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Should eFootball be the worst-reviewed game on Steam?
At the time of writing, I am looking at eFootball’s Steam pageThe game was launched yesterday and accumulated more than 11,500 reviews in 24 hours, of which only 9% were positive. This means that it has been given an overall “overwhelmingly negative” rating, and according to certain metrics, eFootball is the worst-reviewed game in Steam history.
Well, those weird faces may not help. Many long-time fans of the series are upset about the demise of the Pro Evolution Soccer brand, don’t like the name of eFootball, and don’t like the idea of it becoming a service game. But how bad is electronic football?
I only played for two hours, but I can tell you: it’s not as bad as tens of thousands of overwhelming negative reviews. There is no real scientific method, but I started scanning them just to see what people were saying. I noticed that a large number of negative reviews have very little air time. Many people call it a “mobile game” (I think this is unfair). There are definitely negative comments from people who have invested a few hours in the game and made some decent criticisms.
But the more I watched it, the more I felt this was an old-fashioned bombing of comments. An obvious factor for this is the hatred of certain gaming audiences towards Konami, which began in 2015 when the company began pursuing a new mobile-first strategy, and then publicly broke up with Hideo Kojima at the end of the year. That year. Since then, the label and perception of “Fuck Konami” have always existed. Many of Konami’s largest and most popular franchises seem to have been sealed, which is obviously to no avail.
#eFootball Important information for fans pic.twitter.com/Tp9RFhmXp9October 1, 2021
Since eFootball is a free game, users can view it and learn more about it without spending $50 or any other privileges. It really feels that many people just thought eFootball was bad and reviewed it on this basis.
I’m not saying that this is a game without problems, but it is absurd to call it “the worst football game ever”: this game still feels similar to PES, despite the slightly different physics, even though we have all seen This kind of absurdly wrong and faulty shots usually looks good in sports (although the crowd is very bad). I’m not sure if I would recommend it, but I do think there is a foundation that Konami can build on.
Maybe this is the problem. eFootball shouldn’t be released directly to the full version: simply marking it as early access will definitely eliminate some of the venom, especially because it does feel like an early access game. When it is bad, it usually breaks in interesting ways. It feels a bit like the viral irony of Mass Effect Andromeda again.
Konami has now issued the statement embedded above, part of which is “We are very sorry for the problems that have occurred, and assure you that we will take all problems seriously and work hard to improve the current situation. This work will continue to be updated, and the quality will be Continuous improvement, content will continue to increase. Starting next week, we will prepare for the October update […] We will do our best to satisfy as many users as possible, and we look forward to your continued support of eFootball 2022. “
Whether they will get it remains to be seen.