When did anyone say “devs should be allowed to remove reviews”? All I said is that Steam needs a better implementation than “flag and hope Valve gets around to it” for devs to be able to handle obviously fake reviews like someone leaving “Sonic Mania uses Denuvo” as a negative review for Endless Space 2, and that there need to be systems put into place to prevent people from purchasing a game, leaving it running for six minutes, writing a review, and refunding the game.
Valve also needs to do a better job policing game submissions on Steam to prevent Unity asset flips and the like from showing up, but that’s wholly unrelated to their broken user review system.
The GAME review section is for opinions on the GAME. Not your hatred of what the developer ate for breakfast. Forums for discussion are categorized for a reason. If everyone vomits their unrelated complaints all over every form with a text box then it all becomes worthless trash. If they’re not going to at least attempt to keep the posts on topic (and yes, that includes the “positive” meme garbage too) then they should get rid of the system. Valve has generally preferred to use filtering and sorting algorithms to deal with quality rather than deletions, but their attempt here requires too much user interaction to make any difference for the intended audience.
If devs want to appeal to Valve to have more people available to vet reviews that developers find objectionable, then be prepared for Valve to take a larger cut of the purchase price. It is a service that they are providing to the developers and that costs money. So if someone wants to offer to pay Valve a higher percentage for this service they should propose that to Valve. So far I have yet to hear anyone propose that most simple of solutions.
Devs should not be handling any reviews and they should have absolutely no power whatsoever to unilaterally decide what is acceptable and what is not. That is not their right. Consumers should have a right to express their opinions.
Finally, many of us have played games for 6 minutes that are so horrendous that we needed no further time to make a decision. Games that did not load at all. Games with graphics display problems on some cards (Empire: TW did not display properly for certain graphics cards for 4 months after launch). Games that curse at you for pressing the wrong button (I am looking at you, Cargo Commander). Games that had unresponsive control schemes that render the game neigh unplayable or did not support controllers they said they did. The list goes on and on. You think none of these voices should be heard? What gives you that right? And let’s just say you did remove the 6 minute reviews. So what? I can let the game run for 12 minutes before reviewing it.
One person’s invalid reason is another’s valid one. Ultimately for the vast, vast, vast majority of games the review system provides some aggregate idea as to the consumer acceptance of the product. An attempt to try to weed out the statistical outliers will do nothing but prevent many more “legitimate” reviews from being heard.
That’s debatable. To some people, a developer’s political stance can be so abhorrent to them that they feel it directly impacts their enjoyment of the game.
For example, in movies, it’s hard for me to recommend Powder to anyone despite how well I think the movie is made due to the person that directed it and his unsavory history.
Please do not attribute arguments to me that I did not make. I said anyone was legally entitled to request a DMCA takedown for whatever reason as they are the owners. I said nothing about the morality of such an action.
As for this being my “best example”, again, an argument I’m not making. I’m speaking to the situation at hand. I’m not arguing for it as the best or worst example.
My point - which you have ignored - was pointing out the flaws in your argument that getting reviewed bombed via conspiracy would be good for any developer once the news broke. You still haven’t really defended that position, you just made simple assertions.
Please do not attribute arguments to me that I did not make. I said that an arbitrary review bombing organized by clowns like those at 4chan would result in positive publicity.
I’m not saying it doesn’t matter or shouldn’t be discussed, I’m saying that I don’t think the section for game reviews is the appropriate place for it. It might be fair to say that Steam does not provide sufficient tools to comment/rate developer and publisher relations and I’d be on board with ideas to rectify that. Even when the arguments have some merit, like the Paradox Interactive price raise thing, several developers who had little to do with it get affected because they’re bulk attacking games instead of the publisher directly.
The specific wording for the actual “score” on steam is “Do you recommend this game?” Thus it seems fitting that this could include things like a developer abandoning a game, a developer having unreasonable microtransactions, a developer selling a patched version of the game or a developer attacking streaming.
The irony is people are telling others not to support pewdiepie even if they like his content (gag) because they don’t like his actions as a person, but doing the same thing to a game when you don’t like the actions of the developer is somehow wrong.
That article is terrible with outright falsehoods or entirely unsupported claims. This one belongs in the Hall of Shitty Gaming Journalism, which is saying something given the company it keeps. Thes article has absolutely no credibility given the factual errors contained within.
The only way this is even technically possible is for someone to download the game during a free weekend. Otherwise you cannot review a game you do not own. Swear words are starred out. And you do not give stars for reviews. You give this a thumbs up or down. I do not believe this person has any clue what a Steam review is or is not. Given these obvious errors, the author has lost any credibility because all of his points stem from an incorrect understanding of how Steam reviews work.
Citation needed. Made up, unsupported claims also loses this author any credibility.
No, it is not. It is consumers expressing how they feel about a product they own, which also can include the actions of the developer. Is it unacceptable to refuse to like a Roman Polanski film because he is a child rapist?
On the front page of this website their is an article about a recent game giving it one star. One of the primary reasons for this and the subject of the title was the DLC policy of the game selling maps for $4 each. Fallout 4 just got bombed for much the same reason (selling mods as DLC) yet some here lament the FO4 bomb while supporting the article.
That is such a terrible reason to give a game a bad review. If the base game is good, the review should reflect that. I’m not sure if the base game is good or not in this case. If a person doesn’t think a map is worth $4 then don’t buy it. If the base game isn’t any good without the DLC, then don’t buy either or in that case leave a negative review if the game was purchased. But if the game is good and a person is just pissy about the price of the DLC then don’t buy it. Or leave a negative review about the DLC - that is what a lot of Tropico 5 customers did.
Sure that’s fine, but they shouldn’t leave a negative review for one of his movies if they either didn’t see it or saw it and thought it was good. Just don’t buy the ticket / rent the movie in the first place if you don’t want to support his work.
I don’t think it’s OK to give something a bad score because the person is shit. I think it’s perfectly OK to mention it in the text of a review or the comments of an article. I think it’s fine to boycott their products. I think it’s fine to tell your friends / coworkers / family etc… Obviously child rapist is on the far end of the horrible spectrum, so I can definitely understand the desire to screw them as much as possible.
In most cases here were talking about less extreme cases, such as “I don’t like your DLC pricing, so I’m going to try and screw you by down voting your game”.
I think Trump is a piece of garbage, but if I read one of his books and thought it was good I wouldn’t down vote it simply because I can’t stand him. This isn’t because I think Trump or Polanski need to be protected. It’s because I think it reduces the usefulness of a customer-based scoring system. I can’t look at a score and know that the grade reflects the
perceived quality of the product. I need to look to see if people let outside factors affect their score and then try to remove their grade if the bad grade is for other reasons.
