Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era stormed out the gates with the most reviews of any new release this week and a score the Heroes franchise hasn't seen in nearly twenty years.

Heroes V (2006) was the last entry to pass the eighty-five percent threshold. VI and VII (2011, 2015) both landed in the fifties on launch and stayed there. Olden Era's developer Unfrozen (previously Iratus ) and publisher Hooded Horse have absolutely produced a winner.

On Steam, every prior Heroes title has always skewed heavily English in review volume with Russian coming up second. The breakdown for Olden Era though is almost exactly a third of all reviews, and both with almost the exact same sentiment of ninety percent positive. In October 2025 the devs shipped a demo that sat at 78.5%, six months of feedback later and the launch is proudly sitting at 89.5%.

English reviewers had some complaints about AI difficulty and a perceived multiplayer focus, and Russian reviewers grizzled about visual clarity and music that leans on older Paul Romero work, though for every one reviewer complaining another praised.

Polish and Chinese players push the visual criticism further, comparing the art style of Olden Era with older entries and in a non insignificant amount - comparing Olden Era with Clash of Clans and other mobile games.

In the forums, the devs are present, responding through the weekend to approximately 8% of incoming topics, including responses to nearly half of the Steam Event posts - which very often get lost in the noise of Steam. Strangely though there's zero dev feedback on the Bug tracking forum - perhaps it got lost in the winds 😅.

This is the first full week that Gameplainer has been tracking owners of games when they post in the forums - so it's interesting to see the breakdown of "owners" vs "curious/potential buyers"

The conversion rate for forum posters writing reviews is healthy at around nine percent, with eighty-six percent of those reviews positive.

Gamble With Your Friends is a one-to-six-player party game that seemed to drop out of nowhere, launching at 88% positive across nearly three thousand reviews. What blew me away while going through the data was first seeing that "friendslop" was only mentioned in 3% of reviews, and then secondly: the two reviews sitting at the very top of the most upvoted (#1 & #2 ). Both are "Not Recommended", written by different accounts, with identical text. Combined they hold around two and a half thousand upvotes which means the first thing a prospective buyer sees on the Steam page is the same complaint twice over.

However the second instance of the review is made by a user with no other reviews, or profile details, no visible games. This could be an attempt at gaming the Steam review score negatively, however... it's not working - everyone loves Gamble With Your Friends, look:

Over half of the reviews praised the goofy gameplay, no one complained about the price, though there were a lot of bug reports hidden in the reviews. One that stood out was an integer overflow one player managed to find, rendering a bunch of achievements unachievable

Meanwhile the devs were not in the forums, posting just a handful of times the day before shipping. Nearly 90% of forum posters have bought the game, but only 4% have reviewed the game. Of the ones that did review, 84.6% were positive, just under the game's overall 88% score.

Invincible VS, a fighter game based on the Invincible comic and Amazon series, opened the week at 76% positive across more than two thousand reviews, and the data tells a story about what happens when the hotfixes ship faster than the storefront can update. The good news is that the fighting works. Combat is the highest-rated topic among the predominantly English language reviews. The complaints around the game are loud, specific, and in two notable cases, already addressed.

Pricing is the single biggest source of negative sentiment at 22% and the story-mode length shows up in 18% of negative sentiment.

Then there was the launch of the Deluxe version, which launched at a higher pricepoint but missing the perks . This was fixed in a day 1 hotfix, however not fast enough for a lot of players to take frustration out in their review, over 60 reviews (2.25%) were negative just because of the communication of the Deluxe bundle.

Sentiment is coming around though, this reviewer flipped from Recommended to not recommended and back again over the last four days. That particularly review is interesting as it mentioned rage quitting which turned up in over 10% of English negative sentiment. Yet at least one player thinks it's already fixed! In any case, it might be time to ship out some more developer responses...

For Invincible VS the Steam forums are a classically wild space, with zero developer involvement, and 64% of all forum posters buying the game, and 15% reviewing mostly positively (78.4%).

Sledding Game is a four-dollar coop indie about sledding down hills, fighting yetis, and (apparently) fishing. It launched on Thursday at 87% positive across 1599 reviews, climbing to 97% in English. It's the highest-rated game in this week's report, and the one I spent the most time on, because it gave me a chance to track something I haven't been able to track before: how forum posters convert to owners over the opening days of a launch.

I've seen moment-in-time checks while doing one-off forum analysis reports, but watching Sledding Game over the weekend was the first time I've seen the conversion happen in real time.

Across thirteen established games, ownership converges between 81% and 94%. The two confirmed demo-having games in the sample (Town to City, Roadside Research) sit at the bottom of that range, around 82%. The non-demo games cluster in the 88-94% band. Sledding Game had a year-long demo. Five days in, it's at 42% own / 4.5% reviewing, climbing toward what's likely a demo-having ceiling around 80-85%.

On the forum itself, the team is most responsive in Bug Reporting (6.8% reply rate, the highest of any forum), and 96.5% of forum posters who reviewed left positive ones. While Sledding Company aren't doing much in the forums - what they're doing everywhere else is clearly working as their engaged audience is the happiest I've seen this week!

Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! is a cozy first-person game about sorting books in a magical library. It launched on Thursday at 95.5% positive across 1384 reviews, the highest score in this week's report.

Players praised the meditative zen of picking up books - though many players complained about a late-game difficulty curve.

The dev is on the forums, peaking at 14 team posts on launch Friday and tapering to single digits through the week. While this is definitely the highest engagement in this week's report, it's still only just keeping up with the public.