Aaron Keller pledged to improve the game for “players who are playing now.”

      • A review bomb is when people start jumping down the game’s throat with negative reviews for shit unrelated/peripheral to the game. If they’re triggered by the actual core design choices of the game it isn’t a review bomb.

        These reviews are because the game is a money grubbing downgrade from the game people bought and had taken away from them, and this is the first opportunity they had to publish a review on a storefront. The motivation being the actual game means it can’t be a review bomb.

        • So if General motors was using slave labour to build their cars and feeding said labour with baby kittens, would you consider it a review bomb for someone to say ‘You shouldn’t buy the latest vehicle from General motors because of the way it is made’?

          What if general motors came out and said that they think a great start to the day is to wake up and punch a dutchman in the face?

          A review is, ultimately, a recommendation of whether or not you think other people should buy this product. If you can’t recommend it because of something the company who made it did, to me, it’s still a review. Because recommending that product is recommending financial support of that company. Not recommending it, is not supporting them.

          For me a real review bomb would occur generally only in a case where a site like 4chan might suddenly spin a wheel of mayhem and pick a random game to just go shit on or something like that.

          • You tried to argue with someone else over this, but the fact that more people played it, being F2P, means that more people can agree that they wouldn’t recommend it. Given how Steam ratings work, that makes it the worst rated. There’s no arguing how it is. You seem to take an issue with it as if it meant Gabe Newell personally stamped it with a 0/10, which is not how it works.

            In Steam, being 4/10 for thousands of people is worse than being 0/10 for a couple people.

      • Based on what?

        The negatives are extremely bad, and people are legitimately reviewing the game negatively because they legitimately think it’s a pile of shit.

        It is literally unconditionally impossible for it to be a review bomb if the reviews are motivated by the core design decisions of the game.

        • Today’s concurrent player peak is ~47k.

          Why would 47k people choose to play the game when it’s the worst game on Steam? Literally worse than a game like Bad Rats: the Rats’ Revenge that fundamentally doesn’t function correctly. For reference, its peak today was about 20 players.

          Before you reply with something like “marketing”, you seriously think that if Bad Rats launched today, and with the same marketing budget as OW2, that it would achieve anywhere close to 47k players peak 10 months after its release?

          Like I said: you’re disconnected from reality if you think OW2 is the worst game on Steam.

          • You are really trying to downplay the power of marketing, but you seem to realize that gets people playing. Not only that but live service design is very effective at keeping people playing even when they are not having any fun whatsoever. Because they gotta grind the battle pass and such. Extrinsic rewards and habit-forming conditioning making up for a lack of intrinsic enjoyment.

            Still, I would agree with you that it’s not the worst game on Steam, but like I mentioned in the other comment, that’s not what steam ratings mean. It means that the vast majority people would not recommend it, and that seems pretty reasonable.

            • bf2042 had a playercount in the high 1000s 2 months after its launch

              ow2 released 10 months ago

              are you saying bf2042 didn’t have marketing?

              which is more likely:

              • 50k people have been brainwashed into playing the game every day, and similar numbers into watching it on twitch
              • there is review bombing
    • Playing the matches is fun, since it is just Overwatch. Literally the same gameplay as Overwatch, but with 5 per team instead of 6.

      In between is an assault of micro transaction manipulation bullshit that ruins the experience. PvE is hidden behind a paywall, except for the free stuff that is a retread of the seasonal PvE from Overwatch. I know this because I gave it some hours to see if it was as bad as people were saying.

      People hate it because it was supposed to be an improvement but instead it was just another attempt to bleed the players dry. It might be the only game I have reviewed negatively on steam because the monetization really is that bad that it ruins the whole game.

  • "Aaron Keller gets that (people are upset). “That announcement was about an ambitious project that we ultimately couldn’t deliver.”

    On one end, he could be lying, after all it’s not like they didn’t have working prototypes and cinematic for the new game mode that wasn’t deliverable

    Or.

    He is telling the truth. Then making people return to the office impacted blizzard’s bottom line more then they thought and was a stupid decision that they should end ASAP.

  • If you’re the game director and had so little sway to the producers /publishers, then you’re nothing but a “yes man” figure head. Maybe go back to dev, the executive role isn’t for you.

    Otherwise, the only excuse is you initiated all these changes and you are completely out of touch with your customers.