‘Friday the 13th Game’: Devs admit being slightly unprepared for launch
By Joey Click
After launching with a few setbacks, developers of ‘Friday the 13th: The Game’ are admitting they weren’t expecting so much traffic out the gate.
Crystal Lake is really crowded these days.
According Games Industry, revelations and Friday the 13th: The Game are meeting. After debuting last May, Gun Media began being shocked. After expecting somewhere around 30K-40K users on launch, including at 30% cushion for capacity, the “Jason Voorhees” game broke out with almost triple the audience.
Without server space to accommodate the crowd, the devs were facing fan backlash for crashes, glitches and connectivity issues. And now, the makers are coming clean about the whole thing.
Here’s what Wes Keltner, co-founder of Gun Media, is saying about the launch of Friday the 13th: The Game:
"We looked at our player numbers from the beta, along with pre-orders and then added a 30% cushion. That’s how we set up our servers and database for launch. We were soooo wrong. 100,000 players hit us in the first 20 minutes, and our servers melted. Our first weekend was chaos. The entire team slept at their desks trying to keep up with demand. It’s an experience I’ll never forget. With our small budget, we couldn’t afford a large scale QA effort. We did a PC beta, and gleaned a lot of great data from that. But again, we weren’t ready for the tidal wave of players.”"
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Friday Freaks, 100K is A LOT of Camp Counselors.
While the numbers may be shocking, the question still remains: Did you think about the non-horror gamers? Sure, every Friday the 13th buff’s been looking forward to this like a kid with Christmas, but non-horror fans weren’t pre-ordering most likely.
And when you think about what Keltner is saying, how can you take into account a closed beta when gauging a game’s potential audience? Sure, we got keys to give to friends, but you had to pre-order to get them. Thus showing only the hardcore fans and not the general gaming community.
Either way, I didn’t mind the problems so much as the game is glorious and I’ll forever be in Gun Media’s debt. But I’m sure some people don’t see it that way.
Next: Jamie Lee Curtis had some interesting words for Michael Myers
Friday the 13th: The Game is now available on PS4, Xbox One and Steam.