The Worst Tech on Steam, According to Players
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Short version: the four games with the lowest Tech & Support scores of the 498 we have analyzed are New World: Aeternum, ARK: Survival Ascended, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered and Borderlands 4. Three of them fail the same way: they do not run well, even on strong hardware. The fourth, New World, fails differently: its players are angry about being sold a game that was already announced to shut down.
How to read the score
Tech & Support covers bugs, performance and developer support. Players mostly bring it up to complain, so we count it across all reviews of a game: a review that says nothing about crashes counts as "no problem." A score of −3 means complaints are both common and strong. Most games sit near zero. How we score games.
The four lowest
| Rank in Tech & Support |
Game | Tech & Support | Reviews read | Overall (0 to 100) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 498th / 498 | New World: Aeternum | −3.1 | 256 | 51.6 |
| 497th / 498 | ARK: Survival Ascended | −2.9 | 401 | 35.0 |
| 496th / 498 | Oblivion Remastered | −2.8 | 430 | 41.1 |
| 495th / 498 | Borderlands 4 | −2.6 | 407 | 30.7 |
What reviewers said, summarized (the number is how many reviews made the point):
- ARK: Survival Ascended. "most poorly optimized game ever, terrible performance" (148). It is also the only one of the four with a second big complaint: "a paywall system requiring $60+ for DLC content on top of the base game" (70).
- Oblivion Remastered. "poorly optimized, unnecessarily heavy, shader recompilation every driver update" (157). Yet its visuals are its most-praised feature: "mostly great graphical improvements" (83).
- Borderlands 4. "riddled with crashes, freezes, stuttering, poor optimization" (167). More in our Borderlands 4 breakdown.
The odd one out: New World
New World has the lowest Tech & Support score of all, and it is not about frame rates. The complaint, from 148 of 256 reviews: the game is still being sold after its shutdown was announced. Its developer-support indicator is −3.1.
The rest of New World's reviews are surprisingly warm. Its most common praise is "highly addicting and so much better after updates" (59), and players describe "amazing friendships and social connections" (23). Its overall score, 51.6, is higher than the other three.
What the three performance cases have in common
All three are large, recent releases of established series, and in all three the most common positive review is about how the game looks or what it is, not how it runs. Players are not rejecting these games; they are asking for them to work.
Limits
1) These are aggregates of what Steam reviewers wrote.
2) Performance complaints come mostly from PC players who had problems, and a single patch can change the picture.
3) Analyzed September 10 to 14, 2026.
BC2S. Better Creative, Better Society. We read hundreds of thousands of reviews so you can see what people really think.
More deep dives
- Why Borderlands 4 Players Are Angry: 407 Steam Reviews, Broken Down
All eight Borderlands 4 categories land below zero. Crashes, stutter and optimization come up in 167 of 407 reviews, yet players describe a game they like. - What a Steam Score Can't Tell You: Why We Read and Analyzed About 500,000 Reviews
One percentage hides a lot. Four well known games show what reading reviews in every language adds: when, who, and what. - Does Modern Warfare 4 Live Up to Expectations? The Campaign Delivers, the Multiplayer Launch Doesn't
90% of Modern Warfare 4's campaign early access reviews recommend it, but 42% after multiplayer opened. 227 of 414 praise the campaign. Score: 81.1.
Game pages: New World: Aeternum · ARK: Survival Ascended · The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered · Borderlands 4 · How we score games
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