Apex Construct is a VR game that was released on Steam back in March 2018. Last week it sold more copies in China than it sold in all of 2018. Why the sudden increase? It seems a lot of folks are confusing Apex Construct for the popular battle royale shooter Apex Legends.
PC Gamer first reported the news after an Apex Construct developer posted on the Vive subreddit and shared the story of the massive and sudden increase in sales. The Apex Construct Steam page has seen 4000% more visitors since Apex Legends released.
Fast Travel Games communications manager Andreas Juliusson shared the bizarre news on Reddit. He also explained that the company expects many of these new copies to be refunded after players discover they don’t have Apex Legends.
Interestingly, both games have similar logos, which might be adding even more confusion to the situation.
While an increase in sales is nice, Juliusson also shared a negative side effect of the confusion: Players leaving a ton of negative reviews for Apex Construct simply because it isn’t Apex Legends.
“Fortunately the Steam Community team is looking into this right now,” explained Juliusson. “Somewhere, there are massive misunderstandings going on.”
[VR Game Apex Construct sales spike after players mistake if for Apex Legends | PC Gamer]
Comments
10 responses to “VR Game Sees Huge Increase In Sales As Players Confuse It For Apex Legends”
Simple solution. Put in a filter that allows you to filter out anything with less than 2 hours playtime. Or something similar. That’s when review bombs are at their worst, where people buy the game, review bomb it, and get a refund.
This game is a victim of unfortunate naming, and theres not a thing they could do about it. How dare they name their game so similar to something released a year after them, then have the nerve to keep such a similar logo!
Its also a reflection of modern society where someone rates a game as zero because of irrelevant issues like this. Fault is on the gamer for not paying attention, yet they transfer it to being the game, and try to punish the game for their mistake.
That may work for bigger titles, but there are a lot of indie games on Steam that can be fully completed in under 2 hours.
The better solution would be to have the review marked so people can see whether the person owns the game or not.
Fair point, but do people really play those games to completion then get a refund? If they do, I still don’t want to see their review myself, they’re preying on the system, and not supporting the work being done.
Make it a little more complicated then. Maybe where the playtime is less than an hour, or where >90% of reviews for those short playtimes are negative.
There doesn’t seem to be a perfect solution, but right now games are suffering unfairly for what amounts to either a persons stupidity, or a political motivation that has nothing to do with the quality of the game in question.
So what other ways are there to easily clean up those reviews motivated that way? I just think a time filter would at least do a solid job of it. @jagli ‘s option would work in the same way, being a simple filter that at least tries to show where the motivation comes from.
Personally I hate going to a games page and seeing recent reviews as very negative, with all reviews mostly positive, or something like that, then having to wade through pages of crap to get to something relevant.
I generally don’t expect a refund unless the game doesn’t function in the way it’s expected to. For example, if it claimed to work on Windows 10 but then didn’t open, constantly crashed even though my PC meets the system requirements etc. I’ve played a lot of games I didn’t like and wouldn’t recommend to others, and I’ve left a negative review explaining why I didn’t like it as feedback for the developers, but even then I wouldn’t demand a refund.
The focus of this isn’t refunds, though. It’s the visibility of negative reviews. I think they should be left visible regardless of playtime. How often do scenarios like this, where a game is mistaken for a completely different game, actually happen? In these rare cases, getting assistance from Steam is probably still the best course of action.
Yeah, not disagreeing with you, its more the review bombs you see more and more these days, and the motivations behind them. Metro games have been review-bombed into oblivion in recent weeks for obvious reasons, and while people may or may not agree with the sentiments, do those older games really deserve it? To me, that’s not what reviews are for.
Or here, where the motivation is about punishing a game released a year ago for the user error. If a game is mistaken, like here, Steam are going to give a refund. Get assistance, move on, and get what you originally wanted. But don’t punish the game for your mistake.
It shouldn’t be THAT hard to isolate the reviews motivated for reasons other than the game itself. They will have things in common, and all I’m suggesting is that one of those will be very short playtimes.
What about human intervention. As you say, this wouldn’t happen so often that you couldn’t manually check those high percentage negative review cases to see whats motivated them. And add a tag if its clear theres something more driving them.
To take this into account you could only show reviews that are above the average time played, or within a certain threshold behold the average.
Those can be legitimate reviews too though. I had to leave the latest metal slug open for four extra minutes in order to review it, it was so badly unplayable. That’s legitimate info.
This is like when you’re a kid and a grandparent tries to buy you a game, and it’s barely close to what you actually wanted.
I really did want Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge though…
Haha good grab
Well played. Take your damn upvo..wait this isn’t reddit…
Except that in this case it’s not some old person who has no idea what they’re buying, it’s the person who supposedly wants this game. That’s what you get for jumping on the bandwagon. “I only want this game because it’s popular and it’ll make me cool if I have it”
Did they not think something was sussed when they had to pay for a free game?