Best thing about negative reviews that go beyond just, this sucks, is they usually tell you why they don’t like the game. The positive ones often gush to the point of not really telling you anything. (user reviews).
I do exactly the same thing. The bulk of user reviews on Amazon are useless.
I always read recent first. I assume most Brand Unknown products are paying for the first 10-50 reviews; which they often very much do even above board. by providing “samples” to Amazon reviewers who may or may not note this at the bottom of a review.
Also, Amazon user reviews are useless both ways - often you’ll find a crapload of one star reviews just because they promised 2 day shipping and it actually took 3 to get to them, with nothing about the product. Man I hate those.
And a significant number of 3rd party sale listings are bogus. Amazon is having fraud problems right and left. If they leave this unchecked for too much longer, they’ll get eBayed.
I couldn’t disagree more.
Sorry I meant from a publisher pint of view vis a vis how publishers used Metacritic before.
In my experience, Amazon is too busy being awful at their own businesses (especially if you don’t pay for Prime) to have time to worry about third-party vendors.
But critic reviews seem to suffer from fewer outrage campaign, whereas Steam user reviews are easily manipulated by bizarre online politics.
Hey, do not forget the snark and shit bonez.
And perhaps most importantly the "Fuck you, Chick!"s.
They suffer more from let’s treat this dev or this dev as a rockstar, too afraid of being blacklisted to ask hard questions or hold them accountable to what was marketed to what was delivered and my favorite blaming everyone but their company or sometimes themself for hype machines. I appreciate critic reviews and user reviews for what they are, but critic reviews are certainly not outside of politics.
Media seeking confirmation for a bias/agenda they have will jump and re-tell the first story that fits the narrative they want to spread, without bothering to confirm it, or using another unverified source as confirmation instead of doing their own investigation.
And naturally, the impact of a clarification/correction to an article is an order of magnitude smaller than the original piece so, even if the original piece was a lie, it would have achieved the goal of the piece.
Well THAT was a weird link. It’s just a google search on stories too good to fact check.
Note to self: Bookmark that post and see where that link leads in 10 years.
“News” site makes mistake, issues correction. Call the gamer gaters. /s
It’s all about ethics in game journalism. Owning up to a mistake, for example.
I suppose it was, I was just thinking of how common that phrase has become lately.
Didn’t intend to confuse. : )
Don’t look now, but Polygon thinks they just did some gaming journalism warning us of the evils of steam, haha:
I just saw that show up on my Google Now feed. Good lord.