Fucking finally. I love a funny joke but if you’re looking for serious reviews, you currently have to wade through a sea of trolls, jokes and copy-pasted meme reviews in order to figure out if a game is interesting to you.
Community features are cool but if you’re the most popular platform of your kind, you’re gonna attract a lot of trolls who’s content can be really out there. Filters are a good solution to this!
A review should tell you what the game is. It should also tell you what they like/don’t like about it, but different perspectives about how the core mechanics work are absolutely critical parts of the discussion.
Indeed, sometimes I really appreciate a heads up of if I can save in the middle of gameplay or if I have to complete a whole run before it saves progress, things like that are not deal breakers but it can definitely affect how I play a game
different perspectives about how the core mechanics work
As you said, how they work. The description already tells me what the game is and I don’t need a review reciting it a la “Shadow warrior is an action adventure fps game where you play as a ninja fighting against demons”
This is a side effect of YouTube content creation practices where a video will have an overview of the plot or story to pad out the run time or article. Often, because game journalism is basically long distance abusive relationships between the writer and the game publisher, the review is too mild to contain actual opinions and will draw on comparisons to other games instead of forming genuine critiques and admiration.
The end result is a generation of games and movies where the review is unable to provide enough genuine content to fill 10 minutes or 3 pages, so they instead spoil the game while riffing on very specific foibles. They don’t know how to talk critically about mechanics or story or design.
It’s because sometimes I just want to “rate” the game, not “review” it but steam won’t let me. So sometimes I just write “it sucks.” or sometimes some random shit. Steam should have a idk 5 star rating system with optional reviews. Makes more sense but shit games will be bought less I bet.
There’s this very nice template you can use to quickly make a more detailed review without having to write it all yourself. You can always just google “Steam review template” to find it.
This is what I hope it is. There’s way too many joke reviews. I don’t want to see review bombs get silenced because they are very informative when I’m not in the know about a particular developer/game’s situation. I don’t want to buy games that are outraging players. Chances are, I’ll be one of the outraged too if I give them my money.
Good. I’m sick of seeing the “pet this cat” reviews at the top of the list. Hopefully this changes some of that stuff.
I hope this is partly to deal with review bombing, but I also hope it doesn’t completely hide review bombing.
It can be really helpful to know that there is a social media shitstorm around a game.
But sometimes the shitstorm is a bunch of basement dwellers getting mad over nothing, and it makes it hard to see actual opinions about the game.
Some review bombs are for legit reasons. I’ve seen a few for games that dropped support for a language well after release.
Is it even review bombing if it’s for a legit issue with the game in question?
In my opinion, the question comes down to “what is a valid criticism”. I think the bombing part, where a lot of people give a similar negative review at the same time is secondary.
If a game releases in a borderline unplayable state this warrants negative reviews. It shouldn’t matter how many of them there are and if they are all in a similar time frame. Same with an update that harms the game a lot. If this makes the game change the rating from positive to mixed or negative, I think that’s fair because if I buy the game now, I will get it in the most recent state and if this is shit I don’t care if it was better at some point in the past, I’m glad if I get a warning through the reviews.
If the game gets negative reviews because a person/group related to creating the game said or did something that a large group of people disagree with it’s more complicated. It boils down to if you can/want to separate the art from the artist and if you find that criticized thing bad in the first place. If you don’t think this is a valid criticism you probably think this “review bombing” is a bad thing.
I think the term “review bombing” is used to imply that the criticism has nothing to do with the game itself. But like with all terms, the usage becomes broader and broader until it changes or loses meaning completely.
Since Steam reviews contain written explanations it is easy to check why the game gets the negative attention. I never came across a game that had a lot of reviews for an unrelated thing where almost all the negative reviews lied and said it was bad for gameplay reasons.
I don’t have a direct quote, but I remember reading a few years ago that valve was debating how to handle bombing. They said something along the lines of not wanting to silence the bombers, but to highlight it so it was clear it was a review bomb. I got the impression they were considering things like showing the unusual spike of reviews in a different color. This sounds like it might be the results of that.
They already have something for it, when I look at a review bombed game it specifically tells me that theres been unusual activity with the reviews. I believe you cna choose to hide or show the review bombs in the settings somewhere.
I’ve never discovered review bombing over steam. Either my peers mention it to me or I see it on social media.
Though to be fair, almost all of my decisions about buying games are made from watching videos of said game, rather than reading reviews. Steam reviews, for me, are either for very cheap games I’m buying impulsively or games where I have some insight but am still on the fence.
I used to read Rock Paper Shotgun as part of the decision making process, but I’ve found their input less useful the last few years.
If a game isn’t overwhelmingly positive, I almost never buy it. I also find review bombs completely valid in almost every case and I’m not interested in funding games that have managed to outrage their player base. In every case I would be outraged by the same thing they are.
You can now review reviews
Does this mean “reviews that negatively affect profits” or does in mean genuinely removing irrelevant content?
It probably works based on whether users marking reviews as helpful or unhelpful and then uses some formula to remove the unhelpful ones. So it can be neither, but the key takeaway is that the users decide what ends up filtered out.
Thanks. That’s actually not too bad an idea. However, I’ll offer that it could lead to critics being silenced. Not necessarily out of nefarious purposes, but people love the downvote train sometimes.
Yeah, that’s why I said it’s neither because people can be unpredictable. It might not filter out irrelevant content because people love to upvote memes and it might filter out criticism because sometimes people downvote criticism.
Overall like with some other Steam features the value of the feature is dependent on the community, and generally that value has been a net positive.
