Hey, remember how Dead Island: Riptide was going to have a European special edition with a dismembered torso? That had giant boobs? Remember how offended everybody was? Remember how Deep Silver apologized?
No? Neither does Deep Silver. They still shipped it out the door.
To be fair, they probably want to distract players from the game they bought, looking at the Metacritic scores, but apparently they also want to capture that valuable “aspiring serial killer” market:
The Australian and New Zealand special editions of Dead Island Riptide are the Survivor Edition available through EB Games, and the Pre-Order Edition available through JB Hi-Fi. An extremely limited quantity of the Zombie Bait edition has been made available to some retailers for those customers who wish to purchase it.
We ran that through our press release translator and got back “Look, we’ve got thousands of these things, and if we know our audience, we’ll be able to sell at least a few of these to the kind of gamers that you don’t talk to on chat.”
Leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that this is, like, an entire graduate thesis worth of disturbing, you’ve kind of got to wonder what they were thinking. The controversy erupted back in January, and the fact that there are actually variants of this Fox News catnip with different bikinis depending on the country it’s sold in says one of two things. One, either Deep Silver figured the game wasn’t going to sell that many copies in the first place, or two, they figured that all you have to do when you put a premium in that makes all gamers look like creeps is apologize and sell it anyway.
Either way, thanks guys. Perfect timing. It’s not like politicians are trying to demonize games right now to actually avoid doing anything.