Friday, February 15th 2019
Steam Fanatics Review-bomb "Metro Exodus" on Metacritic
"Metro Exodus" is the week's big AAA PC launch, and the latest entry to the post-apocalyptic horror-survival shooter franchise by 4A Games. The Ukrainian studio recently pulled the game from Steam and made it an exclusive with rival DRM platform Epic Games, in pursuit of a higher revenue-share. This invited inexplicable hatred from Steam users, who appear to have review-bombed the game on review ratings aggregator Metacritic.
Metacritic presents averages of reviews by media publications and user-reviews side-by-side. This is vital as it helps uninformed or undecided gamers know if a game is overrated by the media. In case of "Exodus," Much of the 0-rated user-reviews include lines that criticize the game's non-availability on Steam or its withdrawal from the platform. The Metacritic review-bombing is the latest episode in a long saga of animosity between Steam users and "Exodus" developer 4A Games. 4A Games did initially solicit pre-orders for the game on Steam, and abruptly stopped its sales late-January. Those who had pre-ordered would continue to receive the game and its updates. 4A muddied the waters further by responding to initial criticism from Steam users by threatening to desert the PC platform as a whole, inviting more bile from some really angry gamers. The game received "generally positive" reviews from professional game reviewers.
Source:
Metacritic
Metacritic presents averages of reviews by media publications and user-reviews side-by-side. This is vital as it helps uninformed or undecided gamers know if a game is overrated by the media. In case of "Exodus," Much of the 0-rated user-reviews include lines that criticize the game's non-availability on Steam or its withdrawal from the platform. The Metacritic review-bombing is the latest episode in a long saga of animosity between Steam users and "Exodus" developer 4A Games. 4A Games did initially solicit pre-orders for the game on Steam, and abruptly stopped its sales late-January. Those who had pre-ordered would continue to receive the game and its updates. 4A muddied the waters further by responding to initial criticism from Steam users by threatening to desert the PC platform as a whole, inviting more bile from some really angry gamers. The game received "generally positive" reviews from professional game reviewers.
157 Comments on Steam Fanatics Review-bomb "Metro Exodus" on Metacritic
pretty sure its been 100% explained.
The publisher is not going to put forth pc development money if the PC game makes no money due to people’s anger. He merely said what the likely result could be.
Less cost to consumers though? That's just not true, the game was cheaper on authorized resellers like the Razer store (before the Epic bribe) than it is on the Epic Store.
Personally I wouldn't mind the Epic Store if only they weren't bribing developers to make their games timed exclusive, that anti-competition practice has no place on an open market like the PC.
If a developers chooses to release a game exclusively on a specific store without the influence of a moneyhat/bribe, that's fine, but what Epic is doing though, paying devs to not release on Steam, that is not fine.
Children. Grow up.
so when intel were caught bribing best buys to only sell their cpu's and people found out and were then angry. you think other mfrs should have forced retailers to only sell their things in retaliation to the disgruntled customers voicing their pitiful opinions??
is this a case of 2 wrongs don't make a right but 3 will?
I am pretty sure things should be much smoother if they allow 2-3 days for the fans to buy it from steam before shutting it down.
Metacritic scores lose all relevance. If every time I get angry with a game or a publisher I generate hate campaigns to criticize the publisher and not the product in question, I'm doing things wrong.
This isn't how you compete with other platforms just buying in.
Removing the game from steam without any reasonable time for the customers to react is not ethical.
And, a company should always act towards customers not against them.
In this case, no warning period was a big NO NO, they are effectively deceiving the customer (and potential customers) on steam.
When Steam has exclusives (though more often than not, Steam keys are available on authorized 3rd party stores anyway), they're not the result of a bribe from Valve, Valve is not forcing anyone to not release outside of Steam. Meanwhile Epic is doing the opposite, they're bribing developers to not release on Steam.That's not what happened though. Epic made a deal with Deep Silver to make the game exclusive to the Epic Store for 1 year.
It was Koch Media and Deep silver
$10 cheaper on epic store vs steam. I don’t know how they are not passing the discount on to consumers. Wait til next year and you can buy on steam.
Also the Razer Store had the game for cheaper than the Epic Store before the Epic bribe (game got removed from there thanks to the exclusivity), so in the end the consumers only lose.