this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
71 points (97.3% liked)

PC Gaming

8568 readers
816 users here now

For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki

Rules:

  1. Be Respectful.
  2. No Spam or Porn.
  3. No Advertising.
  4. No Memes.
  5. No Tech Support.
  6. No questions about buying/building computers.
  7. No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
  8. No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
  9. No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
  10. Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
UncleBadTouch@lemmy.ca
EXiLExJD@lemmy.ca
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
71
Take Two warns investors that review bombings can hurt profits (www.gamefile.news)
submitted 4 months ago by alessandro@lemmy.ca to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 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.