Ha ha, busted! I bet I haven’t spent five minutes looking at user reviews in the ten years or so I’ve been on Steam. Still, would have been nice to get an actual answer to my question.
Usually in discussions about Steam reviews, people will bring up anecdotes of games getting review-bombed. The reasons vary (I’ve heard of copy protection, DLC policies, dev is/isn’t a gamergator, etc) but I’ve never seen a study or hard data as to how common it actually is.
Edit: It seems to me that review-bombing is usually used as a reason not to rely on Steam reviews, so I’d really like to know how prevalent it is. As far as I can tell, the aggregate score Steam shows is more often than not a good indicator of the game’s quality.
It’s not that common on the whole, but when it does happen, it’s typically with high-profile games (Gone Home, Firewatch, Endless Legend, and Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds are just a few examples), which makes it seem like it might be more widespread than it probably is.
That said, it shouldn’t be happening at all. Even if only one game out of a hundred gets review-bombed for one reason or another, that’s still too much, and Valve’s refusal to fix their awful review system ensures that it’ll continue to happen.
<looks at time with Divinity Original Sin 2>
Guilty as charged.
This is a game where I liked so much of it … probably 90% of the game I just was enthralled with, and I couldn’t beat the ending. Put it down, came back, re-rolled and thoroughly enjoyed everything up through act 3 again, got to act 4, and didn’t even get to the ending before I just quit & uninstalled and sat down & really put up a hugely negative review.
Because I think the vast majority of people should avoid this game & not go through the frustration that I did, unless you just want to quit the game when you get to act 4 and be content.
I was more pissed at all the fucktards and shitwabbles that posted positive reviews with < 50 hours played because why in the fuck are you reviewing a game you have clearly not finished?
Gee you like to try and overcomplicate things. ;)
This is a review on Steam, (possibly) read by thousands of strangers. It’s not a conversation with your mates to whom you’re making individual recommendations based on their tastes. It’s about your tastes. As a Steam review, it should be telling us your feeling on the game, not your prediction of someone else’s feeling.
To put it in more simple terms, ‘did you like this game’, yes or no? I don’t think it’s difficult, and the binary system gets down to the crux of it. A review should be able to tell us at least that much right?
And if you can’t even tell us that much, you need to reconsider whether it’s worth sharing that indecisiveness with the world. :)
Well did you or didn’t you like the game? Did your thoughts at least get you that far? I would suggest that one thing is the most basic determination a reviewer should be able to arrive at before sharing anything with their audience. :)
Again I point you to Tom’s reviews. Sure he uses five stars, but you could convert them to binary because there’s no middle ground - each star is some degree or like or dislike. He has no default ‘I don’t know, I have no feeling one way or the other’ star in his system.
We’ve all seen people reguarly fail to understand his ratings, assuming it’s some scale of ‘good/badness’ with 3 stars meaning ‘average’. Seems it’s the same thing here with Steam’s binary system.
Imagine doing a guest review on the front page using the five-star system. You’d be expected to use that system and work within those parameters. This burning desire for a Steam ‘thumb sideways’ seems like misunderstanding the five star system and wanting to use two and a half stars, because you couldn’t decide whether you liked a game or not. :)
EL got review bombed?
To me, the Steam review system is so much more usable than Amazon review that complaints like that ring a little hollow. Last time I seriously tried buying something I didn’t know well on Amazon (two years ago, admittedly) every product I looked at had about 50 5-star reviews saying things like “It fell apart as i took it out of the box, but it might work for you! LOL! I got this for free.” Now those are worthless reviews.
Edit: That’s ruder than I meant to be. No time to soften it, though. Sorry
All I said was that some games aren’t clear thumbs up or thumbs down material. Obviously if I’m leaving a review I need to decide what to ‘grade it’ based on the system being used. Tyranny is an example of a borderline case for me. There were aspects I liked about it, but overall I would not recommend it. Just because I said some games are difficult to grade doesn’t mean I can’t do it.
When I asked above what should the ‘default’ be it was more of a hypothetical question.
Yeah, there was a debacle with a patch breaking a popular Chinese mod, the mod developer being unable to fix the mod for the current version and posting a link to a pirate copy of the old version instead, Amplitude taking down the pirate link, and mod users getting mad and bombing the reviews.
“It’s fine that this thing sucks because this totally unrelated other thing is so much worse” is more useless than these Steam reviews!
I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Amazon and Steam both have user review systems. Steam does not have the blatant review buying that Amazon does, so of the two systems I am familiar with, Steam wins by a mile. Is it better than a hypothetical perfect system? No, but it’s better than what I have experience with.
If there’s a better system that puts them both to shame, please tell me so I can shop there instead.
You’ve read reviews on Steam right, and you know some of Valve’s changes to their review policy literally had to do with this problem right? Amazon has policies as well where you’re supposed to identify the item was received for free.
This has actually been a big problem on Steam since reviews started. In fact, at least a couple of Steam policy updates were done specifically to combat this issue, with debatable results.
Amazon changed their review policy recently. Sellers and manufacturers can no longer send review products directly to reviewers. They can only send review products to Amazon, and Amazon will forward them to reviewers. However, Amazon selects reviewers according to their “helpfulness” rating, not by whether they leave positive or negative reviews. Thus, reviewers have an incentive to provide reviews that readers, not manufacturers, will find useful.
I know that’s why they made reviews from people who didn’t buy through Steam not count towards the aggregate score. There’s been plenty of debate (on this very forum, even) about whether it was a net benefit, but I think on the balance it’s the right call. (Note that I’m not claiming that an awful lot of Steam reviews aren’t rubbish; they clearly are. I tend to think they get a lot right in aggregate, however) Amazon requiring people to identify they received the product for free didn’t actually help when there are 60 reviews, 50 of which are paid 5-star reviews. The “signal” of legitimate reviews gets swamped by the “noise”.
Like I said, it’s been two years since I tried to buy anything I didn’t already know I wanted from Amazon, but this sounds like a great change if it’s worked.
Well Amazon has a verified purchase icon.
Here’s the thing though, this can happen on almost any site, probably happens on most sites that allow third party… the bigger sites are just the ones getting most the notice.
Sure, no disagreement with that. I’m derailing the thread, so I’ll try to be brief.
I use Amazon reviews a bit differently than Steam reviews. Usually on Steam, I already know what game I’m interested in from this or other forums. I use the individual reviews to check what other people thought of it/check how buggy it is. From that standpoint, a negative review from someone with 1000 hours in the game who burned out is still often a positive - there’s basically no chance I’ll spend 1000 hours on the game so it’s probably good for the 20 hrs I’ll spend.
On Amazon, however, I know what type of product I need (e.g. motion-sensing sprinkler to convince the neighbor’s cat my yard isn’t a litterbox) but not what brand to buy. If the reviews are legit, it’s much easier to pick the highest starred brand and get that. If I have to mentally remove paid reviews from half the brands ranking, it’s way too hard to actually figure out which one works and which breaks after a week.
I’m sure it is a problem for almost any site. I was just surprised and pleased to see Valve respond before Amazon.
Edit: I see people like @WarpRattler saying how much they dislike Steam reviews. There are problems with them for sure, but I still haven’t seen a review system that works much better than Steam. Maybe I just lack imagination to think of a better system, but there are SO. MANY. GAMES. on Steam that I need something to filter out the dross. I am legitimately curious what people think would work better than user reviews.
I think you’re giving Valve more credit than due. Both these online giants have been tackling the review problems, with multiple changes and marginal success.
Anyway, your issues doesn’t seem to be with the negative reviews but the positive ones. I think someone mentioned above they were not exactly pleased the complaints are all about the negative reviews instead of say the questionable ones that are positive reviews. Between the hero worship and fan service and the burned out or frustration/late game bad experience the reviews are probably okay for most games. For the ones running into DLC, DMC or other issues review bombings of their game… they should just expect that.
I’m sure I am giving them more credit than is due. It’s certainly just my perception biases: I went through several months where everything I looked at on Amazon seemed to be full of paid reviews, but I haven’t actually noticed it on Steam. I’m sure they were/are there, I just never looked at the right games.
I think games elicit more review behaviors than a lot of other things. Who’s going to be a fanboy over a motion detecting sprinkler (besides me, I guess)? Or reviewbomb one?
Let me introduce you to Instant Pot
… for one model.
I mean… gamers are not the only group passionate about their things. over 25k. Age of Wonders 3 has 4k. I mean… people are just excited about some things.
Ok, you win! I do see people praising their Instant Pots all over the place. Sous Vide cookers too, although those top out at 3,600 reviews.