What are your thoughts on Hitman 3 getting negative reviews on Steam? Are the negative reviews justified? IMO, they are. The developers have added terrible pricing on Steam for a game that is pretty good.
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There are several issues with this release. They did not stick to several rules (some can be found in Useful Practices in Steam documentation) :
- Buying your game should not be complex â Having a complex offer on your store does not equal value. You want to sell your game in a way that is easy for customers to understand.
- Start marketing early
- Publish Your Coming Soon Page as soon as possible - As soon as you begin talking about your game publicly, you should launch your Coming Soon page to start collecting feedback and let customers wishlist your game.
It would have been better to delay the release of year 2 a little bit and explain beforehand how they want to sell the game, then collect feedbacks, for all platforms. Instead, marketing showed up 1 hour before release.
But what surprises me is the low impact of this release on Steam (less players than hitman 2), as if everyone had already bought it on another store in 2021, and the people who complain are also those who intended to buy it again but not at full price ofc (Seems the regional price tag is also an issue, but I donât know enough about that to comment). The game seems not to have reached a new audience either (VR people).
And the starter pack management did not help either (6-hours queue to access it and no access to previous games inside if you own them).
About VR, Iâm pretty convinced that IO Interactive did their very best trying to make the most awesome VR experience - and probably are clueless right now why a lot of people doesnât love Hitman 3 VR. The game did not deserve such hostile treatment, remember that devs have little to no PC VR experience and made up their own controls. I have seen a lot of constructive criticism since release, things can only get better if IO takes them into consideration.
Anyway, considering the low number of reviews right now, I donât even call that review bombing⌠Just a silent release. This is the curse of Hitman on Steam.
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Basically this. I checked on Reddit a few days ago, and I wasnât surprised at the ânegative reviews on steamâ posts I saw. Weâre still technically in the goldilocks zone of release times (usually 72 hours or a week after release), so Iâd take some of the user reviews with a grain of salt for now, especially the ones are that are saying itâs a negative, despite writing otherwise positive things, which can throw off the ratio simply because of petty protesting.
Their complicated marketing probably has a lot to do with this; that can sink games faster than anything bad in the game can in no time flat.
I maintain locking people to two versions of the game on PC, despite the game being mostly always online, was a bad idea, and I get the sense many players from EGS wouldâve double dipped if progression and/or DLCâs transferred to Steam. But as it is, itâs a confusing mess with weird regional pricing, and an apparently underwhelming VR mode.
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Yes. I agree.
I can understand that a total cross-platform requires a lot of work with so many platforms and a system that was not originally designed for that (hitman services have always been very isolated from each others). They did not want to put extra time into a âmaster account to rules them allâ system back when the game was initially released in 2021 to avoid a new layer of complexity.
But it would have made the online mode a little more acceptable in people minds. They missed an opportunity.
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I donât think the Hitman services have changed all that much since 2016 tbh. Sure, theyâve upgraded them to be faster and more optimised, but I canât imagine the code for 2016, 2 and 3 being significantly different.
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2016 has several differences to the 2/3 servers, but there arenât as many between 2 and 3.
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Good to know =)
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Just to give an example on that, buying the Deluxe edition on EGS last year upon release cost me 9,380 JPY. Now the price for it is 11,664 JPY, which is roughly equal to 90 EUR (which is the EUR price for the DE). Apparently the price increase didn´t occur until the Steam release (can´t confirm myself, as I have naturally not been checking the price of the game over time).
As someone who planned on switching to the Steam version as soon as possible, this of course isn´t pleasant. Lack of any discount (and a minor discount was not unreasonable to expect) aside, the idea of actually paying more for a game that has been out for a year than when it came out is hardly gonna make people cheer.
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Makes sense. I wonder what happened if even the regional prices on Epic increased at the same time of the steam release. As far as I remember, IO had issues too with regional pricing when H3 was first released on Epic.
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That is true, a lot of people were complaining about it here at the time. IIRC, even the Japan price jumped up for a few days prior to release before being reverted to the original one.
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Youâre not wrong there, I remember that kerfuffle.
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Yes. Sadly itâs been a hell of a disaster, again 
The launch night was painful for all the Steam users whoâve been waiting for this since months!
https://www.hitmanforum.com/t/hitman-3-steam-release/13231/235
Hitman 3 is Being Review Bombed on Steam: https://gamerant.com/hitman-3-steam-review-bombed
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Decided to join up again on here to voice my displeasure about this whole situation. As someone in another thread quipped, âeven Jasper Knight sitting in an ejector seat does launches better than IOI.â
I actually did cave in and buy Hitman 3 from Epic, even though I despise the Epic Games Launcher and would have preferred to play it on Steam. I event bought the âdeluxe editionâ which turned out to be a joke in itself. Now, a year later, not only is the game being sold for an exorbitant amount, but if you had the misfortune to support IOI becoming an independent publisher last year you canât even transfer your progress between versions.
I absolutely would have double dipped with Hitman 3, not just to show my support for IOI but because I just know itâs going to be a hassle dealing with both EGS and Steam VR at once. Now Iâm not even going to bother trying the VR conversion (that has its own raft of issues from the sound of things). And I certainly wonât be re-purchasing the game anytime soon.
Even with a breakdown of all the different packages on the Steam store itâs still confusing as hell, I canât imagine how people completely new to the series must feel looking at that mess.
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I think the worst part of all this is that it could have been avoided.
Like obviously, they have the right to charge whatever they want for their game and set whatever crazy regional pricing they can. But SHOULD they have charged full price at the Steam launch? Iâve seen so many people voice their disappointment in IOI for doing this and how theyâve lost faith in them as a company, and I wonder if it was worth not doing a 20-50% launch discount. Would they have made more money if the game launched at a 50% discount?
It sure as hell would have maintained goodwill about the company, thatâs for sure.
IOI has been treading on thin ice with a lot of people for a while now, especially with the always online stuff and elusive targets as a whole.
I bet a lot of people had middling feelings about IOI. They made an amazing game with Hitman 2016 and it was a great base for future games. The always online stuff was annoying, but it wasnât enough to tank my opinion of them as a whole.
But then they go out and launch Hitman 3 at full price on Steam. Not only that, they launch a sale on Epic at 50%, then promptly set it back to full price hours later.
It just fuckin sucks.
This game has so much potential and is already a pretty amazing game. But it gets held back by so many fucking AWFUL decisions that reek of upper management wanting money in the short-term at the cost of long-term goodwill.
Just think about it again.
Imagine a world where this game launched for $30 on Steam. Itâd be sitting at like a 97% review score and peopleâd be raving about it. Sure, thereâd be the people that are upset that it went to Epic in the first place, but thatâd be a much smaller group than the group complaining now.
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Honestly no, because the bulk of those negative reviews (and review bombing in general) ends up being more about how much the developer sucks and less about how much the game sucks. Which is what user reviews are supposed to be for, right?
Basically, wrong platform. The best way to show a game developer (specifically ioi) youâre unhappy with their business practices is stop supporting them and stop buying their shit.
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Iâm not sold on the âdeserve discount for H3 at launchâ argument of reviews, but it saddens me that newcomers wanting to buy the trilogy will see a gigantic price tag on the H3 Steam Store page, but if they just knew to go to the store pages of the previous games theyâd have more content AND for less than half the price. If only everyone knew about that then the whole âTrilogyâ price aspect would be fine
Ideally theyâd buy Seasons 1 and 2 while itâs cheap and play that to see if they want the rest and to wait while a discount for H3 comes along, but of course IO hasnât given them a Free Starter Pack to do that. And even if they get the demo working it wonât have achievements or anything like that for if/when they do decide to buy H3
Anyway, reviews are now 56% positive, up from 31-34% around launch
Although this entire thread should probably be moved to here:
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I used to be on that side, but I sympathize more with review-bombers nowadays.
Leaving a negative review is one of the ONLY ways to get your voice heard in a meaningful way. Comments on a forum or subreddit can be ignored by developers and issues can be shoved under the rug if comments on forums are all thatâs being made. And new people buying the game might not know about the problems or concerns that existing buyers are having.
But once a store page says the gameâs reviews are âMostly Negativeâ in dark red text, then the developer/publisher has to pay attention. Itâs a big risk to leave drama that caused a review bombing alone, because as long as that âMostly Negativeâ or âMixedâ is up there, potential buyers will get turned away.
Review bombing only came about because its the only way gamers feel they have a way to voice their concerns and truly have the developers/publishers listen. And I think thatâs an extremely valuable tool to have. The most helpful reviews will get rated as helpful, and the mass of low effort will never be surfaced to someone scrolling down on the store page.
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No, I get it. And I agree with the complaints/criticism people have, donât get me wrong. Itâs just not the right platform. You do realize people that have no idea/donât care about a game developerâs business practices read those reviews too, right?
Imagine Joe Schmo checking out some reviews for a game to see if itâs good or not and seeing countless negative reviews that donât even mention the game. 
I think companies social media pages are a better platform to voice that frustration. Just saying.
Actually, I think Steam is one of the best places to do it. It handles reviewbombing better than most review aggregate sites IMO.
Joe Schmo looking at the Steam reviews would very quickly find lots of âthe game is great, but the launch sucks because X and Yâ reviews and considering he doesnât care about the launch sucking, heâd probably buy, because Steam reviews require you to write your reasoning, give you a lot of space to write it, and the reviews the community finds most helpful rise to the top.
Sure, there are a lot of jokey Steam reviews or low effort ones, but I think if you look at the broad User Ratings of games on Steam, and the top reviews of games on Steam, I think prospective buyers would find them very useful.
Especially when compared to social media feedback. Social media feedback can be powerful, but only if it trends strongly enough to snowball, and itâs inevitably filled with FAR less productive feedback. Steam reviews only need a fraction of the playerbase to feel strongly enough about something to have a significant effect on the rating.
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There are different types of negative reviews on Steam right now.
I would say that the ones criticizing the pricing, the confusing packages and the server issues are justifiable.
But the negative reviews criticizing the exclusivity deal donât really add anything. If youâre buying on Steam youâre likely already giving your statement on exclusivity deals. You preferred to wait and itâs ok to do so, but the negative review for it is pointless.
Itâd be like God of War fans review-bombing the game because itâs no longer their console exclusive (many were mad about it, although there hasnât been such a waste of time with review-bombing that I know of).
These are corporate decisions to grow your company within a competitive industry and reviews should be about the quality of the product, not business.
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