Cognition Dissemination: Is Review Bombing Really Worthwhile?

The concept of review bombing has been a hot topic for the last month. This process involves facets of the gaming audience banding together to tank a game’s user reviews rating on various aggregate sites by leaving one negative review after another to send a message to the publisher. It’s been mostly used on Steam and Metacritic, but it’s especially effective on the former considering gaming software can also be purchased for PC there. Meanwhile, several people still visit Metacritic to see review scores or see all the reviews gathered in one place, while others read user reviews for games that can’t be purchased on PC.

There’s one key question here: Is review bombing really all that useful? The answer is a bit more complicated than you might think if you’re not familiar with the concept, but their worthwhileness has changed over time.

Review bombing was useful at one point, though I’m hesitant to classify earlier examples as actual “review bombing” thanks to how dubious its definition has become. For instance, customers bombed the user review section for Batman: Arkham Knight on Steam after it launched with more glitches and performance issues than its predecessors. It was clear developer Rocksteady Studios and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment were paying attention to them when they temporarily removed the game from purchase, and fixed it up before making it available again.

This also happened with Chrono Trigger, whose initial Steam release was an underwhelming port of the mobile version with a UI barely adjusted to suit a computer interface, and a blur filter over its sprites. After it was bombed, Square Enix quickly fixed it up to make it the best version available for purchase at the moment. Again, I hesitate to call these “review bombs” because those who purchased it had legitimate grievances, and the games were fixed after publishers were pressured.

These days, those examples are few and far between. Like any feature on the internet that had useful purposes, it’s now being used nefariously. Some gamers are review bombing games because they don’t like recent decisions the publisher made, pertaining to whether they’ll sell sequels or successors on Steam or not, or other matters that have little to do with the quality of the game itself.

This recently happened with the first two Metro titles, 2033 and Last Light, after sequel Metro Exodus switched from being available on all PC platforms to an Epic Games Store-exclusive title for a year when publisher Deep Silver struck a deal with Epic Games. Steam users immediately started leaving negative reviews on both games to send a statement, which had nothing to do with the quality of the games or ports — you know, the actual purpose of reviews. A similar situation just occurred with the previous Borderlands games on Steam after it was confirmed that Borderlands 3 would be exclusive to the same store for six months.

The last two examples occurred for similar reasons, but it’s also happened in other situations. The Taiwanese-developed first-person horror game Devotion released to good reviews in multiple territories in February, especially in countries where Mandarin is one of the main languages. But its score and those accompanying other games from the same developer came crashing down when a jab at China’s president was discovered within it, which led to it being removed from Steam. Once again, a score was dunked due to problems unrelated to the main game’s overall quality, and it still hasn’t returned to the store as of this writing.

Steam started combating this through showing aggregates for “All Reviews” and “Recent Reviews” in the reviews section page, which lets users see when a game only recently received a sudden surge of negative reviews. After Valve and publishers felt that wasn’t effective enough, they started classifying reviews whose sole obvious purpose is to reduce the aggregate as “off-topic review activity.” Borderlands 2 is one of the first game this has occurred with, as several recent reviews no longer count towards the aggregate viewable close to the purchasing options. But it’s clear Valve doesn’t want to get rid of user reviews entirely.

On the other hand, the Epic Games Store will dodge this by not allowing for user reviews at all. It won’t be a surprise when several publishers find it more enticing to publish their games on their store alongside Steam upon release, if they don’t make an exclusive deal with Epic to avoid this entirely. Epic Games has continued to make deals with publishers to bring their upcoming games to their store as temporary exclusives, and this is only one reason why that will continue.

There was a time when review bombing was useful and forced good changes, when they were used to harshly criticize the main product. Now, they’re just another tool for gamers to express collective anger for unrelated issues, which is only further pushing the usefulness of user reviews into irrelevance. There are plenty of ways to find out whether a game is good or not upon release, but these types of user reviews are still useful for games that receive constant updates over time. It’s a shame to see this is feature being ruined, even if this was inevitable.