PA Steam Review - Analysis

Everybody knows that the Steam reviews makes a huge difference on how well the game sells. Also, Uber, as an independent game developer, must rely on the revenue generated by the game to keep developing it (no money = no development).

So, I decided to take some time to study how well PA is performing on Positive - Negative reviews and below you can find a link to the Google Sheet document I'm updaing (still only 3 days of data, but I will keep updating it daily).

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N3JS4IDE0ogsxKYUNMeJjDWi6E5wVZn13TnnDw0gcRM/edit?usp=sharing

As I write this thread, 71.87% of the reviews are positive and that put PA on the Mostly Positive category. This value is dropping, and if it hit any value below 70%, the new category will be Mixed, and that will hurt even more PA sales. The category table and its rules:

ClassificationRule
Overwhelmingly Positive>= 95% Positives
Very Positive>= 80% Positives
Mostly Positive>= 70% Positives
Mixed>= 40% Positives
Mostly Negative>= 30% Positives


What I can do to help? ... Well, not much really, but if you are having fun with the game, post a positive review, if you can't recommend the game, wait a little bit until the game is in a state that you can reccomend.

What do you guys think?

The reviews need to update.

Most are from November and September, before a few major updates.

Click on the most recent tab

still, the Positives % is still dropping. From the 85 new reviews from the last 24 hours, 68.24% are positives, and that bring us to the Mixed classification

Yeah we definitely don't want to go there.

maybe people who bought smurf accounts on steam can make up some reviews, or Uber could add the save function and make it COMPLETELY OBVIOUS THAT THERE IS OFFLINE AND YOU NEED TO UPDATE YOUR GRAPHICS DRIVERS ON OPENGL

Steam really needs to flush reviews that are two months or so old. Games can change a lot in that time frame.

It seems like people who disliked the game are more likely to check out the other reviews and mark negative reviews as "helpful", and people who liked the game aren't likely to mark positive reviews as "helpful". 71% of reviewers like the game, yet literally 19/20 of the reviews on the front page are negative. Negative reviews on the front page should be around 6/20 according to the like percentage...

I think that it is more important to know why the game is rated negative, than to know that the game got a bad rating. People that gave the game a negative review on steam are hardly to be found here in the uber forum, but their opinion is needed to improve the game.

probably just bots made by EA to kill independent developers...

At least I hope so, some of the reviews seriously hurt what little faith I have left in human intelligence

That is another point. This is the first thing I check before buying a game and I bet many people does the same. Right now, Ive downvoted negative reviews and upvoted postive ones to see if they are out of the front page. I know that this is not good, since many negative reviews are actually good ones..

Well, a good part of the negative reviews are:
1 - I don't think playing on a round planet is good...
2- This game only has one faction! We musta at least 3!
3- No single player campaing besides something called galactic war

Well, these points are being told since the beggining and all reviews point that out..

@felipec

1) If any of them played a 1v1 map, they would see a very thoughtfully built map plays like a flat map. Natural generating maps are just too open, at least handmade maps have the classic RTS 3 chokepoints right outside base sort of thing happening.
2) 3 faction RTS are a fad, like killstreaks in shooters. We can live without those and they know it.
3) This is actually a decent weak spot, but it exists nonetheless. Is mildly interesting to play. Bottom line, is this is a weakpoint, intentionally, because one has to exist somewhere, and in this game it is storyline campaign. The focus was not put in storyline campaign.

Ironically enough I am actually putting a team together..sooooooyeaaaaaaaaaaa

If you would like to join I am in need of a 5th man since currently @burntcustard doesnt want to reply to me

G0hst read the thread bro.

Team for what?

G0hst's being a derp don't worry about it.

Well, from what I have gathered amongst gamers in my area, everyone likes it.

The planetary setting is a big positive, everyone says it's something new and refreshing.
Offline play is a huge positive.
None of them seems to be bothered about the single faction that much.
The lack of save functionality scares them off though (all of them being working class people with families, and enjoys offline singleplayer games), and yes, offline casual games can easily stretch for 5+ hours.

I think people are too easily swayed by negative reviews, and the lack of save functionality seems to be a big negative for many. Many people do not know that the game is still being supported and further developed, we shoud exclaim the continued development in our reviews about the game so that people can know it is still growing.

I think one of the main problems is Uber 'releasing' the game when it's still far from finished. I feel like they made some very hard to live up to promises, and it will be a while before everything is working nicely. In the meantime people will hate on the game because it is very unfinished. I really enjoy this game myself, but I've been playing since Alpha, and I've always considered it a work in progress.

Currently one of the biggest problems is lag. The other day I was trying to play with my friend I usually play PA with, and the Steam Sales cause a huge influx of new players, meaning the servers were struggling (well, I assume this is what was happening anyway). We spent a very long time actually getting into a lobby at all, and games generally get laggy towards lategame. Both my friend and I also seem to have randomly laggy games, for example, even on 1v1 ladder, sometimes performance is great, and sometimes from the start of the game things are very choppy.

Also, the balance is still far from finished, as is Galactic War (I hope).

The current state of the game would be fine if it were labelled as being in Beta, but for a 'released' title loads of stuff is still incomplete, buggy or missing. I think the biggest mistake was Uber's decisions regarding Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Release labelling. For me, there is no point in adding a Gamma Stage, it should still be labelled as Beta now, because it is clearly that.

I personally love the ideas behind PA, and I very much enjoy playing it, but I can understand why somebody would pick it up and fell a bit cheated by the incomplete state of the game, when it is advertised as released.

Examples of missing features?

As for the lobby issues i completely agree.

Spherical maps are literally the best thing since the creation of bread -deal with it.
No seriously ...people don´t realise how ******* amazing working spheres as battlefields are.

Sheet updated and another fall, 0.05% this time =/

Well excuse me @stuart98 I guess you don't want to be part of my team!