When Trust Breaks. The Heartbound Controversy and the Reorganisation of Player Evolution on Steam

This paper examines how the 2024 online controversy surrounding Jason Thor Hall ("Pirate Software"), developer of the early access RPG Heartbound, restructured player evaluation on Steam. Following Hall's public opposition to the Stop Killing Games consumer rights initiative in August 2024 - and compounded by subsequent controversies including the OnlyFangs World of Warcraft incident (January 2025) and an intensified backlash in June-July 2025 - the game's positive recommendation rate collapsed from 84.1% to 19.8% and did not recover across a 14-month observation window.Using a mixed-methods case study design, the study analyses 3,589 Steam reviews across two periods (pre- and post-controversy) through quantitative time-series analysis and qualitative thematic analysis of 150 purposively sampled reviews. The most significant finding is retrospective critique: gameplay shortcomings that had existed since Heartbound's early access launch in 2018 - limited content, slow development, poor technical quality - were discursively invisible before the controversy but became central afterwards. The controversy did not simply add negative sentiment; it reorganised the very criteria by which players judged the game, a shift consistent with the disruption of parasocial attachment and the platform's binary recommendation structure constraining evaluative expression.The paper contributes to debates in affective platform studies, moral economies of player-developer relations, and the temporal dynamics of user-generated feedback on digital platforms. It argues that early access development creates structural vulnerability by merging developer identity with product evaluation, and that on platformed review systems, once the criteria of judgment shift, they may not shift back.