In recent months, Epic has drawn the ire of many gamers with exclusive deals for their store. In response, fans have bombarded the games with poor reviews. Has it made a difference?
Why are players angry at Epic? After announcing their own online store for games, Epic set out to fill it with titles.
In doing so, they managed to snag some highly sought-after games as exclusive or time-exclusive for their store. With these games, Epic aims to compete with the current market giant, Steam. Among the games that will not appear on Steam for the time being are:
- Metro: Exodus (exclusive until 2020)
- Borderlands 3 (exclusive for 6 months)
- Dauntless
- The Division 2 (also on Uplay)
- The Outer World (exclusive for 1 year)
- Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, and Detroit Become Human, which were once Sony-exclusive, are only available on PC for the Epic Store
Epic is likely using the vast amount of money they earned from their battle royale hit Fortnite, to entice developers to their side.
This, along with the store’s weak security measures, has caused a great deal of upheaval among PC gamers and often led to full-blown shitstorms.
How are players fighting back against Epic? To express their frustration, many players have started bombarding the relevant games with poor reviews.
However, since the Epic Store does not offer a review option, this occurred on other platforms such as Steam or Metacritic. The initial targets of the bombing were the Metro series games: Metro 2033 and Last Light received 600 to 700 negative reviews each within a few days.
The Borderlands games faced a similar fate. Following the announcement of the time-exclusive deal for Borderlands 3 with the Epic Store, the predecessor titles were torn apart on Steam.
This pattern is also repeating with the latest victim of review bombing: Rocket League. The negative reviews came after the announcement that Epic has now acquired the developer of Rocket League.
Although the developers assured that Rocket League will continue to be supported by Steam, they were inundated with poor reviews. After the release in the Epic Store, however, the sale of Rocket League on Steam will be halted.
How are developers responding? The head of Gearbox, Randy Pitchford, responded on Twitter to the shitstorm caused by the exclusive deal for Borderlands 3.
Pitchford stated that the review bombing on Steam somewhat confirmed his opinions, and he believes that switching to Epic was a good idea.
In the case of Borderlands 3, the decision for the deal probably did not rest with the developer Gearbox, but with the publisher 2K Games, as Pitchford explained on Twitter. This would mean that the wrong people were targeted.
Ironically, that this misuse is possible and that Steam has no interest in correcting this misuse makes me kind of happy about 2k’s decision and makes me want to reconsider Gearbox Publishing’s current posture on the platform.
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) April 5, 2019
Epic’s CEO, Tim Sweeney, has also addressed the criticism of their exclusives. In a tweet, he stated that Epic would immediately stop making exclusive deals as soon as Steam lowers the revenue share from game sales to 12%. It is currently at 30%.
He also stated that short-term deals like those for Metro Exodus will never be made again, as they are extremely frustrating for the players.
Has the review bombing made a difference? The strategy of review bombing seems to have yielded little for the angry players. The developers and publishers who decided to switch to Epic have not changed their opinions so far because of this.
Even with Metro: Exodus, the protests and calls for a boycott had little success. The game achieved double the number of sales at launch in the Epic Store compared to its predecessors on Steam. So it has not significantly harmed the title.
In response to these bombing actions, Steam introduced a new filter to counteract the sharp increase in negative reviews.
On a special graph, players can now see when a review bombing occurred and how it affected the game’s rating. This allows them to form their own opinion about the situation.
There will surely be more shitstorms and review bombings in the future that will follow as responses to Epic’s exclusive deals. However, their actual impact and the likelihood of changing anything are questionable.
