UPDATED 12:30 EDT / AUGUST 06 2015

NEWS

Indie game dev explains how Steam Reviews harshly punish early mistakes

Since introducing user reviews in late 2013, the Steam store has sometimes been overrun by reactionary mobs who leave negative reviews for all kinds of reasons, and one indie game developer says that Steam’s review system can easily kill a game over a small mistake, even if that mistake is quickly resolved.

Paul Johnson, co-founder of England-based Rubicon Development, admitted that his studio made some errors in its rush to push its free-to-play “hardcore CCG” Combat Monsters to the market when it was suddenly and unexpectedly approved for Steam Greenlight.

“We were elated at this news and dropped everything to get the Steam version up to speed and published – adding the achievements, doing the payment processing, making the store page, stuff like that,” Johnson wrote on the studio’s blog. “In our mad rush though, we’d forgotten to step back and actually make a good job of finishing off the PC version for the public.”

Johnson explained that Combat Monsters is a cross-platform game, and because day to day development was done on PC, the team took the PC version for granted and had not realized that the current build was not final and still lacked keyboard shortcuts and other important features. He also explained that the game’s PC interface focused too heavily on cash shop items, a carry-over from the mobile version.

Johnson said, “On mobile this is kinda needed to some extent … On PC though this comes across as pushy and greedy, and boy did the public let us know!”

“We fixed all this about six months ago … And it’s done us no good at all”

Combat Monsters -  Rubicon Development

Johnson explained that despite all of the efforts Rubicon went through to resolve the issues with Combat Monsters, it still could not overcome the initial negative response to the game.

“We fixed all this about six months ago,” Johnson said. “Not just that, but since then we’ve also shipped a number of massive game expansions, drastically increasing the amount of play options to way, way beyond our competitors. And it’s done us no good at all.”

While you can read individual reviews for games on Steam, the real determining factor for many potential players is the aggregate opinion listed at the top of a game’s store page. This provides the overall sentiment of the user reviews based on a percentage. For example, any game with at least 70 percent good reviews is considered Positive, and higher percentages can be Mostly Positive, Very Positive, and Overwhelmingly Positive. Anything that falls below 40 percent is considered Negative, with further designations for Mostly Negative, Very Negative, and Overwhelmingly Negative.

Games that fall in-between the 40 to 70 percent range are called  Mixed, but Johnson explained that when gamers are trying to decide what games to play, Mixed can be just as bad as Negative, and it can be almost impossible to climb out of the hole once you have fallen in.

“Since that first fix, we’ve had almost exclusively good player reviews, often waxing at length about how generous the game is, the wealth of options, how easy it is to play for free, the works. All stuff we want to hear because it’s what we intended, and more in keeping with our outlook generally. We’re no longer seen as those greedy and pushy chancers we never were.”

Combat Monsters Steam Store

While fixing the issues with Combat Monsters may not have been enough to improve the game’s score, the subsequent attention it has gotten thanks to Johnson’s blog post has helped push the game out of Mixed and into Mostly Positive with just four new reviews since the time he wrote it. Still, Johnson believes that the Steam Review system could be improved to take into account recent improvements.

“Apple have a system on their App Store where they show all reviews, but they prioritise ones based on newer versions of the App,” Johnson said. “More importantly, the average player rating is calculated from ONLY the latest build. If there aren’t enough new reviews in yet, it simple says so and doesn’t show a score at all.”

He added, “If our Steam presence worked the same way, I’m pretty sure that by now we’d be well into ‘mostly positive’ territory, maybe in the hallowed ‘overwhelmingly positive’. And biased as I am, I think that would be totally fair to be honest. We listened to our complaints, fixed all the issues and represented our game to the world anew. Since then, we’ve had nothing but positive feedback from the small numbers of players we do pick up. But our ‘score’ is still based heavily on a version so old now that nobody can even remember it, and it’s still doing damage.”

Photo by hans s 
Game image credit: Rubicon Development via Steam

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