s no denying that the PC audience is growing rapidly, I just hope that with that growth in audience comes a new dawn of intelligent buying. Steam has shown that its quality control is almost lackadaisical, with games decades old being released as ‘new releases’. It’s time to stop putting companies and games on pedestals simply because of previous successes.

Dark Souls was a great game, but an awful PC port and From showed their lack of interested in fixing that. Steam sells games cheap and provides a lot of great services and games. That said, they’re not doing a lot right now to protect their users against awful games with shady marketing techniques. Something needs to be done both on Steam and for developers porting console games onto PC, because the complacency on show recently is unacceptable and can’t carry on.  The only people who’re suffering are the people genuinely excited to play a new game and whose hopes are dashed by things like this. Things like this that seem to keep happening.