Over lack of account integration.
World of Tanks has arrived on Steam, and if you read the headline for this article you know that the internet is not happy. Wargaming’s tank-based MMO is more than ten years old, and they finally made the moves this (last) month to bring the title to the Steam storefront. In the two days since launch, World of Tanks has accrued a 36% “mostly negative” rating out of 1,412 reviews (as of this writing).
So why is everyone upset?
Well it’s a simple matter of poor user experience. Players are angry over the fact that their World of Tanks accounts will not transfer over to Steam. Unlike most other companies who launch their existing games on Steam, Wargaming is requiring users to start fresh with new Steam accounts. In addition players are simply angry over World of Tanks and its history of pay to win monetization practices.
We did a cursory check of the negative reviews and out of 835 negative reviews, 184 reference accounts in some fashion (in English). Wargaming’s FAQ addresses the account issue directly;
Unfortunately, you will not be able to use your existing account to log into World of Tanks via Steam. Initially, we never assumed that access to our game could be multi-platform and, to our great regret, we will not be able to provide access to existing accounts via Steam.
In other words, you can blame the shoddy work Wargaming put into building their account system years back. Alternately Wargaming may just not want to introduce existing players to the Steam ecosystem where they would have to give a portion of sales to Valve.
Who knows.
MMO Fallout 