Hey there! Today I have a treat for you. Today I want to bring to your attention a guy named Sergey Titov. You might not know his name, but you certainly played a...let's say game...in which he most certainly had a hand. So who is this guy?
The first game I experienced from this man was Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. His magnum opus if I might. You must have seen videos and reviews about this game, or at least heard its name in passing. To cut it short, this is a racing game in which you drive big rigs. The problems arise from the fact that, allegedly, this game was released in a pre-alpha state, and you can see all the broken pieces: the opponent never moves from the starting position, you do not have capped speed when going backwards, everything but the ground has no hitbox, so you can pass through buildings and bridges and most importantly of all, one of the maps crashes the game when selected. The game was lambasted upon release and to this day, it garners an 8/100 on Metacritic (this is not a reliable site to gauge the quality of game by any stretch, but this is an extreme case). Titov defended his reputation for this game by saying that the publisher GameMill mandated that the game be released in the early stages. So far, let's let it slide as publisher meddling. Another note: the studio developing the game was called Stellar Stone, and they made no games of any importance.
Moving forward, there came a free to play online shooter called War Inc. Battlezone which was released in July 2011, cashing in on people's hype for Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3. This game amusingly claimed to have destructible light sources and night mission as features. There is not much to note about this game, it was competent, it was pay to win, and it was the first use of the game engine we will see forward in most of the other games Sergey had a hand in. Also, if you dig deeper, you'll see that the game is published by Arktos Entertainment, a company at which Titov is CEO. Even deeper you'll see that Arktos bought a large stake into the developers of the game, Online Warmongers in 2009 and in 2010 Sergey became the president of the studio. The shady stuff comes a month after the release of the game (the only game of the studio, might I add), when Arktos sold all of their stakes in Online Warmongers.
The next confirmed game is The War Z in 2012, developed and published by Hammerpoint Interactive. The studio was funded about a year before the game was released on Steam. This was supposed to copy DayZ, but with pay to win mechanics like buying inventory slots and resurrecting you character. After the backlash the game received, the studio changed their name to OP Productions and the game's name to Infestation: Survivor Stories, and more recently Infestation: The New Z. Now, it's time for the pattern: this is the only game the studio ever released and the majority stake is owned by Arktos. There was another release of the same game called Romero's Aftermath in 2015, and yes, still published by OP Productions using a new puppet developer, Free Reign Entertainment.
Let's move on to the next exhibit, Burstfire, developed by Nacho Games and published by the puppet Free Reign Entertainment mentioned above. This game is a free to play clone of Rainbow Six: Siege on the same outdated engine as the rest of the games mentioned so far. Attackers use drones to find enemies and objectives, you choose your loadout before the round. The kicker is the fact that this came in July and Siege came in December of that year, meaning that Burstfire was constructed based on all the demos and trailers shown for Siege to cash in on the hype.
If they ripped off one tactical shooter, why not rip off another. In 2016 came Shattered Skies, a copy of Escape from Tarkov with added zombies, which was actually a competent game made by Free Reign Entertainment. It featured a tiered inventory buying system like Tarkov too. Also, this game was abandoned, so there goes the small sliver of potential they had on their hands.
The next churned out game on the same ancient engine was Last Man Standing in 2017 which, you may guess, came around the same time as PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds. Glad they also went to rip off bad games too. There is not much to talk about here, it is a battle royale with no soul put into it.
And finally, we have Wild West Online, which came out around the same time as Red Dead Redemption 2 on consoles. It was basically The War Z with no zombie and featuring horses. Funnily enough, they also made another cash grab at Red dead in 2019 around the time it came on PC, called New Frontier, which is basically the same game as before.
All in all, Sergey Titov and his companies should be avoided, as their modus operandi is creating quick barely functional pieces of software to cash in on upcoming AAA releases. The few competent games they made were most certainly accidents, seeing as they rereleased The War Z two times and made those lazy gmaes like Burstfire and Last Man Standing.
Archdruid Discord: https://discord.gg/cw3z74s
GamingHD Discord: https://discord.gg/CZSXJwy