Ship Of Heroes Has Dropped 70% Of Its Peak In Three Days

The Wreck of the Heroic Fitzgerald.

I’d be willing to put down money that Ship of Heroes has already cemented its place as winning multiple awards for MMO sites and not for the good awards either. I said on Bluesky that Ship of Heroes would qualify as the dumbest decision of 2025 with its premium box price and premium subscription for what is clearly not a premium quality game.

Now that I’m thinking about it I’m going to put it in for worst developer response to criticism over a game launch this year. And their competition is Randy Pitchford, and when you outdo Randy Pitchford in putting your foot in your mouth you’re really gunning for gold.

But to get to the topic of the headline, Ship of Heroes launched with a peak user count of 100 and has since lost over 70% of that in the last three days and now can barely pitch over 30. And of the scant few players that Heroic Games could convince to buy in, only 27% think the game is worthy of a thumbs up on the Steam reviews.

I shudder to imagine where it will be in a week let alone a month let alone by the time MMO websites are publishing their awards for the end of the year. I tried Ship of Heroes during one of the beta tests and you couldn’t pay me to play that game. And I’ve been paid to play some real garbage.

I don’t know how much of the dev’s commentary is ignorance or just dishonesty. They tend to nitpick over the dumbest of details to try to get one over on posters and they act like angsty teenagers. For instance in one forum post the dev claims that the game price is actually $45 plus $15 for the first month’s subscription. I’m not sure how this is supposed to help the game’s value proposition.

The devs aren’t making a great argument for the game with their posts. I’ve seen them constantly whining about trolls and rude people and how the price of the game is partly to keep rude people away. In the same way that I set my house on fire to stop Christmas carolers from standing on my front porch that one year. Turns out it made the whole house uninhabitable.

They have said once or twice that they might consider a free trial once the “anti-fan” activity goes down, if it ever does, but also condescendingly adding that they would keep the poor demo players away from the paying customers if they did.

“After all, our regular players are literally paying us to keep the trolls on these forums out of their gaming experience.”

Yes I’m sure the 20-odd concurrent players are looking around thinking about how glad they are that there’s less people in the game.

Another example of either egregious ignorance or flat out lying is stating that devs have no control over regional pricing and that it’s all Steam. Here is Heroic Games’ comment:

“Pricing overseas is based on the Steam standard model and conversion rates. We don’t make any individual decisions about country pricing — it’s all Steam.”

Here is the public documentation from Valve on regional pricing:

As a service for helping you manage pricing across all our different currencies, Steam offers a recommendation for all other currencies, based on whatever USD price you choose. When you are entering your pricing for your game, you will notice Steam fill in a set of recommendations based on your selected USD price. You can use our recommendations for some, all, or none of the other currencies, as you see fit!

The devs have also blamed “Homecoming trolls” for review bombing the game on Steam, which itself is kind of funny because City of Heroes players are the only reason this game has anyone buying it period. Just a smidge ungrateful to the community whose prior support contributed to the game’s completion.

Oh and literally ain’t nobody dropping $60 on some borderline shovelware just to lower the review score. I’d like to note for posterity since the developers don’t know how Steam works that refunded products don’t contribute to the review score. There are a lot of users refunding their purchases though.

Of the 59 reviews, 11 of them had a processed refund attached to the review. Meaning the review score is actually inflated and higher than it should be because Steam doesn’t include refunded accounts in the review score.

Good luck to them.