Developer Review Bombed On Steam For Putting Anti-Mask Rant In Patch Notes

Whether or not you agree with the practice, review bombing certainly is a thing that exists. People leave heaps of negative reviews on games for a variety of reasons, and often, those reasons aren’t actually anything to do with the game itself, such as calling developers out for problematic views they might hold.

Well, that’s exactly what’s currently happening with the indie gladiator management sim Domina. Over the past few days, it’s managed to rack up hundreds of negative reviews on Steam - at the time of writing, just 23% of its most recent 955 reviews were positive. Why, I hear you ask? For some reason, the developer, Dolphin Barn Incorporated, decided to leave a completely out-of-place anti-mask rant in their most recent patch notes. 

Speaking of Steam, Valve's new handheld console, the Steam Deck, is out now - check out the video of it below.

“TAKE OFF THE FCKN MASKS - Next time you're at the grocery store, try showing a woman your face. Be confident, unafraid of the LIES -- you might get a girlfriend,” the notes read. “Women like confidence. Women don't like dudes who cover their faces in fear. What are you afraid of? Getting laid? Grow up.”

Needless to say, most Steam users understandably haven’t been responding to this message in the way that Dolphin Barn Incorporated probably hoped. “Anti-masker devs using their patch notes as a glorified Twitter feed. Embarrassing,” one user wrote in a review. “How to ruin a game in [two] easy steps. 1. Add microtransactions years into release. 2. Add a weird rant about masks into your patch notes. Avoid this dev,” said another.

Strangely, this isn’t the first time that the dev has slipped messages into their patch notes that clearly don’t belong there. As noted by PC Gamer, in May 2021, at the bottom of a different set of notes, they added a particularly bizarre rant about Pornhub, OnlyFans, and growing potatoes? I don't even know.

“Weak men lack character. Strong moral fibre is hard to come by. It's earned through hard work and sacrifice and it cannot be had via onlyfans or pornhub,” they wrote at the time. “No, those f**kin’ things are demonic [possessions] waiting to show you a succubus tiddy in the hopes you'll waste a load on her instead of spending that energy studying how to weld or grow a potato or learning a new language or how to program a computer. […] Masturbating to egirls isn't gonna solve the energy crisis is it? Get to work.”

I’ll be honest, reader, I don’t know how on earth I’m meant to follow up from a sentence talking about “succubus tiddy”. Let’s just all take a moment to process all that, shall we? …Okay, I’m still no closer to comprehending it. That’s enough internet for today, I think.