Escape from Tarkov dev's latest wheeze is to offer players $50 'compensation' after a price U-turn, but rather than a refund it's a one-time use $50 Tarkov voucher

It has been a terrible month for Escape from Tarkov. The hardcore extraction shooter, developed by Battlestate Games, has had some ups and downs over the eight years since it was first released into beta, and is one of those where the most devoted players seem to love and hate it in equal measure. It can sometimes be hard, as a Tarkov-watcher, to know when something's gone badly wrong (as it occasionally does), or when people are just blowing off steam before heading back in for another round.

But this time is different, and it's an entirely self-inflicted disaster from BSG. In late April the developer announced a new package, Escape from Tarkov: Unheard Edition, that cost $250 and included access to a long-awaited PvE mode with co-op and persistent progress (the main game in Tarkov is wiped semi-regularly). Problem was that all players wanted this mode and, in particular, a subset had previously purchased the $150 Edge of Darkness Edition (no longer available, viewable here) which promised "free access to all subsequent DLCs."

BSG claimed the new mode wasn't DLC. You can probably guess how well that went, and the pushback from its community became ferocious. The studio tried to convince players things weren't all that bad but no-one was being fooled and, in the end, the time from announcement to complete U-turn was six days.

As PC Gamer's resident Tarkov expert Jake Tucker put it shortly afterwards, Escape from Tarkov had "wiped out years of goodwill in one catastrophic week." 

Despite the reverse-ferret from BSG, some bad blood yet lingers among the playerbase. One of the things BSG promised was «compensation» of some kind for owners of the Edge of Darkness Edition (the old one that was supposed to include everything). As it was, BSG initially offered these players the chance to upgrade to the Unheard Edition (the villain of the piece) for the low price of $100, and yes I'm being sarcastic. 

This was another thing that got rolled back: BSG lowered the upgrade