Legit surprised it’s this bad, tbh. I was expecting some amount of people to review bomb it, but thought that at worst it’ll maybe hang around “mixed”. Let’s be honest, besides the monetization model, it’s a fairly solid game, and I assumed many people were willing to overlook it (because it’s a “free game”, blegh).
2023 starting to shape up to be the year where megacorps overreach a bit too much and/or consumers to finally grow a backbone.
I actually went through some of the positive reviews, seems they are only thumbs up because I assume people want their posts to be read - a lot of them are just memes and shitposts.
I was initially also a bit surprised by the amount of it, but after thinking about it for a bit, Blizzard seems to have engineered the perfect conditions for this to happen:
- Create a massively successful game for PC, which also creates a giant group of people who care about the game.
- Make a bunch of bad decisions, which are particularly bad for the existing user base.
- Only then release the game on Steam, meaning there are no positive reviews from the launch period and a bunch of disgruntled former players, all of which are allowed to review the game because the game has become F2P.
Review bombing seems so silly
Review bombing is the only impactful way in recent years that has worked against these large publishers. Plus Overwatch is F2P so the old trick of just saying don’t buy it doesn’t work, they will still get a player base with giant “whales”.
Edit: Never played the game btw
Last I checked the game was 13th highest in revenue globally on steam according to the stats available on steam. So the negative reviews don’t seem to be making much impact at all. They still seem to be pulling in plenty of money from their MTX and the bundles available through steam.
Remember these companies only look at the funny profit line. If that goes up despite negative reviews then nothing will change.
I didn’t know it was on Steam. Had that stupid blizzard launcher just for OG Overwatch
They released it on Steam on August 10th because player engagement was on the decline: https://gamerant.com/overwatch-2-player-count-down/
Maybe they should look at why engagement is down among their existing players instead of trying to shovel in new ones…
I think they just released it
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Good riddance, literally overwatch 1 game with more .icro transactions. Not to mention they took down overwatch 1 so you can’t play it anymore… not to me tonight the co-op was suppose to come out and be free they said nope we aren’t doing it, then they did it and it’s a paid feature as far as I know now. Blizzard is the worst
Wow, they took down Overwatch 1? That’s really messed up…
Even if you buy a physical copy of Overwatch 1 in a store, when you pop it in your system, it’ll install Overwatch 2 instead.
When did Flatout 3 move out of the top spot?
I first read it as Fallout 3, and thought that can’t be right!
The gameplay got a lot better when Overwatch 2 dropped, and then they just killed it with a lack of content, both multiplayer and story mode.
Pray tell how was it improved? By making the teams smaller thus lowering team variability? By changing one of the most fun mechanics to be only mild annoyances? By removing features that actually made the game fun?
Shield Shooting Simulator got old pretty fast, as did the nonstop CC spam. The move to 5v5 has made the game way more consistently balanced and fun to play.
6v6 -> 5v5 made the gameplay MUCH better. The new heroes weren’t disappointing at all, the game seemed like it was going in a good direction. I disagree on your last two points, and the first one is not relevant to what I said, as that was a major improvement to Overwatch. Too many barriers and abilities on the field in 6v6, and the switch to 5v5 immediately made the game more rewarding and fun.
For what it’s worth, pcgamer.com just had an article talking about this. They said it’s not really review bombing but more of a pulse check on how gamers feel about OW2. Battle.net doesn’t have a review system so this is just the first opportunity for gamers to express how they feel about the game in this way
Well, there is the MetaCritic user score too. It currently sits at 1.4, so it should surprise nobody.
The game is currently being review bombed. Valve will soon do a big cleaning: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/valve-to-remove-off-topic-review-bombs-from-steam-user-scores
But it’s blizzard who bombed their own game…
9% of 75K reviews are positive. I’m very curious how many will be removed. Also does Blizzard have a review system for their games? Curious how these reviews could be considered “off topic” if there’s no first-party system to compare them to.
The reviews don’t get removed, they’re just hidden by default. And it’s considered off topic if the content of the reviews is about something that a team at Valve determines to be unlikely to help a new player decide if they want to play the game.
Like this “review”:
The steam post that is referring to is about 3 1/2 years old.
If there was a proper way for people to express the problem then that would be great. But, as it stands with F2P games, and ones as complicated as Overwatchs history, well, fucking Steam slaughter is AN option for most. Fuck the game and company, there are no redeeming values. Even if these there is a dilution of review efficacy, oh well.
Doesn’t matter the reviews or review bombing to Blizzard. The fact remains that no matter how actually shitty the game is Blizzard is making record profits off of the game.
That’s all Blizzard looks at these days. Is it making them money? And the answer is an abundant yes. So for whatever hate there is, the fact that players are still handing them fistfuls of cash indicates full success to them.
That’s all any publicly traded company looks at because that’s all that actually matters for them
I guess this could be a glass half full kind of situation.
But they also are not making as much money as they could have if they delivered on a good game. Even if they got only 5% of steam, that is still 95% of steam that didn’t buy it.
Sure, you can make the argument that they still got into a new market. However, if your product was scientifically engineered to appeal to the most demographics, then only 5% of that market is concerning.
Review bombing doesn’t actually help anyone, it just makes people question the validity of user reviews in general.
The situation kind of reminds me of titty streamers on Twitch. Everybody seemingly “hates” them yet they make an absolute killing regardless, because the silent majority think it’s perfectly fine.
While I completely understand the hc gamer community hating the game, I personally, as a 37 yo working person, have had co-op and solo fun for over 200h with a few friends.
For me, that’s well worth the price of the game. And no I won’t be buying any passes and I won’t even finish season 1 because there’s nothing really that new there, but objectively D4 was a good fucking game, especially for couch co-op lovers.
If they’re making record profits why did they decide to come to steam?
I think their player numbers have dropped and they’re trying to boost them.
It seems most likely to me that it’s prep for the rest of the Microsoft deal so they can claim to regulators they aren’t using their ever-growing control to choke out other platforms. Same reason they’re making those promises about Call of Duty on Switch.
More money.
That’s literally any of this is lol
Steam takes 30%. If they thought they could drive people to their standalone launcher they would be doing that
I don’t think that is correct; Steam usually takes 30%, but I thought some of the larger publishers negotiated different (secret) rates.
I’ve been mostly out of the loop for overwatch but my guess is so that can have even more recorder profits
I shudder to think what they’ll do for recordest profits
They’re gonna do the profitiest profit that anyone has ever profited
I liked the part where Bobby Kotick said “its profiting time” and then profited all over the place
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And thats where it fricking belongs.
I’m not s fan but if you really think it’s the worst game on Steam woof…
Yea, one thing I would love to see on Lemmy that I rarely saw on Reddit are level-headed gamers when it came to controversies.
Civility argument is about protecting the powerful. Let people have opinions. We all know why people are upset. Downplaying it just makes someone sound like an apologist.
People are voicing their opinions, what’s the big deal? We should all agree with these gamer tantrums?
We should all agree with these gamer tantrums?
no, why should we? But should gobble up the lies and the shit corpos give to use? No, absolutely not.
No, I would think the proper response is to stop playing this game and giving it attention rather than continuing to play it but leaving a negative review. Whatever, we’re all free to do as we please, but the decision making doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It’s also clearly not the worst game on Steam, because people still want to play it.
“Tantrums” show your true purpose: denigration.
Yeah these review bombings are ridiculous, so what? Am I not free to express my opinion? And I’m not quite sure how anyone’s not allowed to have their opinion, if it’s dumb then you can call it dumb.
It’s not a review bombing to review a deliberately hostile game as a bad game.
Are the reviewers not allowed to express their opinions even though other people think it’s dumb?
Why is it on the reviewer to be level-headed and not the consumer?
Take some personal responsibility. If you see a game at 1/10, read the reviews. Do some research.
You’ll get much further teaching yourself to be smart instead of teaching society to be smart.
it belongs there because its simply Overwatch 1 without all the features promissed for Overwatch 2. 80 gigabytes from /dev/random has more worth that this “game” and its cheaper!
For sure, agreed. Major downgrade and when I tried it at launch it still had the same queue problems OW1 had so not like they even fixed anything for a casual player.
But I’m pretty sure we both know Overwatch 2 isn’t the worst game available. (I’m not going to go out of my way defend OW2 to anyone, it’s not worth it.)
The way steam reviews work is a pure recommend or do not recommend syatem.
Its more accurate GBE say ow2 is the least recommended game of all time, not the worst
It makes more sense to think about it like that.
Did I say that somewhere?
And calling review bombers reviewers, like they offer legitimate unique criticism is kinda funny too.
