this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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This is stupid. I have no love for Overwatch or Blizzard - I've been boycotting them for years, in fact. But there are far, far worse games on Steam than OW2. The fact that, to my knowledge, it runs properly, doesn't have crypto miners built into it, and isn't just made from stolen assets already puts it at like a 5/10 at minimum.
I'm all for consumers standing up for themselves and being critical or poor products, but I really wish people wouldn't get caught up in these hate bandwagons.
Correct me if I'm wrong (I've never left a Steam review before), but isn't the way Steam reviews work is that you either leave a thumbs up or a thumbs down? There doesn't seem to be any rating scale. The "score" displayed on this page is presumably based on the ratio between positive and negative reviews, and the only thing it tells you is that about 90% of players aren't convinced that whatever the game has to offer earnes it a recommendation, not that they all thought it deserved a 1 out of 10.
Yup. No way to give it a 5/10. With so many people (IMO rightfully) disappointed with what they turned Overwatch into, of course they won't recommend it. Though no doubt some people now only want to pile on the negative reviews for fun.
Well it's also easy to see this as review bombing, when infact, this is just the first time everyone is actually allowed to review the game at the source. Blizzard was just deleting bad reviews on their own platform so this is the first place the game is hosted that people are free to voice their complaints.
Oh it’s absolutely for fun, from people who don’t even play the game. They were planning this on the Steam forums for weeks.
People feel overwhelmingly negative about the game. This is an accurate representation of that. I don't see the issue here. It's one of the few ways to get Blizzard to actually listen, they can't ignore the public perception here like they do on literally every other platform. It's a massive money hungry studio, no need to defend or feel bad for them.
It’s not representative of how people who actually play the game feel, at least not in my experience.
My old OW1 crew came back for OW2 and we’ve been playing pretty religiously since. It’s not perfect and we all have complaints, but it is such a clear improvement over where OW1 was from ~2018 to 2022.
A lot of the monetization complaints ring hollow since the game is far more generous with free hero and cosmetic unlocks than alternatives like Valorant or Apex.
Then why aren't they voting it up to counter the negative reviews?
Blizzard aren't worth going out of your way to defend with a review, but the game is fun enough that people playing it are probably doing just that - playing the game.
For my part, my friend group have played pretty regularly since OW1 released, and continue to do so. The game has its problems but they're no more egregious than the ones in games like Apex or PUBG, and certainly not bad enough to put it in the same league as all the hentai crypto mining asset-flips littering Steam these days.
I have played the game on and off since 2017 with the same group of people. We complain about issues but still overall like the game. I don't play the game on Steam so I have no reason to jump on there to defend the game in a review. I imagine lots of people who have played OW for years are in the same boat.
These kinds of lists have to factor in popularity too though. Otherwise the top 1,000 would all be shovelware with 1 or 2 negative votes. It's not interesting or useful to point out that the games no one is going to play anyway are bad. A game that's popular enough to even make it onto the list obviously isn't going to actually literally be the worst game on Steam. That's just how it has to work.
I wish Amazon worked that way. Sort by reviews and you get random Chinese garbage with 1 5* review from the importer's mom.
The old 'most reviews' sort on newegg.com was honestly the best way to find decent stuff. Well that combined with comprehensive filters to narrow the search down significantly. There are certain products you just can't successfully search for on Amazon because there's no way to filter out the irrelevant trash.
To me, the retaliation should be proportional to expectations, size of the dev, and the blatantness of the money grab. If you're gonna pull shit, expect to get roasted. It's our only defense against tactics in the gaming industry. My only concern is are we making enough of a dent in their wallet? Because if not then none of these shenanigans even matter.
I agree for the most part. However, due to how Steam only lets its users review games in a binary manner of good or bad, and how prominent Overwatch 2 is (major publisher, highly advertised), I think this is a case where it is warranted.
It's easy to assume that everyone has the same level of interest and enthusiasm in the game's industry to follow all of the shitty practices, both in terms of development and just in general, that Blizzard has demonstrated over the years, but people like us are not the target audience for their ads and we aren't the people they're trying to get to play OW2.
Most people who fire up Steam don't know who Blitzchung is. They haven't heard about the whole breast milk thing, or about the bathroom camera thing. On top of that, they haven't looked into anything about OW2, so they won't know about how the game was only developed to move the previous entry's player base into the new fleecing "free"-to-play model. They won't know about the promised, yet cut content. They'll just see the banner ad and click on it to check to see what the game is all about. Seeing an immediate overwhelmingly negative review is going to make them pause and then check out the comments to see what's going on.
And also this is really the only way Gamers have to let their voices be heard against gaming companies like this. The statement of vote with your wallet doesn't work with a free-to-play title like this. It also doesn't matter, because whales are going to play it anyway and that's where all of their money comes from. The overwhelmingly negative review at the very least could potentially prevent additional people from falling victim to their schemes.
Overwatch is far from the worst game on steam but it is not a good game. It could be so much better if blizzard was still passionate about making good games but they are only passionate about nickle and diming now. We ALL need to stop giving them money. I gave in and bought diablo 4 and already stopped playing it, there's just not enough substance to keep me coming back... The seasonal stuff is just a boring grind and I just feel bad about giving them my money, especially with all I know about how they treat their own employees. Just done with them.
I'm with you there. I regret buying D4 and it'd probably the last Blizzard game I'll ever buy unless MS cleans house when they acquire them.
Why the (obliquely homophobic/misogynistic) hate in the second half of your comment? No need for that here, friend. Be(e) Kind.
You could have made your point in a much more constructive and kind way very easily.
Like I said, I've been actively boycotting Blizzard for years now; I'm not sure why you think I'd want to "slop on their dick". But yes, if a game is fine on a technical level and mediocre in every other sense, why wouldn't it be a 5/10? A game that runs properly and is otherwise unnoteworthy is probably already better than the average game out there. There's a lot of shovelware.
There's a reason review outlets like IGN rarely give scores below 5/10 - it's that almost any AA or AAA studio is going to be competent enough to get their game to run and have something to it. Even Redfall is a 5/10 on Metacritic. 5/10 games aren't generally worth your time, but that's only because there are so many 7+/10 games competing for your time/attention.
Even though I have no love for Blizzard as a company, and have never played Overwatch 2, I refuse to believe it's in the bottom half of all games ever. A lot of the grievances I've seen about it seem completely justified, but it's not a game that's truly awful. It's good on a technical level. It has good art direction. The characters are unique and identifiable, even to people who've never played Overwatch. I get that people don't like the balance, they don't like Blizzard's money-grabbing, they don't like the change to 5v5(?), and they don't like whatever else people are complaining about. But that doesn't make it the worst game on Steam, and it doesn't make every single aspect of it bad.
Steam doesn't let you actually rate a game; only recommend it or not. So, a game may be a 7/10, but if people can't recommend it for something like its monetary practices or frequent bugs/crashes, then it can end up on that list. That low rating doesn't necessarily mean people think it's the worst game on Steam, but rather that only about 10% of players think it's worth playing. Though, it's also worth mentioning that it has something like a 1.2 rating on Metacritic. It's generally considered a worse game than its predecessor in many aspects (including the readability of its characters, apparently. I guess they made some changes to the original characters' models that made them less identifiable?), and the reasoning behind shutting down the first one for this new free to play model was canceled. It's also been having issues with player attrition leading up to the Steam release, so the complaints don't seem unwarranted, but this probably wouldn't be happening if these players had some other outlet for their grievances.