We don't want to stop the community having a discussion about the issue they're unhappy about, even though there are probably better places to have that conversation than in Steam user reviews. Then, Valve demolishes this logic with a terrible justification.īut if we lock reviews on a product for a short period of time, what does that mean exactly? Are players no longer able to post reviews at all during that time? Or should they be able to post them, but we ignore them for the purpose of calculating the review score? In the end, we didn't like the way this ultimately meant restricting the ability for players to voice their opinions. If not, would-be bombers’ immediate fury would pass without incident. If there’s a real problem, the company’s post reasons, the score would still dip when the freeze lifted. Valve puts forward a reasonable solution: temporarily freezing reviews. ![]() And even a few righteous, ideological protests wouldn’t justify leaving a broken system in place. But posts about paid mods are on-topic complaints about something that affects a buyer’s gaming experience, while accusations that a certain game killed Half-Life 3 are not. Some people have defended review-bombing as the equivalent of a boycott, citing cases like a mass-downvote of Skyrim over adding paid mods. Steam is a storefront, and by its own admission, brute-force review bombs don’t “accurately represent” the likelihood that an average buyer would be happy with a game. Review bombers can make sure buyers only see negative feedback in the “most helpful reviews” section, and short but genuine-seeming reviews could just be subtler attempts at manipulation. Moreover, the whole system is temporarily poisoned. If customers have to stop and look up answers, they may as well ignore Steam and head straight to Google for reviews. Valve is asking for a lot of off-platform detective work here, especially for the many people who barely know who PewDiePie is. When I checked last night, the most recent comment said Campo Santo “took a stand” against PewDiePie over racism, and the highest-rated said the developer was “childish and thin-skinned” with no further explanation. If a casual customer clicks on the reviews for Firewatch and sees the recent distortion, they have to dig through posts to see whether it’s a game-breaking bug or an unrelated review-bombing. I’m not sure what’s supposed to be “easy” about this system. As Valve puts it, “as a potential purchaser, it's easy to spot temporary distortions in the reviews, to investigate why that distortion occurred, and decide for yourself whether it's something you care about.” ![]() Nathan Grayson at Kotaku has fully laid out the practical tweaks Valve is suggesting, but essentially, there’s a new chart that tracks a game’s ratio of positive to negative Steam reviews over time. As it turns out, the company’s fix for review bombing is to foist responsibility on customers. ![]() Yesterday, Valve seemed like it was finally addressing that problem, posting a long explanation of a new review feature. Given that Steam holds massive sway over the PC gaming market, that’s a real problem. But review bombing and similar attacks are a long-standing issue for developers, making Steam a less useful platform to buy and sell games. Firewatch’s reviews are still generally excellent, so this controversy hasn’t necessarily hurt Campo Santo. In response, angry fans pushed the critically acclaimed game’s score from an overall “very positive” to a more recent “mixed” reception, against PewDiePie’s wishes. Last week, the indie game Firewatch suffered a Steam “review bombing.” Developer Campo Santo ordered Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg to remove a Firewatch video after he shouted a racial slur elsewhere.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |