I was going to write something about the InSight landing this week, but honestly every tech outlet on earth already ran that story to death, and I don't have much to add to "a robot landed on Mars and that's cool." So instead let's talk about a duffel bag.
If you haven't been following the Fallout 76 saga (lucky you), here's the short version. Bethesda sold a $200 "Power Armor Edition" of the game that promised a bunch of physical goodies: a wearable power armor helmet, some figurines, and a nylon duffel bag to carry it all in. When the boxes actually showed up in mid-November, the bag wasn't nylon. It was a thin canvas tote, the kind you'd get free at a conference for signing up for a mailing list. People were annoyed, and fair enough, that's a real bait and switch on a $200 purchase.
What actually got me was what happened next. Bethesda's response to thousands of angry Power Armor Edition buyers was to offer them 500 Atoms (that's the game's in-game currency, the stuff you buy with real money in the cash shop) as compensation. Atoms go for roughly a penny apiece if you buy them in bulk, so 500 Atoms works out to about five dollars. Five dollars of pretend money, for a hundred-and-ninety-five-dollar shortfall on a product people had already paid for months in advance. It's the kind of math that only makes sense if the person doing it has never once had to justify a decision to an actual customer.
I don't even play Fallout games (I bounced off New Vegas years ago and never went back, sorry to the three of you who'll be mad about that), but I've been half paying attention to this because it's such a clean little case study in how not to handle an unhappy customer. You'd think after the backlash somebody in a meeting would've said "wait, we're offering people a coupon for our own store as an apology for lying about a bag," and the room would've laughed them out. Instead it went out as the official response. Bethesda did eventually walk it back after the internet made fun of them for about a week straight, and they're now promising an actual nylon bag sometime next year plus some additional currency, but the fact that the first instinct was "give them store credit" tells you everything about how these companies think about the people buying $200 collector's editions in the first place.
And look, I get why publishers do the whole "special edition with a bag and a statue and a lithograph" thing. I bought one once — the big Skyrim edition with the dragon statue, back in 2011, and it's been sitting on a shelf collecting dust for seven years because I never actually took it out of the box. There's something a little embarrassing about that purchase in retrospect. But at least that statue was the actual statue they photographed for the listing. Nobody swapped it for a smaller plastic one and then offered me a five dollar Bethesda store credit when I complained.
The bigger story here, the one that actually matters more than the bag, is that Fallout 76 launched with server issues, duplication bugs, and a shocking amount of jank for a full-price online game from a AAA studio, and a lot of the "here's your five dollars" energy from Bethesda has carried over into how they've handled all of it. It's not that companies mess up launches — that happens, servers fall over, nobody's perfect on day one. It's that the follow-up response keeps landing wrong in a way that feels less like incompetence and more like they genuinely didn't expect anyone to push back.
Anyway. If you preordered the Power Armor Edition, hang onto your invoice, and maybe don't preorder the next one sight unseen. I know, I know, I'm one to talk with a dragon statue on my shelf.
One last thing before I close the laptop tonight: if you're doing any holiday shopping for a gamer in your life this week, buy the base game if you're buying Fallout 76 at all, skip the fancy box. Save yourself the bag conversation entirely.