CD Projekt’s troubled RPG Cyberpunk 2077 won the Labor of Love category in the 2022 Steam Pricing (opens in new tab), given to the game that “is still getting new content after all these years.” But in the aftermath of the victory, it has become clear that not everyone feels the right decision has been made.
Steam Award winners are chosen by vote, which means a majority of users chose them over the other entrants in the category: Dota 2, Project Zomboid, No Man’s Sky, and Deep Rock Galactic. But in a way, Steam’s user rating system means the Steam Awards are never really over. Sure enough, a slew of new negative user reviews were posted on Steam following Labor of Love’s victory, with many expressing the feeling that it was the popularity of the Cyberpunk: Edge Runners (opens in new tab) show on Netflix, and not the game itself, making it overkill.
- “Labor of Love my ass the game is where it should have come out. It only got labor of love because of the weebs and stupid anime.”
- “This won labor of love because of the show and nothing else. 0 content has been added to this game over 2 years compared to literally any of the other nominees. The game still sucks and will continue to be until the company gets their ♥♥♥♥ together.”
- “Shocking how a decent animated edit can fool so many people into thinking the source material is worth forgiving, let alone rewarding it as a ‘Labor of Love’.”
- “Cyberpunk Edgerunners didn’t make a good game out of it.”
It’s not a bombardment of reviews in the classic sense of the word. While there has been a marked increase in negative reviews since the announcement of the Steam Award winners – 193 in total so far – it appears to be a handful of fans expressing their frustration with the current state of affairs, rather than a coordinated attempt to cause grief for some reason. And many more positive reviews were posted in the same two days: 836 in total.
In fact, that ratio isn’t far off the user reviews posted in December 2020, when Cyberpunk 2077 first launched and was in its most atrocious state: over 63,000 negative reviews, which is an absolutely wild number, but still little more than a quarter of the 227,000 positive reviews posted during the same period.
Despite its rocky history, Cyberpunk 2077 has only been “officially” reviewed on Steam once. That happened in March 2022, when thousands of negative user reviews were posted after CD Projekt stopped selling its products in Russia and Belarus (opens in new tab) to protest the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As noted by The gamer (opens in new tab)was the number of negative reviews enough to bring the game’s “recent” rating to “mixed”, though Valve later labeled those reviews as off-topic, causing exclude them from the overall assessment (opens in new tab).
However, this one is still there.
