Overwatch 2 Has 91% Negative Reviews, as Many as 2/3 Coming From China
It turns out that the criticism of Overwatch 2 on Steam has a second bottom. Although the game has 91% negative reviews on Valve's platform, as many as 2/3 of them come from China. We explain why.
As you already know, Overwatch 2 has become the worst-rated game in the history of Steam less than four days after it launched. Blizzard's game received more than 113.5 thousand reviews on Steam, of which the positive ones account for only 9%.
- Players criticize not so much OV2 as such, but Blizzard, which for about two years essentially halted the development of the first game, as it worked on the sequel and the promised PvE content for it.
- Eventually, however, the highly anticipated Hero Mode was canceled, and players were left with what was essentially OV1 with an inferior progression system, in which getting cool character skins requires reaching for your wallet, rather than - as before - simply playing regularly.
So the community has reason to criticize Blizzard, and the negative reviews Overwatch 2 is getting on Steam, are the aftermath of this. In most of them you can find the accusations I've outlined above.
Most reviews come from China
However, if you take a closer look at them, you can see that roughly 2/3 of these reviews (about 63,000) were written in one language - simplified Chinese. Analyzing only this group of reviews, one discovers that the negative ones account for as much as 97% of them.
- As noted on Twitter by popular gaming analyst Daniel Ahmad - who works with Niko Partners - the criticism of Chinese gamers is related to the fact that a few months earlier Blizzard suspended most of its services in the country.
- Thus, Chinese players lost the ability to play Overwatch 2 - and other Blizzard games - on local servers.
- Premiere of OV2 on Steam is basically the first opportunity for them to express their frustration. That's why in reviews written in simplified Chinese you can come across such accusations as Blizzard's poor handling of the game, the lack of a national server, the removal of a pre-existing account or long login times.
What is the reason for the criticism?
It is worth noting here that Steam released the international version of Overwatch 2, which has localization in both simplified and traditional Chinese. However, the lack of a dedicated Blizzard server in China makes playing OV2 an average experience at best.
- As Daniel Ahmad suggests, criticism of the game from Chinese players is aimed at prompting Blizzard to restore such a server.
- Citing data from Niko Partners - collected before Blizzard withdrew its services from China - the analyst reported that 53% of local players said they would return to Overwatch 2, if there was an option to play on a local server.
Therefore, it can be assumed that the whole action has just such a purpose. It is worth mentioning that involved in it is another game namely the card game War of the Three Kingdoms - currently the second worst-reviewed game in the history of Steam (out of more than 30 thousand reviews, the positive ones account for only 11%). What is interesting, however, individual gamers have begun to give it positive reviews to prevent Overwatch 2 from losing the "honorable" first place.
So if you were wondering why - despite such low ratings - at the peak of the day OV2 was played on Steam by 60-70 thousand people, the answer to this question is most likely hidden in the fact that Western gamers are not as critical of Blizzard game as the data seen on Valve's platform suggests. It is possible that some time from now, its management will decide to rescind some of the negative reviews Overwatch 2 has received, declaring them to be review bombing.
