Earth Defense Force 6 is being review bombed on Steam due to its requirement that players sign up for an Epic Games account in order to play online.
The game has attracted a “Mostly Negative” review rating on Steam across 909 reviews at time of writing, and since it’s only just been released, that’s a lot of angry players queueing up to give it a kicking.
Most of the negative reviews point to the fact that it’s necessary to sign up for an Epic Games account in order to play any of Earth Defense Force 6‘s online modes, and also the fact that players must install Epic Online Services in order to play the game at all.
Pretty much all of the negative reviews I could see on the Steam page pointed to the Epic requirement, although there were one or two criticizing Earth Defense Force 6 for its lackluster technical performance as well. That’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to EDF games, though.
Developer Sandlot and publisher D3Publisher took to Steam earlier today to address the criticism. The two studios apologize for “the lack of advance notice”; players apparently weren’t told that signing up for an Epic account would be needed if they wanted to play online.
Additionally, the two studios point out that signing into the Epic account is “usually” only required once, and that players can play online freely once they’ve done so without needing to sign in again.
There’s no sign that the studios will climb down from the requirement to sign up for an Epic account; since Epic’s online services are seemingly baked into Earth Defense Force 6 on a basic level, it’s unlikely that such a walkback is coming.
Although the Epic controversy might have dulled D3Publisher and Sandlot’s spirits, the two studios can take solace in the fact that Earth Defense Force 6 is easily the best-performing game in the series when it comes to player numbers.
At time of writing, the 24-hour Steam player peak for EDF 6 was 17,690, over twice that achieved by Earth Defense Force 5 (which stands at 8,416). Other Earth Defense Force games can’t hold a candle to those numbers.
Weirdly, this controversy makes Earth Defense Force 6 the second bug-blasting third-person multiplayer-focused shooter to incur the wrath of Steam players over the need to sign up for a third-party account in order to play.
Of course, the Helldivers 2 situation is different in a number of key ways.
For one thing, the need to sign up for a Sony account made it impossible for players who couldn’t access the PlayStation Network in their home countries to play the game. For another, Sony eventually walked back the requirement to sign up for PSN to play Helldivers 2, although it has yet to relist the game in many countries.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens in the case of EDF 6. For now, though, if you want to check out Sandlot’s latest bug-based splatterfest, it’s out now on PC and PlayStation. You can check out our preview of the game here.
