After clawiing our way up to "mostly positive" ranking on Steam with #TheAwayTeam's Lost Exodus update, we're back at "mixed" again. This hurt's the game's visibility to people who do appreciate it. If you enjoy the game, please consider leaving a review https://store.steampowered.com/app/426290/The_Away_Team_Lost_Exodus/
It's important to note that this isn't a game that attempts to capitalise on impulse buys. It has a playable demo and clearly positions itself as an interactive novel. It's difficult see buying & leaving a negative review that only says "Boring..." as appropriate in this system.
@Cheeseness I looked at these and another games recent reviews. Seems like it is pretty easy to fall into the 'mixed' category on Steam nowadays. By my approximate guess I'd say both games should be 'mostly positive',
@murks AFIK, the thresholds haven't changed - you need 70% for "mostly positive," and we just hit 69%.
Obviously, "mixed" should be "balanced," and "mostly positive" being below neutral "positive" makes no sense to me. Even without taking into consideration the fundamentally unhealthy way the review system ends up squashing things that don't have universal appeal, it's all broken and backwards
@murks The Away Team had spent a long time as a sub-$2 game in the hopes of getting broader exposure before I came onboard. That brought in a lot of people who weren't interested in the game and seemed to make negative reviews more likely.
@murks When the update launched, we pushed up the price to $8 and did a lot of outreach to existing customers to make sure we addressed their concerns in historic negative reviews. Were able to climb back up out of that, but it still haunts us and we were never really far from falling back under. Often feels like all it takes is a couple of joke reviews and someone feeling like a review is the right place to report a bug :/
@Cheeseness I noticed those bug report reviews as well, very odd. Also those seem to be mostly people with very broken systems.
I left a short review for The Away Team, hope it helps. I don't usually leave reviews but I should really do this more often for games I enjoy.
Do the reviews count if the game was received for free? I don't recall whether I bought the other game I was talking about on top of getting it for testing. It's also on mixed currently.
@murks They're all super appreciated, but Valve only allows reviews of things that were bought on Steam to count toward the store page ranking (supposedly there were big problems with developers selling keys in exchange for positive reviews years ago)
@kazriko @Cheeseness On one hand the measure sounds reasonable, but that sounds like a real problem.
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@kazriko @Cheeseness It's similar for me, I got a lot through Humble or itch.io since until recently I didn't buy any games on Steam directly. On top of that I got some keys from developers for testing and those tend to be games I care about the most.
@Cheeseness @kazriko Yeah, a bit. If I like the game and the developers then I'm not going to leave a negative review.
On the other hand people leave negative reviews because they don't like the publisher or their system is so broken that an otherwise stable game crashes constantly. People leave negative or positive reviews for many reasons aside from the quality of the game. I guess it balances out somewhat maybe.
@murks @kazriko There was sarcasm there :)
That's an incredibly broad area covered by that "maybe," and it kind of carries the assumption that the thoughts of someone who does like a thing are by default of equal weight as the thoughts of someone who does not like a thing, which feels off to me?
Since "people who don't like a thing" also includes "people who can't appreciate a thing," the latter has be less likely to be equipped to discuss the nuance of a subjective experience
@Cheeseness @kazriko I doubt anyone at Steam ever gave it that much thought.
It's one vote per account, up or down. Done.