I am peeved – nay, really, really peeved – with Eurogamer. While I have nothing against their news reporting, their journalistic style or any of their writers, I have a huge personal vendetta against their beta invite scheme. I’m not bitter at all because everyone else got the LittleBigPlanet beta and I didn’t, before you ask. Don’t be silly.
In all seriousness though, they need to get their act together with their servers if they’re going to give any more betas away. Enraged, completely bitter-free rants after the break.
A bit of backstory for you first: Eurogamer is a website. It’s a website for gamers in Europe. It offers news, reviews, all of your typical gaming website fare, but from an exclusively European point of view. Just imagine a more intelligent, balanced version of my writing and you’re on the right track.
Lately, Eurogamer have been forking out beta invites for PlayStation 3 software by the truckload. Well, no, they’ve given away at least 2 lots of beta invites for SOCOM: Confrontation and LittleBigPlanet, and on both occasions their site has been utterly murdered. Destroyed. Torn apart, stitched back together every few minutes and then torn apart again, meaning some people were constantly locked out the site and couldn’t get their mitts on some delicious pre-release content.
For a game like SOCOM: Confrontation, demand was pretty frisky, and it killed the site every few minutes. This meant, as I found out, that pressing F5 every couple of minutes would do the trick and soon enough I was the owner of a brand new copy of the SOCOM beta. It was quick, it was simple, and relatively hassle-free. It’s just a shame that the game itself didn’t appear to be very good.
Now, for a game like LittleBigPlanet, things are a bit different. I mean, it’s only the biggest, most-anticipated game on the PS3, perhaps in the history of all PlayStation consoles. I’ve seen my own 360-owning friends admit to wanting to buy a PS3 just for this (even in these parts..) and it’s attracted both gamers and non-gamers alike; when my parents are interested in something on a games console, I know it’s something big.
So, with the popularity of the game fresh in your mind, how do you think Eurogamer handled the freebie invites? To put it nicely, not terribly bleedin’ well.
Popularity: 1% [?]
CONTINUE TO PAGE: 1 2
Its not a very good time for European gamers now, is it?
I missed out on one hell of a beta lol
If you look at the comments for that article they seem to have kept it quiet for the first 1000 codes. After that news got out on all the other major sites (I found out at Kotaku) and their servers asplode. I was F5′ing for over a half hour and finally got my code with less than 300 to go. I’m glad I didn’t have school that day.
Well this is a problem that always happens, yet no one fixes.
Gamespot went down the second they started broadcasting the Microsoft E3 conference.
When the first GTA4 trailer was shown, ROckstar went down, Kotaku went down, TeamXBOX went down. Hell, everywhere went down.
They just don’t seem to anticipate the traffic.
@Eoco: To be fair neither does Sarcastic Gamer. Their servers have gone down multiple times, am I correct?
@Eoco I agree totally. In fact is there anysite that can prevent traffic.
@Pablos oh hell yeah. only time I truly there forwas the picture of PS3 in an Microsoft box . I think people digged i or somthing.
Oh I did get in the beta BTW I meant to say you instated of I lol
@ IronAxe3k
It is if you got a beta
I missed out on it too, what annoys me more is I’m a regular at that site, I go to work for 4 hours and I find out they’ve come and gone, an email to forum members wouldn’t have gone amiss.
What annoyed me about it was that Americans where jumping onto the site to get keys, even when there own beta keys are yet to be released.
So on saying that, I’ll be waiting in the shadows for THEIR beta keys. mhawhawhawhaw!!
LBP is the most anticipated game in the history of the Playstation brand? Wow. Bartender, I’ll have what he’s having!