Game companies making good

[Rukh]

This is something that has happened a few times, but I don't really think its precedented.

The first in recent memory was Bioware. They put a lot of hard work in the Mass Effect 3, and in my mind, the game was damn good, all except the very end. A lot of people felt that way, and Bioware did something about it. They changed the end. For free, they put in tons of man-hours to script and create a more in depth end. There were some people who were still upset, but there would be people upset no matter what they did. In my mind though it was world better and it made it overall the best Mass Effect game of an already awesome series.

So a new one happened recently. There's a small company called Stardock who make some games, generally strategy games. They're a small company in the games market. They made galactic civilizations, and sins of a solar empire. They also made a game called "Elemental: War of Magic" which I had pre-ordered because the game looked right up my alley. Unfortunately, the game sucked. Pretty badly. Well, stardock thought so too, and so they did something about it. They made a new game, this time completely from the ground up. This game is called Elemental: Fallen Enchantress and because they felt bad about the previous game, they're giving thew new one to EVERYBODY who bought the previous game for free! That's pretty amazing to me. They're definitely under no obligation for that. Plenty of companies make terrible games and generally you just live with it. It is something special for a company to care enough to try to do a solid for their customers like that.

Anyways, is this something new? I never remember game companies doing this. Generally in the past, if a company made a crappy game, and plenty of companies made crappy games, it was just too bad, thanks for the cash. But now it seems like companies are paying more attention to their customer relations side of the field and I think this is a good turn of events. More companies should care about such things.

Has anybody else had this happen with other games or is this really rare?

[Vespian]

So how bad is the new one :P Sorry to go slightly offtopic, I haven't really seen such a developer response yet myself.

[Rukh]

I'm downloading it now so I have no idea. They say they think its good enough and the metacritic reviews are in the 80s. I'm going to try it out after it downloads in a few hours.