It’s like the Helldivers 2 incident, but for a single-player game, there’s no excuse.
It’s not review bombing when there’s a legitimate problem!
there’s probably no official definition, but you could argue it is supposed to refer to negative reviews that have nothing to do with the product. Like when a bunch of idiots gave Captain Marvel 1 star reviews because they hate Brie Larson.
Not going to lie, needing a PlayStation account feels pretty unrelated to the actual game to me. Akin to complaining about how something shipped on Amazon instead of, you know the actual product.
Your difficulties with needing a PlayStation account, like shipping, is going to wildly vary depending on location.
Review bombing is an intentional attack (e.g. someone posts a story about a shitty restaurant owner and everyone on the internet starts leaving negative reviews for that restaurant even though they’ve never been there). Just getting negative reviews organically for being bad is not review bombing.
- It means Sony won’t sell the game in countries where they don’t allow PSN accounts.
That isn’t a problem for all the users that review the game though.
- Their servers suck ass. I’m literally unable to play this game, even if I wanted to, because I get one generic server error after another when trying to make an account. This is the same reason it was originally removed from Helldivers 2.
I don’t know about that since I have never connected my PSN account. The only game I own which supports it is Ghost of Tsushima and I haven’t connected my account to that game.
Sony has a horrific track record of data breaches.
They’re collecting and selling data about you for profit.
Its a completely arbitrary and anti-consumer requirement that has zero benefits to you as the consumer.
Fair enough but I don’t think it’s actively anti consumer, I place that bar higher than this.
Publishers are trying to exclude “review bombing” because they think it’s just social manipulation, while just casually ignoring that there are actual problems with the game. Review bombing used to be something else, but now be wary of it because it’s usually them just trying to discredit actual concerns.
You can have actual concerns without abusing the review function, though. If you don’t own and never planned to play the game and are “reviewing” it because something on the internet made you angry, then that just discredits the actual review platform as a whole.
Reviews should be an actual review, not a tweet reply. If you haven’t actually played the game, don’t review it.
How much of a problem it is will vary by how much it impacts and upsets a customer. For you, sounds like it’s not that big of an issue.
But the fact that they pulled out the “review bombing” exscuse means that it qualifies as a problem to a significant percentage of customers.
God of War Ragnarok PC port
suffersearns review bombing on Steam due to PlayStation Network account requirement
Fixed it for them
I hate the “review bombing” term.
It’s a set of criteria. Reviews are organized from outside the review site, are negative, and generally come from people without any real interest in the piece of media.
“Review Bombing” implies these aren’t legitimate reviews from miltiple real peoples.
Sony is just selling an inferior product, that should be the headline.
I hate that the term “review bombing” completely generalized to just “a lot of negatively reviewing something”. Review bombing is supposed to be negative reviewing that’s not relevant to the game, like when it was originally used to speak out against publishers, because, you know, that’s the only thing that seemed to get their attention. Now we just have the tools and excuses to just kill genuine criticism.
