It’s at a 9% score.
This is a great time to remind the gaming industry about MMO Fallout’s Professional Consulting Services. For a mere $100/hour I will review anything you want me to; tweets, press releases, news posts, letters to the community, letters to investors, anything really. And the purpose of the consultation is for me to say “I’d probably think twice about doing this if I was you.”
And yeah, $100/hour might seem like a lot, but a couple hundred bucks is probably less than what Gaijin Entertainment has lost when they blew in from Stupid Town this week. War Thunder is currently in the middle of being blown out in reviews, and I refuse to call it a review bomb because that tends to imply the players are wrong or at least overreacting.
After years of mucking around with the economy and gradually making the free game less palatable, Gaijin Entertainment officially hit the “find out” phase of this experiment when they posted about big changes to the game’s economy and players did not take it well. Over 60,000 negative scores on Steam have brought the game down to a 9% recent review score, and Gaijin Entertainment appear to be so embarrassed that they’ve actually stopped listing Steam as a store on the War Thunder home page.
Let’s be clear; everything around this is Gaijin Entertainment’s fault. The player sentiment, the massive influx of negative reviews, the hostility from the player base. All of it the end product of a company gradually seeing how far they can push their customers over years until they break, now shocked that they broke.
But what really caught my eye was the somewhat snarky, mostly disingenuous, completely embarrassing comment about the negative reviews where Gaijin like an abusive spouse blames the players for the bad things that might happen because new players are driven off seeing how badly Gaijin treats its customers.
So review bombing does damage to the game in that new players simply won’t try it, while it doesn’t raise their awareness of the problems you’ve noticed. If your goal is not to hurt the game, please use other, less destructive ways. For example, leave feedback in our forum, and suggestions specifically about the economy we are inviting in the feedback form. Also, review bombing will not cause modifying or nullifying in-game prices – if the game is shut down, no one wins.
Whoever wrote this is either an idiot or far less manipulative than they think they are. Review bombing doesn’t raise awareness of problems? Clearly a lie. Gaijin Entertainment has been well aware of the problems that have existed around the game for years, given they deliberately manufactured those problems.
Players can also see past the obvious attempt at hiding feedback by asking players to do so in a way that historically speaking can be safely ignored like on the forums where players can be banned and silenced rather than Steam where Gaijin has no control over review visibility.
And as for the “no one wins,” oh well. If you genuinely can’t survive as a company because players didn’t like your awful business decisions, maybe you don’t deserve to exist as a company. If new people don’t play War Thunder because the game has a 9% review score, there’ll be nobody to blame but Gaijin Entertainment for it.
We try to proceed according to the principle “do no harm” and change the game carefully. However, if a topic receives a lot of support from the community – we do everything possible to support the players.
I don’t think anyone actually believes this, least of all the person at Gaijin who wrote it.
MMO Fallout 