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Steam review bomb

Overwatch 2 review bomb

The Steam release on August 10, 2023 opened at about 9 to 15 percent positive and became the lowest rated game on Steam at the time. The reviews named the free to play switch, the cancelled PvE mode and paywalled heroes, and more than two thirds were written in Chinese after the game lost its servers in China that January. Read as OneStar reads it, the August 10, 2023 wave was both: a wave about one event, with real complaints about the build inside it. The counts below are Steam's own.

The wave, counted

Overwatch 2 against its own median

The card shows the week or month that held the event as Steam counts it, against the game's median week or month, and whether it clears the rule OneStar uses: at least 20 reviews and more than 5 times the median.

Overwatch 2

Both at once

The Steam release on August 10, 2023 opened at about 9 to 15 percent positive and became the lowest rated game on Steam at the time. The reviews named the free to play switch, the cancelled PvE mode and paywalled heroes, and more than two thirds were written in Chinese after the game lost its servers in China that January.

178,422reviews in August 2023, against a median month of 7,144
90%thumbs down that month
25xthe median month: flagged by the 5x rule

Overwatch®: 429,987 reviews in all, 68% thumbs down, Mostly Negative on Steam, counted by Steam on 2026-11-05.

Sources: Shacknews, August 2023, TechSpot, August 2023

How to read it

Three questions, in order

  1. How far above the median was it? A real wave is several times the usual volume, not a loud day. The ratio on the card is that number.
  2. What did the reviews name? An account, a credit or a price in another region is about something outside the game. Crashes, a nerf or a missing mode are about the build. A OneStar report answers this for the reviews it reads in the window, with the reviews behind each share.
  3. Did the thumbs down come back down? A bomb ends with its cause. A problem ends with the patch. The next week or month on Steam's history tells you which happened.

The method and the other six cases are on How to tell a review bomb from a real problem. For a patch instead of a wave, see What a patch did to your reviews.

Cite this page: link https://onestar.sh/guides/review-bombs/overwatch-2 and name OneStar and the date you read it. The counts are Steam's own review totals per week or month. Shares in OneStar reports are of all judged reviewers unless the report says otherwise.

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FAQ

Questions, answered plainly

Run the same read on any game with the Steam review analyzer.

Why is Overwatch 2 rated so low on Steam?

Its August 2023 Steam launch gathered years of grievances in one place: the move to free to play, the PvE mode that was promised and dropped, heroes behind a battle pass, and the loss of servers in China in January 2023. Most reviews were written in Chinese and nearly all of those were negative.

Is it a review bomb or a real problem?

Both, which is why the label alone does not help. The volume and timing look like a bomb; the complaints about content and monetization are about the product. Reading the words sorts the two, and the share of each is the useful number.

Run the same read on your own game.

OneStar reads a game's Steam reviews, flags the days that stand out and names the complaint that led each one. Run a report free: 3 report runs a month of up to 500 reviews each and 1,500 reviews a month in all. No card needed.

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