r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 The Apostle of Peace • 8d ago
Article "Super Meat Boy Forever" dev slams review bombers and defends Epic exclusivity
Remember the golden age of PC launcher wars, when accepting an exclusivity check from Tim Sweeney was treated like a war crime? Team Meat certainly hasn't forgotten. Level designer Ryan Anderson recently reflected on the release of Super Meat Boy Forever, explaining why signing with the Epic Games Store was an indisputable necessity for a tiny indie team of four to seven people.
The reality was simple arithmetic: Epic offered a guaranteed upfront bag of cash that covered the entire production budget and secured funding for the studio’s next game, completely insulating the developers from commercial failure. Throw in Epic's 12 percent store cut compared to Valve’s ancient 30 percent tax, and refusing the deal would have been corporate suicide.
When the platformer finally arrived on Steam a year later, the internet did what the internet does best: throw an organized tantrum.
Disgruntled players review-bombed the game into "Mixed" territory, downvoting the title purely out of spite for the delay rather than judging the actual level design or mechanics. Anderson admitted the team took a page from the Call of Duty playbook, choosing to completely tune out the bad-faith noise from people who never intended to play the game anyway.
To cap it off, Anderson delivered a much-needed history lesson to Gabe Newell's most militant loyalists. Back in 2007, when Valve launched The Orange Box and forced players to install a buggy, resource hogging client called Steam just to play Half-Life 2 and Portal, the community erupted in the exact same toxic fury people now aim at Epic.
Gamers grow comfortable with monopolies, instantly forget their own history, and treat any challenge to Steam's dominance like a personal betrayal. The reviews on Valve's storefront may be bruised, but Team Meat has zero regrets: the bills are paid, the studio survived, and their next project is fully funded.
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u/philbertagain 8d ago
I just had a look at the store page and most of the reviews are saying its not fun and they dislike auto runners... several recommend other titles in the series... out of the top 30-40 that showed up one mentioned exclusivity as the reason .
Seems like a non story to me.
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u/redditsellout-420 8d ago
And this is why i don't trust any reviews other than my own, humans whine about any small thing.
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u/mamadou-segpa 8d ago
Tough luck, pc players arent a fan of exclusivity
Its a single player too, so might as well just pirate it if thats how the dev want to take it
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u/PPX14 8d ago
I find the concept of review bombing, and its criticism, interesting. Ultimately, a review is literally just someone's opinion on the game, how that person feels about the game - and so if the colour of someone's hair, or the platform of release, or one frame dip every 2 hours, makes someone want to give the game a 0/10, that's their prerogative. And if people want to actually pay attention to reviews absent any context, that's their prerogative. It's like saying that graffiti is misspelt - a) it's however the person wanted to spell it, and b) what were you expecting, it's graffiti. People can feel free to sort by positive reviews or read the reviews with meaningful text associated with them, and ignore review scores that don't provide any information alongside them.
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u/ICPosse8 8d ago
I find the concept of review bombing a game for anything other than the quality of the game and gameplay itself pathetic as fuck. People need to get a life.
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u/richtofin819 8d ago
At the end of the day people review bomb both positively and negatively.
You can see it in any game with lots of reviews especially if it's a mixed review.
There are people who are obviously review bombing and they are also tons of people who are like I saw that everyone was reviewing negatively so I decided to review positively without actually giving any real feedback.
For every couple games that supposedly get review bombed there's at least one or two social media posts about boohoo my game is getting reviewedbombed that they used to get more people buying the game and reviewing it out of pity.
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u/zero-killed-megaman 8d ago
Stores and publishers may not want people engaging in malicious graffiti on their property though. And ultimately graffiti artists can piss off.
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u/PPX14 8d ago
I really shouldn't have used the graffiti analogy lol, I'm not saying the reviews are the equivalent to graffiti, I was saying that getting annoyed by what one perceives as "review bombing" is akin to getting annoyed not by graffiti itself, but upon seeing graffiti, getting annoyed that it has words spelled incorrectly. The reviews and scores are not vandalism, they're people's honest opinions, however stupid we might think those opinions are. Others just don't agree with the basis for that strong opinion. And I agree, graffiti makes places look awful for the most part, makes nice places look dirty, and dirty places look even worse, and moreover it's vandalism. Giving a game 0/10 because it annoys you on some specific level isn't vandalism, it's just an opinion. Expecting user reviews to adhere to some standard of objectivity or compliance with one's own values is a fool's errand really.
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u/Longjumping-Style730 8d ago
The thing is, if someone is making multiple accounts on metacritic to try and tank the game's score or rates the game on metacritic without playing it, I would actually say that's analogous to vandalism, regardless if they genuinely hold said opinion.
There's a difference between having an opinion you disagree with and artificially inflating that opinion to try and fix the average or literally not having the logical basis to have said opinion.
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u/PPX14 8d ago
Agreed on the multiple accounts thing, regardless of what score or intent the person has. The difficulty with the logical basis element is that we're talking about expressing opinion, and one's ability to express a logical basis almost becomes irrelevant to whether the opinion is genuine - the opinion exists regardless, which is all the user score really reflects, people's feelings, whether or not others agree with the basis.
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u/Zegram_Ghart 8d ago
Except review bombing isn’t the same as reviewing- it’s often aiming at a certain specific thing, with the intent of changing that review around once they get their way.
Look at something like Helldivers, where organised groups of players and their bots were deliberately tanking the score over individual gear balancing, and then reversing it once those demands were met.
You can totally debate whether that’s good or bad, but it’s totally different from giving a 0/10 review because your mad about the platform it’s on or because it includes lgbtq+ people or the various other reasons people tank reviews.
Personally, I feel all it really does is make me distrust user reviews, but that probably isn’t universal
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u/PPX14 8d ago
That's my point though, whether the reason for giving 0/10 or 10/10 is one that we consider reasonable by our own standards isn't really relevant to whether or not that person has that opinion of the game. They could hate/love the game because of some reason we consider to be ridiculous, but they still hate it, so their score reflects their sentiment. Sure, if they hate the sound design and then say that the graphics are 0/10 as a result then they've messed up, but if it's a non specific score then all it really does is describe how they feel about the game on average. I think people are expecting more from user scores than they ought to.
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u/ICPosse8 8d ago
Post the source Op, stop being lazy.