FREE-TO-PLAY gamers were eating well earlier this month as two new major games launched close together.
The First Descendant blew away fans with its high-end graphics, but players were upset by its expensive microtransactions and pay-to-win purchases.
Not long afterwards, open-world survival crafting game Once Human was released and was an immediate hit with players.
It saw a peak of more than 230k concurrent players on Steam in its first week, and has kept consistent numbers ever since.
However, there have been some negative reviews since launch, with players complaining of updates breaking the game.
An update on July 18 was a particular sore spot for players as people’s bases were destroyed and items went missing.
The team Starry Studio has said it will replace all deleted items, and offer other “compensation” but people were still upset.
The team wrote: “[The] problems have been identified and are currently being resolved as quickly as possible.”
Despite this, negative reviews started flooding the Steam page, and it seems the developer was disappointed by the response.
Kotaku claims that the team posted on the game’s Discord server with a call to action for positive reviews but it was quickly deleted.
The reporter claims they only caught the message as they received a notification about it from the server.
However, by the time they went to the server, the message had been removed.
One of the rules on Steam’s Terms of Service states: “Do not artificially manipulate the User Review system or voting/rating systems”.
This rule includes asking people to leave positive reviews as it would change the overall rating of the game.
It’s unclear if the speedy deletion means that the comment doesn’t break terms of service.
Reviews have since balanced out and the game is sitting with ‘Mostly Positive’ reviews on Steam.
If you want to read more about free games, check out just how many people spend money on free-to-play games.
Get the lowdown on more of the latest Xbox releases from our expert reviewers.
For PS5 and Nintendo Switch, check out our full game reviews section.
