Gaijin Entertainment has removed the mention of Steam from War Thunder‘s website following review bombing.
As spotted by PCGamesN, the War Thunder website no longer displays the mention of Steam alongside its other platforms. This follows a series of review bombings after in-game economic changes that would potentially make the game harder to play without spending real money.
Even though Gaijin said it would be reversing the changes, the developer went on to remove Steam from its website even though the game is still playable on the platform.
“Review bombing does damage to the game in that new players simply won’t try it, while it doesn’t raise their awareness of the problems you’ve noticed,” said Gaijin. “If your goal is not to hurt the game, please use other, less destructive ways.”
The Steam page now shows the game rated “Overwhelmingly Negative” at over 84,000 recent reviews; while general reviews show the game to be “Mixed”.
Review bombing is something a certain amount of community members will do to make a game appear worse on a storefront. It’s not uncommon and is a typical occurrence when gamers want to force developers to take notice of their criticism.
A similar situation occurred recently following the release of Horizon Forbidden West‘s Burning Shores DLC (downloadable content). The game was review bombed because the game featured an LGBTQ+ relationship. Although the relationship is optional, the protagonist Aloy is able to romance Seyka by kissing her at the end of the game.
While Burning Shores currently holds an aggregated Metascore of 82 among critics, its user-submitted reviews score currently sits at 4.2 out of 10.
In other gaming news, Activision Blizzard has shut down the popular PC Call of Duty fan project, X Labs.