We need to talk about what IOI’s been doing to screw over their consumers for the past few years, and what this means for the upcoming Project 007.

I've seen people talk in this sub about how they're excited for it, that they're going to preorder it, etc, please read this entire post before upvoting or downvoting. In this post, I will lay out why IOI is not the developer you should be excited for, no matter how great you think the Hitman games were.

IOI has an extremely sketchy history of being incredibly consumer-unfriendly, and honestly, and I don’t use this term lightly, scummy towards their customers to try to get a quick buck. They’ve been doing things to Hitman fans for years that I don’t want to see them do to the James Bond fanbase, but unfortunately, there’s a lot of evidence that they will. In this thread, I will detail how they screwed over Hitman fans, and how they have a pattern of behavior that will most likely continue into Project 007.

1. DRM

Do you remember the old days when you used to buy a game, you’d take it home, and you’d pop it into your system? Some people even pretty much exclusively play video games on rainy, unproductive days, and that’s great, but the problem is that IOI doesn’t want you to do that, ever.

IOI made it so you have to always, I repeat, -always- be connected to the internet in order to play Hitman. They claim it’s to prevent cheating on the leaderboards, but cheating has run rampant on the leaderboards since 2016 and they haven’t done a single thing to change it.

DRM (Digital Rights Management) is implemented into Hitman in such a way that you can’t do hardly anything at all unless you’re connected to the internet. They hide the things you’ve unlocked away from you, they occasionally soft-lock you out of the game if the internet drops out, so you have to restart the game frequently, and where this is an issue, is that even with a high speed connection, you will experience frequent dropouts from the server that render you, at best, having to restart the console, and at worst, unable to play the game at all.

In the five years of the Hitman trilogy being periodically released (2016-2021), this hasn’t been fixed. With all of the patches they introduce, not a single one has been released to remove the DRM or improve server stability. This is expected to rear its ugly head in the Project 007 game. Have fun periodically resetting the game because IOI insists on you being connected to the internet at all times.

There were people who couldn’t even play the latest game for two fucking weeks after launch because they couldn’t connect to IOI’s servers.. And this is a single player game with no multiplayer features whatsoever. If they intend to have multiplayer in Project 007, since many Bond games are known for their multiplayer, you most likely will have the exact same experience.

1. Dishonesty

This is probably for the more technologically apt people, but still, you’ll be able to see the bullshit in this regardless:

In all of the Hitman games released 2016-2021, the game was set at 30 frames per second, but there was an option in settings, titled “UNLOCK FRAME RATE” which would allow the game to go above 30fps, anywhere up to 60fps, and resulted in a much, much smoother experience.

IOI conveniently left out, while they were taking preorders and everything, that the Xbox One version wouldn’t have this staple feature, despite being included in previous games on the same console, and have refused to respond to absolutely anyone on Twitter who asks about it, despite being very quick to respond to other users.

This is all the while (and you can check this for yourself) they’ve been publicly patting themselves on the back about “our game is so great!!” while retweeting positive game reviews for Hitman 3.

This wouldn’t be the worst thing a company could’ve done, but it leads directly into the next point:

1. No Refunds

If you’re wondering “well why haven’t people been returning their games if this is the issue?” and the simple answer is that they can’t.

Very, very many people were unable to play this game they paid anywhere from $60-80 dollars for at launch, and people tried to get refunds, only to be denied again and again. I, personally, tried to get a refund only to be completely ignored by IOI. You can see on hitman that many users have tried to get refunds either to be completely ignored or told “no” in response to them wanting a refund for a game they can’t even play.

1. Closing Thoughts

With all of these issues being commonplace for the Hitman franchise for the past 5 years and 3 games, with many people voicing concern about these issues, I have to wonder who in the world thinks Project 007 will be any different.

Vote with your dollar. If you can handle all of this and want to buy the game, go ahead, I’m not telling you not to, but what I’m doing here is something IOI refuses to do: I’m being honest and transparent about the Hitman franchise.