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Take Two warns investors that review bombings can hurt profits (www.gamefile.news)

submitted 3 months ago by alessandro@lemmy.ca to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca

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[–] DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Holy crap, they're learning...

[–] cryptiod137@lemmy.world 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Or they are putting pressure on platforms to block "review bombing". That probably won't work on Steam, so it's kinda of a moot point.

[–] crossmr@kbin.run 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Why? Steam has come out and labelled legitimate criticism of games a 'review bomb' in the past. They're more than happy to bend over for big publishers like this.

[–] cryptiod137@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

They added a feature that changed what review score you see based on a preference to see what may or may not be review bombs, I can't remember exactly what it's called, but I haven't seen them react to so called review bombs since.

[–] crossmr@kbin.run 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

https://kotaku.com/superhot-game-gets-review-bombed-after-removing-depicti-1847352470

This was in direct response to changes in the game, any negative reviews because of changes made to the game are legitimate reviews, not a 'review bomb'.

triggering Valve’s anti-review-bombing tech to kick in and filter out the flood of bad-faith evaluations.

https://kotaku.com/valve-says-it-will-remove-off-topic-review-bombs-from-s-1833332643

“We’re going to identify off-topic review bombs, and remove them from the Review Score.”

Of course Steam is the arbiter of what they deem 'off-topic'

[–] cryptiod137@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The "Store content policy" option made it so Valve doesn't have to manually do anything about "review bombs" or review bombs, which is a very Valve way of handling it.

Bringing up incidents from 3 or 5 years ago kinda solidifies that point, they put it up to the algorithm and don't manually get involved.

They even say in that article, as an update, that they aren't removing reviews. This function lets a user decide what they consider relevant, without removing reviews, and most importantly for Valve means they don't have to manually do anything.

They still could, but again you found articles from years ago, they wanted a solution that requires less work for them and stopped the headlines, and that seems to have worked.

[–] crossmr@kbin.run 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Your claim was that it never happened, this was just a single well known example of it happening.

At that point, Valve says a team of people will investigate those anomalies, and, if they determine that something fishy is afoot, they’ll “mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer.” If Valve finds that coordinated review bombing has indeed occurred, any reviews posted during that time period won’t count toward the game’s review score.

Also it isn't fully automatic. Valve claims that people are involved 'evaluating it', and the result of the evaluation was that reviews were not counted.

[–] cryptiod137@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

I never claimed that it never happened? A single well known example and also the only one you provided, from half a decade ago.

Yeah, no one at Valve, the same people that won't even make their games playable without a massive community uproar, is reviewing any of these. That being something which directly affects there reputation as a company and there bottom line through crates/keys, instead of there reputation as a storefront to publishers. The article even mentions Valve's addressesing this was a reaction to devs salivating over EGS having opt-in reviews, more so than them actually caring about publishers

Developers have cited this sort of toxicity as a reason they’re excited about the Epic Games Store, which plans to address the issue with an opt-in review system.

Also in the same article, they describe the option I've been referring to. You are still able to see the marked reviews reflected in scores if you wish.

On top of that, Steam users will be able to opt out of this new system entirely by using an option that’ll keep review bombs in games’ review scores. And, again, people will apparently still be able to look at reviews that have been removed. Review bombers won’t have as much power to affect games’ standing with the Steam algorithm, but this could also just encourage review bombers to find other ways to evolve their tactics and get through what sounds like some still worryingly large loopholes. Time will tell.

If you want to review bombs or "review bombs", you can still do so on Steam, and the score will reflect your preference for that, as opposed to EGS where you may not be able to see any reviews if a publisher doesn't want you to.

[–] DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I was just thinking of this. I seem to remember someone having the nerve to refer to review bombing as harassment and did something to prevent it at some point. That said, we've since had the debacle with Helldivers 2 so... we'll see?

Edit: Fixed typo