The indie studio behind the recently released Outbound has apologised for asking a player to remove their negative review.
Outbound is a cosy exploration game developed by Square Glade Games, where players drive an empty camper van around an open world and attempt to turn it into a home by collecting materials to decorate it and using technology to power it.
The game was released on May 11 on PC and Xbox (including Game Pass), and is coming to PS5, Switch and Switch 2 on May 14, but it’s the Steam version that’s been gathering some controversy.
As initially screenshotted and shared on the Steam Reddit page (as spotted by Kotaku), one player wrote a negative review of the game, calling its mechanics “incredibly shallow” and saying it’s “definitely not worth the asking price”.
The studio said it understood the game wasn’t to the player’s liking and offered “no hard feelings”, but added: “Feel free to send a support request to the Steam support to get a full refund on your purchase. If you do so, we would appreciate if you would update or remove your negative review. Thanks a lot.”
This has not gone down well with some players, who have suggested that developers shouldn’t be trying to give their game a higher percentage of positive reviews by asking players to change or remove negative ones.
It has also seemingly had a ‘Streisand Effect’ to some extent – while the game’s Steam reviews are still marked as ‘Mostly Positive’, a number of recent negative reviews have made reference to the incident, suggesting it was at least partly responsible for their own rating.
Now, posted in response to one of these reviews, Square Glade Games has apologised for its comment, saying it will no longer ask people to remove or change their reviews.
“First and foremost, we truly apologize for how our recent replies have come across,” it said. “We understand that our communication has felt wrong to many of you, and for that, we are genuinely sorry.
“To be completely honest, the 24 hours since the launch have been incredibly overwhelming. While we started with a lot of excitement, the reality of a launch brings a lot of pressure and intense emotions. Looking back, we realize that the way we communicated was not the right approach, and we didn’t handle the situation with the care it deserved.”
It added: “We also want to be clear: we will no longer be asking anyone to change their negative reviews, and we have also deleted our previous comments. We respect your honesty and appreciate the feedback, even when it’s tough to hear. It helps us make the game better.
“Thank you for your patience while we navigate this. We’re heading back to work on the issues you’ve raised, but we wanted to make sure we stopped to say we hear you and we’re sorry for the missteps in our communication. Please don’t hesitate to shout out if there’s anything we can support with.”
Outbound currently has mixed reviews on Metacritic, where its score currently sits at 64.
