It’s been a hard July for Apex Legends.
We reported last week how players were resorting to review bombing to vent their frustrations with the Apex Legends’ new monetization scheme, which boils down to “Now there are two battle passes and you can’t pay for either of them with in-game currency.” Today, that bombing campaign continues unabated, with the free-to-play shooter racking up almost 30,000 negative Steam reviews in the last week alone.
The recent Steam review rating for Apex Legends currently sits at an uncomfortable “Overwhelmingly Negative.” While the overall rating remains a respectable “Mostly Positive,” only 15% of the reviews from the last 30 days have been favorable. And the rate of review bombing hasn’t slowed much either: At time of writing, players have left over 4,400 negative reviews in the last 24 hours.
Unsurprisingly, the most common complaints echoed throughout the wave of negative reviews are related to the battle pass changes. One reviewer asks, “Titanfall 2 had to die for this battlepass money grab bs?” Another says that they’ve “played from the first season and never had a break,” but after 2,650 hours of play time “this might be the end of this journey.”
Recent successes from similar review bombing efforts have demonstrated how nuking a game’s Steam rating can be a surprisingly powerful lever for players to pull. The Helldivers PC community managed to review its way out of having to sign up for Sony’s planned mandatory PSN accounts, while TF2 fans successfully pressured Valve into anti-bot bans with the power of public sentiment. Of course, others—like the Shadow of the Erdtree difficulty complaints—didn’t seem to achieve much more than a public admission that a lot of people weren’t collecting their scadutree fragments.
And yet, while reading my way through the backlash, I can’t help but wonder how many times EA is going to shoot itself directly in the foot with this particular gun. Maybe someone in the boardroom was nostalgic for the public shaming earned with Battlefront 2’s microtransactions.