The CEO of Ori and the Blind Forest developer Moon Studios has clarified comments he made about the studio potentially facing the threat of shutdown following a wave of negative reviews on its early access action RPG No Rest for the Wicked, noting that "we're not in immediate financial danger."
No Rest for the Wicked has been in early access for just over a year now, but at the end of last month, a new update, The Breach, was released, which initially went down rather poorly with players. Despite introducing loads of new stuff, from fresh quests, to Hardcore Mode, new weapons and more, reviews on Steam criticized it for being a frustrating experience, with its Dark Souls-like difficulty not balanced with that same sense of accomplishment offered by FromSoftware's challenging games.
Moon Studios CEO Thomas Mahler previously said that the day after The Breach update's release was "probably one of the worst days of my life," and as highlighted by Gamereactor, he more recently took to Discord with a post encouraging fans of the game for their support to help counterbalance the negative reviews.
"I think people think I'm joking when I'm asking for positive reviews cause in people's mind there's always some big publisher in the background who'll cover costs," he stated.
"Folks, if you're writing here and are enjoying Wicked and are excited for future updates, but haven't left a positive review, it's entirely possible that we won't be around in a couple of months to do anything anymore simply because we got review bombed which leads to people not buying the game. Which means we're not making any money and will have to shut down."
Further clarifying this statement on Twitter, Mahler reassures fans that the situation isn't quite as urgent as it might have sounded, saying that most who've played the game since the post-The Breach hotfixes have been "extremely positive," and that "the reason I left the post on Discord up was simply to push back against some of the bullshit reviews."
He continues, noting he has "no issue telling active players who love Wicked that they should go ahead and leave a positive review on Steam," since it's conversely allowed for people to "leave a negative review that doesn't even talk about the game at all" before refunding the game, "and the negative review still counts."
Furthermore, he adds: "And no, we're not in immediate financial danger – but from time to time, I think I'm allowed to speak up about issues within our industry I personally find unbecoming.
"We are continuing as always – our goal is for every game Moon Studios creates to be an absolute masterpiece, and with Wicked we're already on the way.
"We want our small 90-person company to push companies like Blizzard, GGG, and others to innovate by putting out products that are top-quality and truly unique – we believe in competition and we think players will win because of that!"
No Rest for the Wicked's average rating on Steam still sits at Mostly Positive at the time of writing, but the proportion of positive reviews has gone up significantly over the last few days, with an enormous spike yesterday in particular.
