Deep SilverThe upcoming FPS horror adventure Metro Exodus was recently announced to be exclusive to the Epic store on PC, and won’t be available on Steam as a result.
This came as something of a shock to everyone, given the announcement was made just three weeks before the game’s scheduled date of February 15 and a ton of customers had already preordered the game via Steam (though Epic will be honouring those preorders, to be fair).
Deep SilverSome fans of the series have responded to this news in a calm and measured manner. A phrase which means here that they’re currently review bombing the Metro games that actually are on Steam.
The logic is presumably sound in the heads of the people doing this. For obvious reasons, they can’t review bomb Metro Exodus on Steam, so they’ve had to turn to the earlier games in the series; Metro 2033 Redux and Metro: Last Light Redux.
The majority of these negative reviews are being pretty upfront about their reasoning, even acknowledging that 2033 and Last Light are good games, which surely makes this entire exercise even more pointless.
Just take a look at the graph below, which shows the massive influx of bad reviews 2033 has had since the Epic news broke. Only 25% of 2,883 reviews in the last 30 days are positive.
SteamIn case the irony of gamers taking to Steam to protest something that has nothing to do with Steam is lost on you, then you can probably at least appreciate at that the Epic store doesn’t even have a review system yet.
The reason for this? Epic boss Tim Sweeney feels review bombing is a very real concern. To be fair, nothing about the past few days on Steam has proved otherwise.
We’re working on a review system for the Epic Games store based on the existing one in the Unreal Engine marketplace. It will be opt-in by developers. We think this is best because review bombing and other gaming-the-system is a real problem.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) December 26, 2018
The Metro games are genuinely great titles that a lot of people have a ton of love for, so it’s a real shame to see the build up to the launch of Exodus tarnished like this.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.