Why Even User Video Game Scores Can't Be Trusted Any More – How-To Geek
Review bombing skews ratings with irrelevant negativity, harming a game's reputation and affecting future projects.
It's hard to trust negative reviews due to review bombing, which only makes it harder to judge a game.
Reviews should focus on gameplay, but outside influences often lead to unfairly low scores and mistrust.
Review bombing occurs when a group of people works together to flood online review sites with many negative reviews. This is commonly a retaliatory tactic that's used even if the game itself is good. This practice damages the trust in user review systems by skewing a game's overall rating and shaping how people see it, usually for reasons that have nothing to do with a game's overall quality.
Review Bombing Has Become Too Common
Marcus Mears III / Review Geek
The process of review bombing sees a bunch of people, often driven by outside issues, all post bad reviews at the same time. Many use bots or automated tools to make their attack even bigger. This wave of low scores drowns out real criticism and pulls down the game's average rating, which can hurt sales and even affect whether future projects get made.
Many games have been hit by review bombing. Big-name games can face backlash over comments made by those involved in production and receive negative reviews that have nothing to do with how the game played or how well it worked. Other games with controversial characters or storylines have also been targeted, like Dragon Age: The Veilguard , showing how easily review systems can be abused because of social or political disagreements.
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These attacks aren't always about politics. Sometimes, players organize negative review campaigns because they're unhappy with changes to gameplay, feel like the game pushes too many microtransactions, or believe the developers aren't listening to their complaints. For example, Infinity Nikki was recently review-bombed due to a launcher error.
A launch error is a bug that would likely have been fixed by reporting it regularly. Players don't need to go to the review section to get attention when developers build games with bug report systems and have X accounts to receive feedback. Many go overboard just because they want others to see that they are angry.
These are calls for attention, not a real reflection on the gameplay or quality of the game itself. Review bombing is an overused tactic to show disdain. If anything, the review bombers look like they're just whining when using this technique to complain over a minor issue or the servers going down for a day.
Bad Reviews Lose Their Believability Over Time
Jorge Aguilar/Activision
The growing problem of review bombing has greatly hurt the trustworthiness of negative user reviews for video games. This issue happens when organized groups overwhelm review platforms with large numbers of extremely negative ratings, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the game's actual quality.
As a result, it can cause many to distrust negative reviews more than ever. At first, negative reviews might appear to be honest, showing real disappointment from players. However, these get mixed in with many review bombers who want to vent their frustration over something unrelated to the gameplay itself.
This makes it very hard to distinguish between real criticism and planned attacks meant to harm a game's reputation. It's gone so far that you can expect negative reviews even if you know the game is good.
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When Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was released, there was a sudden flood of negative reviews. The game had plenty of issues and a very short campaign. This was expected and warranted because the quality of the game didn't surpass Modern Warfare 2 ; it was more like an expansion pack at full price.
When Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 came out, it was a real improvement and did a lot well. However, it faced a similar wave of negativity, where bad reviews at first far outnumbered positive ones, likely because of organized efforts. Even though many of the issues were quickly fixed, players seemed to be focused on bashing a new game in the series for their own personal reasons, not so much on the game's quality.
While many people updated their reviews to be more positive, the initial wave of negativity had a lasting effect. This makes you question whether early reviews can be trusted, and reviews matter most when a game first comes out, and there's not much information on them available.
Reviews Should Reflect the Game, Not Public Opinion
Bioware
While it's nice to think reviewers try to stay fair, outside influences often twist how a game's true quality is judged. A review itself is subjective because it's an opinion, so that's okay. What's less than okay is how often reviews lead away from the game itself.
Reviews should look at the gameplay, story, visuals, and overall design. However, review bombers often get swayed by the drama around how the game was made or the company's reputation behind it. Sadly, this means the ideal review is often ignored, leading to scores that don't truly show how good or bad a game really is.
One big issue is how hard it is to differentiate between professional criticism and public opinion. If people dislike a game's publisher because of issues that aren't directly related to the game itself, like shady business deals or accusations against the developers, such negativity can hurt the reception of a new game. This creates a situation where a well-crafted game gets low scores because people already dislike the company behind it.
There are valid reasons not to purchase a game that's embroiled in these sorts of problems, but whether a review score should be reflective of outside drama is another question entirely.
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Players' distrust, often fueled by news stories about these controversies, directly shapes how critics see the game. For example, even if a game gets mostly good reviews and has solid gameplay, a title from a company dealing with accusations of ethical issues could still be judged harshly by some players before they even try it, dragging down the final average score.
I firmly believe that a publisher should be held to account for unethical and predatory practices. But it's arguably better not to buy the game than to mess with the review system.
A lack of sales will kill a great game. Guardians of the Galaxy is a great example of a great game with good reviews that just didn't sell well because of the public's view it had before release. The publisher wasn't trusted, so the game wasn't bought, and the game died—no fake bad reviews needed.
Reviews From Individuals Are as Unbelievable as Big Sites
Steam
The trustworthiness of video game reviews, whether from big review websites or regular players, has become more doubtful over time. Big review sites often give out fairly high scores, often between 7 and 9. This trend makes people worry that issues have been glossed over.
I've reviewed and edited reviews of games at professional sites for years. It's not easy to make a real game review, but burning a bridge with a publisher is not smart. I'd say that when it comes to the big review websites, read the review and not the score.
Even considering bias or fear of hurting reputation, it's arguable that user review scores can be more untrustworthy than those on big sites. While they seem like they should reflect real player experiences, they can easily be manipulated or influenced by bias.
A Minecraft Movie and Five Nights At Freddy's movies are great examples of this. Plenty of regular watchers hated them, but some of that is because they expect Oppenheimer quality from kids' movies. If you go in without the expectation of an adult target audience, you enjoy those movies much more.
The growing problem of review bombing has made it much harder to tell the difference between honest criticism and planned, harmful attacks. It makes user reviews less believable and has already hurt the user review system far more than it ever hurt any publishers.
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