It feels like it’s really getting out of hand and the language of the negative reviews seems really fake too. I just bought a game that got review bombed and it was fine. From the reviews it sounded like it was going to destroy my graphics card, corrupt my hard drive and be full of bugs. Luckily I watched some gameplay vids and it turned out none of those things were true.
I haven’t noticed it getting worse, and I think Valve is doing the best thing they can to mitigate it by way of recent reviews and the review graph. When you can see when a review bomb started, you can cross reference that date against news for that game in your favorite search engine. If the review bomb is truly frivolous, it will pass in no time at all.
They’ve also segregated reviews by language. So now when a single group starts review bombing (usually China, from the reports I’ve heard) the rest of us are unaffected.
But since the total sample size is much smaller due to language categorization, review bombing is much, much easier and impactful when it does hapoen for the speakers of the language the bombing is targeted at.
I think the point is that Chinese review bots are usually trying to dunk on Western games. It seems to be some brilliant new strategy they’ve come up with.
“If we poorly review Western games everyone will buy ours instead”, I’m sure it’ll work brilliantly.
The graph will also give you a note that the review behavior is unusual and that there may be review bombing going on.
I think the biggest problem is that when people are just browsing games, all that’s shown is overall and mixed reviews. They should add a similar indicator to that view of the game.
That’s good to know.