Illfonic and Gun Media have got to be both the most celebrated and most hated team in gaming right now. On the one hand, everyone and their dog was hyped about the release of Friday the 13th The Game. Finally, a Jason game made by actual fans of the series. They even included tons of franchise callbacks and Easter eggs. On the other hand? Well, the game’s launch was a bit rough.

Depending on your perspective, “a bit rough” is probably a little generous. The game servers couldn’t keep up with demand and were constantly crashing. Plus there were also a host of game-breaking bugs and glitches thrown into the mix. Naturally, when they discovered that their $40 game was nearly unplayable, some people got extremely frustrated. Meanwhile, the devs continued scrambling to fix the stability issues while addressing irate fans. It wasn’t pretty. 

Things have finally begun to settle down. There are still issues, but the majority of game-breaking glitches have been cleared up by now. While some developers would try to sweep the problems under the rug and keep quietly patching things, Illfonic and Gun Media have once again decided to get out in front of the issue. On June 19th the team released a video owning up to their mistakes and offering players some free content to thank them for their patience with the messy launch.

Players across all three platforms will get 13,000 points to spend on their characters ahead of a double XP weekend from June 23rd-25th. The devs are also giving every player two new outfits for each counselor and a retro NES Skin for Jason Part 3, complete with chiptune soundtrack.

Despite this, some people are still foaming at the mouth with rage about the game’s remaining issues. Issues which the developers have assured them time and time again they are both aware of and working towards solutions for.

Why Can’t We Be Friends?

Fans absolutely have the right to expect the developers to fix the game’s issues, but every time a problem has come up Gun Media and Illfonic have done their best to address it. Ever since their Kickstarter, the team has always attempted to be open and honest with their community.

To be fair, I understand having an expectation that when you purchase a game it will work as described, but honestly, that ship has sailed at this point. Friday the 13th The Game didn’t have a perfect release. Things went wrong. Hell, plenty of things still need more work, but spewing venom at the team trying to apologize and fix things doesn’t benefit anyone.

About the Author

Joanna Mueller

Joanna Mueller is a lifelong gamer who used to insist on having the Super Mario Bros manual read to her as a bedtime story. Now she's reading Fortnite books to her own kiddo while finally making use of her degree to write about games as Cliqist's EIC.

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