I don’t know why there has to be so many people in the world willing to lie, cheat, steal & kill to get ahead or at least get “their way” but am glad that Steam is well aware of it and working towards a solution.
Read what the Steam folks say here. Figured I might as well share it as I have talked about this before and for some reason folks seemed like they couldn’t quite believe it maybe think I just make up these things and that is not the case. Lol
I think if a few dozen were banned as an example it might just knock a bit of sense into all of the others.
It’s a perspective thing, not an imagination thing. I haven’t seen it, so my perspective is that it doesn’t happen. You seem to have seen it a lot, so your perspective is that it happens a lot. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle, because perception is flawed - it’s based only on the very limited part of reality that we’re personally exposed to.
That’s why I ask for numbers on these things. It’s not an argument that it does or doesn’t happen, it’s an attempt to filter out the perception error.
There are news articles mentioning this was a result of Firewatch being review bombed, but I’m more inclined to believe it’s the result of Bethesda’s Fallout 4 being review bombed. Shortly after announcing their second approach to “paid mods” the game received over 6,000 negative reviews on the Steam store.
The review rating histogram they have added is a good idea.
It would also be great if they mapped events like update releases on that histogram so that potential buyers would know whether or not the review ratio is affected by game updates or external factors.
I wasn’t aware of the controversy between PewDiePie and Firewatch, and after reading about it I cannot help but feeling a bit sad about the whole situation, possibly because I liked the game quite a lot when I played it.
As I don’t want to start a debate regarding any social issues here, I’ll refrain from mentioning how I think about their respective actions. But as to the review bombing itself, I found it to be a quite silly thing to do.
Aside from being utterly childish, I feel it kind of defeats their purpose, since the whole thing started off when the company behind Firewatch decided to voice their opinion on the matter by using something completely unrelated to the issue. It doesn’t make any sense to me, if people are protesting against such a measure by doing basically the same thing themselves.
I can neither see how a certain streamer’s choice of words could determine if he can legally stream a game or not, nor how an owner of the game company deals with such an issue could decide what merit and artistic value their product has.
So I’m relieved to know that Steam is aware of such a practice and taking measures to prevent it from happening again.
They say in most cases some time after the review bomb the game recovers its positive / very positive rating. Most may be 51 out of 100 or 2 out of 3 and still I would say during the time when it is occurring there are lost sales.
Also we know of course Steam are not going to say “this has severely impacted sales of many games and destroyed other games” even if that is the truth.
The Firewatch or AAA game incidents I don’t personally care much about. Such cases the games have already done very well. Although of course it is only because of those cases that it is being taken seriously unfortunately.
It is all of the other smaller scale review bombings on much smaller games that I hope is solved. Games being hammered because it is too mobile or otherwise doesn’t look / play a certain way, etc. For a good or even great game that is not well known this kind of stupidity can kill it.
It’s something at least. Unfortunately we live in an age where everyone thinks they’re entitled to attack & butcher anything they don’t agree with. It’s been happening to Indies for years now and not just on Steam. Idiots targeting mobile games because “it’s not free.” Other idiots targeting mobile games because the developer wouldn’t buy their app marketing service.
The only real solution is to get rid of such people and we know that won’t happen. So we’ll see how it goes now that it happened to bigger companies so was taken seriously.
If anyone actually read the article (it’s in the second-to-last paragraph before the figure), Steam isn’t doing anything about it.
They’re adding a graph of reviews over time, so you can see if there was a spike somewhere. This doesn’t remove “bomb reviews” or anything.
So this won’t change anything.
As for whether or not review bombing is okay, see this article. Review bombing is a gamer’s defense in a system where they don’t have a voice otherwise, or so it is argued.
I think people afraid of review bombing need to keep in mind that for the most part, it happens in response to drastic actions by developers. Someone releasing expansions for an early access game. Someone blocking modding of a hugely popular tool in their game well known for modding. Someone trying to introduce paid mods when they’ve always been free. Someone making a big drama about a Youtuber after they’ve undoubtedly made money from that person’s publicity.
An indie dev who keeps their head down and works on their game is not going to face these issues.
Yeah I don’t care about it from the big popular Indie games and AAA games. The risk is when people coordinate the attacks on the lesser known games. The super niche games. The tiny Indies just trying to get started. It is hard enough to market a game and make enough sales to make it worthwhile without jackasses intentionally trying to sabotage games just because they got a wild hair up their behind on about something.
Image is only important as it translates to sales. A company like Disney that markets to parents is highly concerned about a squeaky clean image. On the other hand a little controversy here and there probably helps the average indie dev.
IMO it would be a simple solution. Anyone can review, like now, but if you do not have 20+ hours in the game, your review should be shoved to the bottom of the list, and not count towards “mostly positive, mostly negative” at all. So if a purchaser really wants to see all the foul language I hate this game cause I died in 10 minutes, or OMG I couldn’t find Iron so no house for me reviews, they can certainly get to them. i don’t believe in censorship. However to count towards a postivie/negative rating the reviewer should have invested some time actually playing the game and putting a good effort in. Those reviewers should also be at the top of the pile because I would believe they actually know what they are talking about for the most part. This would also stop another trick I have seen done, buy game, review it, refund under time limit. That review stays, person doesn’t even own the game and has their money back.
So you’re saying Firewatch shouldn’t have any reviews because it’s a four hour game.
And you’re also saying that a user cannot form a complete opinion of the game’s core loop before 20 hours in the game have passed. This is, obviously, quite ridiculous.
Additionally, take a look at a game like Ark Survival Evolved, and see that a great deal of the negative reviews are from users with hundreds of hours in the game.
Additionally, Steam has a system in place to prevent refund abuse. I don’t know how well it works, but it’s there.
Well if you can’t put more than 4 hours of gameplay into your game, that is likely not review bombing, that is deserved gtfo and finish your game bombing lol. If you have been spending your life playing games that you can get through in less than 20 hours, I feel very sorry for you. One day you will hit that magic game, and you will understand…
