Uh, really? I don't know where they spent their marketing dollars because I never saw an ad for it anywhere, their promotion ahead of time was so poor that a lot of people were confused over exactly the type of game it was, and most people just plain hadn't heard about it or forgot it was coming out. Then they choose the first week of January to release it? Right after the holidays?

I find it it pretty funny that THQ execs say the sales are dissapointing, when all the game site podcasts have pretty much been saying "Wow, Darksiders is selling pretty well for a game that was left to die."

People keep saying it might chop the community in half, but if they just released it as a download expansion, or made individual levels, then that would do the same thing and it also would take up hefty hard drive space for 360 users that they might not have. To me this seems better because everyone has the exact same amount of content, instead of what usually happens with these games where some people bought certain map packs and others didn't.

Also, saying you're thinking about doing something doesn't mean you "promised" it. As usual, the kneejerk community feels they're entitled like. I've seen this growing rage and spoiled attitude where the PC gaming community starts boycotting and ruining Amazon reviews for the most trivial and speculative concerns and spamming reports of "horrible ports" on message boards for games if they encounter one single crash on their dangerously overclocked system with unofficial drivers. Now even Valve and Blizzard recieve massive amounts of vitriol beased on pure speculation and for merely operating like a profitable company. No wonder so many "hardcore" gaming developers left the PC. The QA and open platform make it much more expensive, it sells far less copies, and the crowd seems far less satisfied with the product no matter what you do. It seems like way too much effort to bother as far as I can see.

As for boycotts, I never understood the point of them. Aside from making a Steam group to "boycott" it is just the usual slacktivism you see nowadays, I don't see a need to vocally take a side. (Due to the online distribution system, I hope someone does the research to see how many people who signed up for this "boycott" end up with the game on their Steam purchase list anyways. That might be interesting.) If a publisher or developer starts making crappy games, or sucks franchises dry or is basically performing shady business practices, I tend to just naturally become less interested in their product line anyways.

They don't have much of an option. Releasing a PC-focused single player FPS nowadays without an IP behind it would be a death knell.

Not that the argument ever sounded valid to begin with, but it just goes to show that people pirate whatever's popular, and the claim that the only reason Spore was so heavily pirated was due to the restrictive DRM was nonsense.

Congrats on criticising an article that you completely misinterpreted.