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God of War Ragnarok PC port suffers review bombing on Steam due to PlayStation Network account requirement
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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Steam has a very generous 2 hours played policy where the system will basically refund you no questions asked so long as you have played less than 2 hours of the game (refunds beyond that are totally possible but usually require manual review before approval).
This means that you can buy the game, open it once, leave a negative review, and get it refunded. Which is more impactful on Sony's bottom line than leaving a review on Metacritic or something because it directly affects the game's rating on the largest platform for PC gaming, and is therefore more likely to see action taken to fix the issue. Sony doesn't care if people make angry social media posts, but they will care if they can directly see it impacting their profit margins.
This is actually a fantastic idea. How long will it take Valve to threaten account bans for doing it?
For trying a game, trying it, disliking it and refunding it, a series of events that is completely normal and allowed by steam's refund policy? Well it's probably getting changed when gaben dies and someone else takes over, but I'm not sure we should be rooting for that...
There’s a transactional cost to processing the sale, hosting the giant download and then issuing the refund. If people organized and manipulated the system and this became a financial burden, then the policy would almost certainly change.
People have been doing it for years as far as I know. It's kinda where this whole "review bombing" thing comes from. It seems like Valve's policy is to label these kinds of mass reviews as "off-topic activity" and remove them from affecting the normal rating for the game. If you see a game with an asterisk next to its score on Steam, hovering over the asterisk will tell you that some reviews have been removed from the score for this reason. They're still publicly there, and you can go into the details of the score to see those periods highlighted, but they no longer affect the score that you see on the storefront.