A curious Google search result for Steam shows an insult directed at the competition from Epic Games Store. There’s also a middle finger. What’s going on?
What is the situation? If you now (as of February 19, 2:37 PM) search for “Steam Store” on google.com and focus the search results on the English language, you can expect a curious image.
Under the inscription “Welcome to Steam” you see an uppercase “FUCK EPIC GAMES STORE” along with some hieroglyphs. Has a big feud broken out between the platforms of Valve and Epic, or what’s going on?
This crazy search result was pointed out by the website VG247 . They also seem to have found the source for this nasty message.
What’s behind it? It seems that Google’s bots picked up a user review, which they then placed directly on the homepage of the search results for the Steam Store.
The player Rommel wrote a review for Metro Exodus on Steam (via steam) on February 17, stating the “FUCK EPIC GAMES STORE” message. Along with symbols that are meant to represent a middle finger on the review page. Hence the hieroglyphs on the Google search results page.
It is quite possible that Metro Exodus was supposed to be advertised in some way and that this user review automatically inserted itself into the advertisement when someone searched for “Steam” and “Store”. However, we do not know the exact reasons for this.
Metro Exodus as a bone of contention
The background: Behind the topics of Metro Exodus, Steam, and Epic Games Store lies a larger story. Originally, publisher Deep Silver planned to release Metro Exodus on Steam as well. However, it then became clear that the game would initially appear exclusively in the Epic Games Store. This was a big deal at the time, Epic Games declared war on Steam.
The fans of the shooter did not want to accept this and stated that they would rather not buy Metro Exodus at all than switch from their Steam to the Epic Games Store for it. They wanted to boycott it. There were then harsh words from a developer.
Since February 15, 2020, Metro Exodus has also been available for purchase on Steam.
What specifically caused this review to be displayed on Google is still unclear.
