Negative reviews were posted in protest, but the players achieved their goal and responded with their ratings
A few turbulent days lie behind Helldivers 2. The announcement that a PlayStation account would be required to play the Steam version was anything but well received by the community
Within three days, the co-op shooter had collected around 200,000 negative reviews on Steam, most of which were directed against the account linking plan. Sony rowed back – the players celebrated.
Operation Clean Up
The community described their review-bombing as a “general order in real life”, because just like in the game, thousands of players took part in the common goal – almost democratically.
Now Helldivers 2 is on Steam with lots of bad reviews, but the fans are starting something like reverse review bombing and turning it into the next “general order” (that’s what big missions are called in the shooter), such as in this Reddit post:
☻
This post with 36,000 upvotes calls for Helldivers 2 to be brought back to its former glory on Steam. The 2,400 comments are almost exclusively in agreement
As of today there are almost 100,000 new positive reviews on Steam, the community is virtually cleaning up again. In total, Helldivers 2 is back at 74 percent positive reviews
What is developer Arrowhead doing?
The studio has traditionally handled the situation with humor. Lead developer Johan Pilestedt shared on X, formerly Twitter, a picture of the graph on Steam with the red bars of the review bombing
The thoughts of turning this into a motif for a cape seem to be quite serious. It would be fitting for Arrowhead to integrate the memes circulating in the community into the game.
It’s not every day that a community retracts its review bombing after it has achieved its goal. But the fans of Helldivers 2 still have a bit of work to do to restore their status before the Sony debacle
What do you think of the situation? Is this behavior only consistent? Feel free to write us your opinion in the comments.