This twice-bombed card battler somehow survived to rank 13th in Steam players today

If you told me one of the most-played Steam games today is the ninth-worst-rated on the platform, I wouldn't believe you. There are two reasons why this free card game, Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond (SVWB), got to a 72% negative review score and why it temporarily bounced back.

On Aug. 28, over 92,000 players were on Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond in the early morning, a number that dropped by half five hours later, according to Steamcharts. This player count is still significantly higher than the average 29,000 players the game saw in July, or the 17,700 average of the last 30 days. Today's numbers made SVWB the 13th most-played game on Steam on Aug. 28, though it has now dropped to 16th—and will probably continue dropping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prCyDNLsiTI

Ranking so high is a special feat for a game so poorly rated. SVWB not only has 72% overall negative reviews on Steam, but 86% negative in the last 30 days. While the graph for the game's reviews shows it never had a negative rating lower than 55%, these numbers were at their worst when a special event ended on Aug. 18 and when the game released on June 14.

The latter is easy to explain. SVWB was bombed at launch because of its expensive and unfair monetization system. Players who came from the original Shadowverse were annoyed at how much harder it had become to collect cards as a free-to-play gamer and how much whales could get a quick edge at building decks just because their wallets were bigger. So, regular players gave SVWB negative reviews.

The second review bombing explains the recent 86% negative rating. Developer Cygames ran an in-game event called Battle Fest between Aug. 15 and 17. It was, essentially, a popularity contest between three of the characters' factions.

In the first stage of the event, players scored points for their chosen faction by playing matches and buying card packs. In the second stage, 100 random players from each faction scored bonus points by winning matches. Players from the winning faction, after the scores of the two stages were added up, would get free character cosmetics.

The event ended with the faction with the fewest points in the first stage, Runecraft, winning the whole thing with a massive comeback in the second. What the faction lacked in popularity, it made up for in card strength, as it had the most overpowered deck. So, it got a bunch of wins and points in the second stage.

Players were already mad that the most popular factions lost and the most overpowered won, and Cygames made it worse. The devs added the loser's Battle Fest cosmetics as an expensive premium bundle just a day after the event finished. People felt they were tricked into having to pay for cosmetics that would've been free if the two popular factions had won, which added to the "Cygames is greedy" discourse.

How Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond survived all that is a mystery. Players probably still enjoy the game despite all that, and Steam's negative reviews might have come from a minority. Either way, as the aftermath of the review bombing fades, the game seems alive.

A new battle pass is why SVWB peaked on Aug. 28, among all this chaos. Players were logging in to check out the rewards, which led to that spike. The average will likely stabilize again in the coming days.

The post This twice-bombed card battler somehow survived to rank 13th in Steam players today appeared first on Destructoid.

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