Earlier this week, Epic Games and Deep Silver announced a deal to make Metro Exodus, the third game in the post-apocalyptic shooter series, a timed exclusive for the upstart Epic Games store on PC. As Exodus was just a couple weeks from launch and had been available for pre-order on Steam for many months, some Steam users aren’t too happy about that last-minute change. Now the most passionate of fans have started giving Metro 2033 Redux and Metro: Last Light Redux negative reviews on Steam.
First spotted by PC Gamer, both games have received more than 2,000 Steam reviews this week, almost all of which are negative and have nothing to do with the quality of the games themselves. As Steam separates “recent reviews” from “all reviews” to help users make choices about games in their current states, the first thing you see is “Mostly Negative” in red. Scroll down to read the reasoning behind the reactions, and nearly all of the talk is about the Epic exclusivity deal.
These are of course symbolic reviews, and don’t reflect the actual quality of either game. Overall, each game still holds a “Very Positive” rating on Steam. Many of the recent negative reviews came from users who have almost certainly given the games positive ratings in the past. Otherwise, why would they spend dozens of hours with a game they don’t like? Since “review bombing” has become a trend in recent years when fans are displeased, Steam has a feature that lets you exclude recent reviews from the average when it detects suspicious behavior.
While Metro Exodus publisher Deep Silver did pull the plug on the Steam release just a few weeks before launch, it should be noted that anyone who had already pre-ordered the game through Steam will get it as expected. And Metro Exodus will come to Steam after the one-year exclusivity deal with Epic has ended.
The ire hurled at Epic and Deep Silver over this Metro Exodus development is a bit perplexing. Downloading the Epic Games client takes a minute or two and it doesn’t appear that anything significant will be lost by playing the game through Epic rather than Steam. In fact, something will be gained: Ten extra bucks.
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