A dispute over review time
Pearl Abyss now says Crimson Desert’s critics didn’t get enough time with the game. In January, the man scheduling its review codes promised them a month.
The first claim comes from Lybee Park, CEO of Pearl Abyss Europe, speaking on The Game Business Show last week. Asked by host Christopher Dring why players seem to like the game more than critics did (77 on Metacritic, an 8.7 user score), Park said reviewers followed the main quest on a deadline and missed the stuff scattered off it. She also pointed out that they had to play “the build that is not the exact same version of the launched game.”
I don’t think critics had a fair chance to explore.
Lybee Park, CEO, Pearl Abyss Europe
That second point is fair. The first one runs into Pearl Abyss’s own paper trail.
The record, in order
- January 9. Will Powers, who handled Crimson Desert’s review-code schedule, tells the New Game+ Showcase: “I’m giving people a month with the game. Please. I think you’re going to need it.” GamingBolt reports it. It’s exactly the right instinct for a map Powers said was bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2’s.
- March 18, 3pm PT. The review embargo lifts a day before launch. Whatever the code window ended up being, the scores arrive at the last possible moment for pre-orders.
- March 19. Launch. Pearl Abyss later says it sold 2 million copies that day. Players, meanwhile, are harsher than the critics: TheGamer counted almost 5,000 negative Steam reviews in the first 12 hours, leaving the game at 66% positive and “Mixed”, below the 77 Metascore Park is now explaining away.
- The first weekend. With patches already landing, Steam climbs to 77% and “Mostly Positive”. PC Gamer’s reviewer later notes that the storage problem she flagged got a fix four days after release.
- June 11. Pearl Abyss announces 6 million copies sold in 83 days.
- October 8. Park’s interview airs. By now the game on sale is Crimson Desert Enhanced, a reworked version that, as GamesRadar notes, directly rewrote parts of the story.
The scoreboard
Line the numbers up and the “players versus critics” story looks more like “launch versus everything since”:
| Who | When | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Critics (Metacritic, 115 reviews) | Launch week | 77 |
| Critics (OpenCritic top-critic average) | Launch week | 79 |
| Steam players | First 12 hours | 66% positive |
| Steam players | First weekend | 77% positive |
| Steam players, all languages | Today | 84% positive (176,889 reviews) |
The players who pushed the game to “Very Positive” are mostly reviewing a different game from the one critics got. That’s Park’s own point about the build, and it’s the one that holds up. The time argument doesn’t: players with no deadline at all scored the launch version lower than the critics did. As GamesRadar’s Austin Wood put it, Pearl Abyss set the review period.
None of this makes Crimson Desert a flop. Six million sales and a Very Positive Steam page are a comeback most studios would take. But the honest version of the story is a big, rough launch that months of patches turned around, and Pearl Abyss can tell that one itself. The next test lands on October 29, when the first DLC, Charting the Unknown, arrives. It was due on October 15 until Pearl Abyss pushed it back two weeks to deliver “a more polished and stable gameplay experience”. That’s the most convincing thing the company has said about reviews all year.
