Steam reviews have hit a new low and I finally see just how damaging they are to a company like Stardock. This is the thread to point out supposedly sincere reviews that are hard to grasp (or have ulterior motives).
This review was written by “DaBlaarg” and is about the new MOO. Yes it’s listed on Moo’s front page of reviews and has 3 out of 3 “this was a helpful” votes (soon to be 3 out of 4).
“Cannot play this. I logged in probably 10K hours in MOO2…can’t play this…doesn’t matter what I do/build/etc cannot win. and this is on lowest difficulty. this game is broken. then I figured I’d mod it so I can at least get a few hours of play out of it and not be a complete waste of money. omg…the modding process is like getting a lava fingered prostate exam. I don’t think anyone could make it more of a pain in the ♥♥♥♥. 1/10 I had such high hopes for this game. completely dissapointed. I’ve never even bothered to write a review for anything online before.”
This guy supposedly played MOO2 for “10,000 hours” and can’t win on the lowest difficulty? You have to do a lot of meth or suffer a serious neurological brain disorder to lose that kind of brain mass. 10,000 hours = 1,250 workdays or 4.6 work years. Nearly enough time to work your way through graduate school and get a PhD on the subject.
God, I just saw that the other day. I can’t believe these people who left bad reviews. To have “mixed” on a game like OTC is totally crazy. One of the complaints was about time it took until it was boring. I’ve played for only 12 hours and I feel like I don’t know anything, and these people were saying they beat the entire game after 5.
I may be wrong here but I get the impression that unless something is incredibly amazingly uber awesome, and/or has a loyal fanbase the people who leave “reviews” on Steam, especially the shorter ones, tend to be the disgruntled.
One of the side benefits of having a lot of achievements is that you can go from a user’s review and see exactly how they have played the game (what difficulty levels have they beaten, which modes are they playing, when did they play the game, etc…). Is pretty helpful for understanding the context of reviews which… yeah, can be interesting.
Probably what you are seeing is that the recent reviews are Mixed (<70%). I’d prefer them to use the last 100 reviews or last 30 days, whichever has more reviews, as sometimes the last 30 days can be a tiny sample size.
[quote=“Kyle700, post:3, topic:128522, full:true”]
God, I just saw that the other day. I can’t believe these people who left bad reviews. To have “mixed” on a game like OTC is totally crazy. [/quote]
Actually, it shows a “Mostly positive” rating with 2000 reviews (most of them older than a month, 76% positive).
Steam is becoming more and more of a toxic bloodbath every day, between its complete laissez-faire “management”, flood of shovelware/Unity asset flips, and uncurated reviews.
If I had the money/time, I’d be looking to find a way to eat part, if not all of, Steam’s lunch with a new digital delivery option. They may be a juggernaut now, but juggernauts have a way of getting wiped out when something nimbler comes along…
I think you should start a curated digital delivery service with your own in-depth reviews that only stocks hardcore flight sims. Then one year later you can have a huge “expansion” and add subs.
Which still seems way too high. Mixed, to me, says a fairly even split of opinions. 70% is not that. it is predominantly positive. hell, even 60% would be positive, to me.
We should be writing more reviews for games we like. I was sick of seeing silly reviews for Tyranny, so when I finished it yesterday, I wrote a positive review of it. First time I have done so. I am going to try to be better about it. It won’t do much to change the overall rating, but at least I tried.
This is pretty true, from what i’ve seen. It’s one reason many developers didn’t like the review count changes Steam made a few months back. It tended to penalize devs who didn’t have huge fanbases or have “uber-amazing” type games.
Ironically, after introducing that all or nothing rating system, Valve got too scared they might destroy the 7 to 9 scale, so they have engineered one, it seems?
The “mixed” yellow colored text in Steam reviews has a psychological effect since it’s in between green for positive and red for negative. It says “mediocre but no abysmal”. It is an entirely unfair assessment since as was mentioned - many more people write negative reviews than positive if a little issue comes up that bothers them. I think the text percentage should be white for mixed reviews as it is more neutral. Yellow is a warning color. I have always loved Steam, but I no longer do and am really upset at the harm it is doing to good developers who don’t hit critical mass.
