Online TCG, War of the Three Kingdoms, was released on Steam on Dec 17th and became the worst-reviewed game in 5 days. The game now has over 6000 reviews, and 94% of them are negative, surpassing eFootball and becoming the No.1 “Overwhelmingly Negative” game on Steam this year.
Even the 6% positive reviews are not actually positive.
Despite aggressive microtransactions being a key factor of the game getting the hatred, the true reason for this unprecedented review bombing is the bitter history between the players and the developer Yokagames.
War of the Three Kingdoms is a free-to-play game based on a physical card game with the same name that was first released in China in 2008. Inspired by Bang! and with the popular Three Kingdom theme, the card game was easy to learn and a lot of fun to play, quickly becoming the table game among young people. Its digital version, War of the Three Kingdoms, was also an instant hit upon release. The game kept updating for more than a decade with many new content packs, but as the price of premium items slowly rose, the players started to question if the updates were there to keep the game exciting or just quick cash-grabs.
The in-game purchases were not welcomed due to their rising prices and the damage to the game’s balance.
In 2018, Yokagames decided to release a new anniversary version with the Html 5 engine. However, they didn’t bother to port all the player data to the new version, meaning players would lose most of their virtual belongings, guilds, friends list and basically have to start over again in the new version. That made many players upset and believe the game developer has no respect for players.
Many players refused to try the new version.
The distrust among players continued to grow since countless bugs are in the game, and developers have been taking their time to fix them. In November 2021, a bug was revealed to the player community, which allowed anyone to purchase unlimited paid items for free. According to the official announcement afterward, that bug had existed in the game since January, so for more than 10 months, players were exploiting this glitch, making whoever spent real money in the game during that period look like a joke.
The bug existed for almost a year and was not fixed until the worst-case scenario occurred.
For many players, the game being released on Steam is a perfect chance to express their feelings together and to retaliate against the developer. With such a level of mismanagement and miscommunication, it’s no wonder this game broke the worst received game record on Steam this year, even when 2022 is only a few days away.