Infestation: Survivor Stories

Controversies

In the original Steam description, the game advertised features which were not present in the game like an overstated map size, overstated server capacity or a missing leveling system. Sergey Titov responded by denying the accusations, e.g. he stated that the servers could hold 100 players but they restricted the maximal number by player request, and that people only misread the description. In a GameSpy interview, he was quoted with the statement "I'm sure there'll be people who will look into small details and will say, 'no I was misled,' where in fact they imagined something to themselves without checking details first.” Valve responded by taking the game out of the store two days later and offering a refund. It was re-released on Steam in February 2013.

Other controversies were the perceived censorship and unfounded user bans on the official Steam forums after the first Steam release up to the point where a Valve official felt the need to make a statement, a forum post by Titov in which he called spawn campers "faggots" and the unpopular inclusion of micro-transaction in a commercial game. The latter was not helped when a patch, one day after the original Steam release, changed the respawn time to four hours and introduced the option to speed it up via micro-transaction.

In June 2013, the game changed its name from The War Z to Infestation: Survivor Stories, assumedly to leave the negative press behind.