No Rest for the Wicked is a gorgeous-looking soulslike action RPG that some of our own writers have very much enjoyed, so know that it is with no malice towards any of the hard-working developers at Moon Studios to suggest that it, um, might be beneficial for your CEO to log off for a bit.
Earlier this week, studio founder Thomas Mahler took to Discord to prophesize doom over a bout of negative Steam reviews due to an unpopular balance patch, which briefly saw the game’s recent reviews on the platform reach “Mostly Negative”. At the time of writing, that’s balanced out, but as reported by Windows Central, they still sent him into a bit of a tizzy. Here’s a shortlist of quotes from the game’s Discord:
- “It’s entirely possible that we won’t be around in a couple of months to do anything anymore simply because we got review bombed, which leads to people not buying the game. Which means we’re not making any money and will have to shut down.”
- “If you want to see us actually finish Wicked, it’s detrimental that we get that review score back up.”
- “Not sure people understand that they participate in potentially killing the studio they want to see succeed by leaving their negative reviews.”
- “We’ve got a few months left in the oven—if we don’t sell more copies cause people review bomb us, you might just cause our death.”
Naturally, websites—such as Windows Central—covered these quotes, because they were things said in a Discord server by the CEO of a game developer on industry trends, about the future of their studio. Mahler took offense with that, and took to X to have a bit of a rant about it.
“The reason I left the post on Discord up was simply to push back against some of the bullshit reviews,” he says, implying that Moon Studios isn’t actually in any sort of trouble. He then immediately launches into a tirade: “I’ve been hated on Twitter by a few crazies for years now, and I also saw the calls for review bombing because, according to those folks, I’m a ‘Nazi.'”
Out of curiosity, I decided to hop into negative reviews and sort by ‘most recent’—and while some are absolutely insulting to Mahler, most seem to be personal frustrations on mechanics, endgame issues, bugs, and the like. There’s some legitimate and honest critique to be found that Mahler doesn’t appear interested in considering.
Mahler barely takes a breath before the trans community catches a stray out of nowhere: “These days, apparently anyone who doesn’t include five trans characters in their game and doesn’t let their products be influenced by political bullshit is a Nazi. What a world we live in.” It’s also apparently the fault of boycotts over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Moon Studios took a hands-off approach to at a time where other studios were expressing their support.
Mahler claims that he merely went onto Discord to “encourage their players to share their real experiences” to counteract what he sees as refund-based review manipulation. “It’s allowed on Steam to buy a game, leave a negative review that doesn’t even talk about the game at all (there are negative Wicked reviews that literally just say ‘.’), and then instantly refund it… and the negative review still counts.”
While I can’t find a substantive answer on whether refunding a game removes its review from impacting the game’s overall score (Steam’s documentation only notes copies received by key, code, or some other free metric as not impacting your overall rating), Steam does actually tell you whether or not someone refunded a game after they reviewed it.
So let’s get a quick temperature check—I scrolled through the Most Recent negative reviews for the game, then CTRL + F’d “Not Recommended” to get an idea of how many I’d just pulled up, around 786. Out of those 786. reviews, 34 had the “Product Refunded” tag on them. That’s roughly 4.3%. Mahler does later share some reviews from folks who did indeed say “.”, but they’re all players with 60 hours plugged in.
Granted, while I did sort by “Most Recent”, Steam doesn’t pull every review (some of these were from January). However, I think it’s reasonable to say Mahler might be exaggerating the role of refunds, here.
Anyway, Mahler writes: “If that’s allowed, then it should also be allowed for a developer to encourage their players to share their real experiences. And no, we’re not in immediate financial danger—but from time to time, I think I’m allowed to speak up about issues within our industry I personally find unbecoming.”
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I just want to redirect you to the bullet-point list I shared above, and let you come to your own conclusions about whether Mahler was saying the studio was in “immediate financial danger”. Personally, if I didn’t want people to think I was saying that, I might shy away from phrases like “you might cause our death” and “we’ve got a few months left in the oven” and “it’s entirely possible that we won’t be around”.
You could quibble over what “immediate” means in this context but little else—Mahler was emphatically and repeatedly stating that the studio would be endangered if the review bombing carried on. That is an immutable fact.
Now, it’s entirely fine for someone to change their mind—and Mahler is entitled to a bad day or a bit of a Discord crashout. Game development is stressful stuff. But to me, this seems like more of an effort to save face.
For whatever reason, Mahler felt like he had to impress the doom of the studio upon its fans: Now that the reviews are better, he doesn’t want to give off an air of desperation. The mind boggles, especially when he could’ve simply asked for support (something else he’s allowed to do) and moved on.
Read the full article here
