Crackdown’s Downloadable Content Resets

So, recently, some downloadable content was released for Crackdown. Only 800 points on XBox Live, and you STILL get the Halo Beta!

What a great idea! Right? Right? WRONG.

Over on the game’s Official Forums, you can see a slew of players reporting that after downloading the new content and participating in co-op games, they return to single payer to find their progress gone, and their games reset as though they were brand new.

A staff member of Realtime Worlds posted this reply in the forum: “hey guys – just so you know, we are aware of the situation and working on it.” Apparently, they were looking into it quickly, as there is now a post here that details how to prevent this from occuring until the game can be updated to fix the issue.

Of course, if you’ve already lost your data, you’re pretty much screwed.

This begs a question that occurs to me all too often these days: Are developers/publishers just not beta testing things enough anymore? I know that there is enormous pressure in the industry to get games out as quickly as possible, and on budget, but that shouldn’t mean that games are pushed out without adequate testing.

Here’s a question for you: What’s worse? The publicity for missing a release date for a game / update, or the bad press when your update hoses the games of a large percentage of your users? I’d think the latter. How about you?