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Baldur’s Gate 3 Was Review-Bombed After The Game Awards 2024—But the Attribution Has Limits

After The Game Awards 2024, a reported wave of negative Baldur’s Gate 3 Steam reviews was linked to some Black Myth: Wukong fans. The available reporting does not establish the wider fandom’s involvement or the incident’s lasting effect on the game’s rating.
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After The Game Awards 2024, Baldur’s Gate 3 received a burst of negative Steam reviews. Contemporary coverage linked the activity to some Black Myth: Wukong fans reacting to a speech by Larian founder Swen Vincke—but that report does not establish that the wider Wukong community took part.

What happened to Baldur’s Gate 3’s Steam reviews?

Push Square reported that hundreds of negative reviews for Baldur’s Gate 3 appeared on Steam after The Game Awards 2024. Its account connected some of the activity to Black Myth: Wukong fans who were upset by Vincke’s speech at the awards show, where Astro Bot won Game of the Year. Push Square’s contemporaneous report also noted that Astro Bot was not available on Steam, while Baldur’s Gate 3 was.

That is a reported explanation, not a verified audit of every reviewer’s identity or motive. It supports saying that some fans were implicated in the response; it does not support blaming Black Myth: Wukong players as a whole.

What does “review bombing” mean on Steam?

Steamworks defines it this way: “A review bomb is when a large amount of players use reviews to voice their unhappiness, lower a review score and provoke a response.” The platform says reviews reflect players’ satisfaction with a game, its value proposition, business practices, and community experience. For developers facing anomalous review volume and sentiment, Steam’s guidance is to contact Valve through partner support. Steamworks’ review documentation explains the policy.

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The term describes a pattern of review activity, not a conclusion about whether the criticism is fair or whether every negative reviewer coordinated with others. In this case, the available contemporary account describes a sudden negative burst, but the sources here do not provide a complete dated Steam review history for the incident.

What can—and can’t—be concluded from the reporting?

  • Supported: Negative Baldur’s Gate 3 reviews were reported on Steam after The Game Awards 2024.
  • Attributed, not proven for every reviewer: Push Square linked the reaction to some Black Myth: Wukong fans and Vincke’s speech.
  • Not established: A precise review count, exact score decline, share of reviewers from any country or language group, or lasting effect on the game’s overall rating.
  • Not representative evidence: A Steam Community participant suggested anger may have stemmed from misunderstanding or mistranslation of the speech. That is an individual comment, not evidence of how most Chinese players understood it. The discussion is user-generated commentary.

Black Myth: Wukong is described on its Steam store page as an action RPG rooted in Chinese mythology. The listing’s current review totals and summaries change over time, so they cannot establish the scale of a 2024 response to a different game.

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  • Epic Storytelling: Embark on an epic journey filled with complex narratives, challenging quests, and memorable characters.
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Did the review burst permanently change Baldur’s Gate 3’s rating?

The sources available for this incident do not quantify a lasting change in Baldur’s Gate 3’s overall Steam rating. A short-lived spike in negative reviews and a durable shift in the total rating are different things; establishing the latter would require dated review and rating data across the relevant period. A live storefront score is a current snapshot, not a record of what happened in December 2024.

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