Last month, Slay the Spire 2’s controversial first beta balance patch inspired a massive backlash from its Steam reviewers, drawing over 9,000 negative reviews in the following 24 hours. In an interview with PC Gamer, Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano said the intensity of the feedback rattled some of the studio’s newer developers—but he wasn’t shaken by it.
Instead, Yano said he understands the motivating impulse behind the flood of harsh Steam reviews, even if it was “unfortunate” that the tone of the feedback suffered from regional restrictions on online activity—and the nature of Steam reviews themselves.
As the review bombardment intensified, reactions online were quick to judge its negative reviewers—the majority of which were writing their reviews in Simplified Chinese—for failing to use the Steam discussion forums or the feedback channel in Mega Crit’s official Discord. In China, however, those alternate venues for offering feedback are hampered by restrictions on internet activity.
Despite the general assumption that users in China are forced to use the stripped-down Steam China platform unless they use a VPN, reports from players in China indicate that the global version of Steam is usable within the country—for some, at least. Its community features, however, are not. As a result, Steam reviews are the only direct method users in China have to offer their feedback without circumventing platform restrictions.
Yano said Slay the Spire 2’s Chinese audience was, fundamentally, sharing the same feedback as its English-speaking players—they were just using a different mechanism, voluntarily or not, for communicating it. Ideally, he hopes Mega Crit can find a way to make those mechanisms more productive for all its players.
Ultimately, Yano said Steam reviews—and the culture around reviews more broadly—is an imperfect medium that encourages us to oversimplify how we feel about the games we’re playing.
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