Thursday, September 21st 2017
Steam Adds Historical Review Data for Games to Counter Review Bombing
You've probably heard about the recent issues regarding PewDiePie (handle of one of the most popular gaming YouTubers, Felix Kjellberg) and Campo Santo (Firewatch). The company issued a copyright strike for the YouTuber's streaming of their game, where Kjellberg used racist terms which Campo Santo didn't feel they should be in any way associated with. YouTube accepted the copyright strike, taking the video down. Legally, Campo Santo (and any video game company for that matter) can do such a thing. Kjellberg, however, is particularly worried because, as he said, "It's a pretty big deal. If I get more than three of them, my channel will shut down." As a response, users started review bombing Firewatch on Steam - id est, posting negative review after negative review, or changing their positive reviews for negative ones, so as to diminish the game's score in the light of what they see as a reprimandable action from Campo Santo.
Now that you've been brought up to speed, Steam is tackling this review bombing issue by adding an historical view of a game's given positive and negative reviews, which should tell players something more about a game's score other than the general "recent reviews" scoring. A game like Campo Santo's Firewatch, which historically has had a "Very Positive" review score, now stands with a "Mixed" recent reviews score, all started due to this issue. You can clearly see the beginning of the review bombing on the provided histograms. Some users seem to even be disguising the reasons why they are giving negative reviews by bashing the game's storytelling or gameplay - the amount of users reporting this since the review bombing started seems too suspicious for a "naturally occurring bad review phenomenon".
By adding the histogram, Steam is looking towards letting players filter through the noise generated by users (which may or may not have anything to do with the game in particular) while not losing access to any data in the process. What do you think of this action from Steam? Is it censoring users' opinions, or simply adding some more objective data to allow new users and prospective buyers to filter through the subjective sea?
Sources:
Steam Blog Post, Polygon
44 Comments on Steam Adds Historical Review Data for Games to Counter Review Bombing
But to seriously think an Iranian is a Neo-Nazi is silly. Not only is he not German.. he's not even Caucasian. He's doubly screwed from being part of the "Master" race.
As I said earlier, I support it.
Personally I never watch any reviews, who knows what good games I'd never even consider if I was reading and following reviews.
BTW, I think trash like this pie chap are full of it, so 3 strikes are always welcome, I think he will make a nice janitor (or a custodian).
Also any types of jokes are welcome on the internet. Deal with it. Why? FU, that's why ;D
In other words, if Campo Santo wasn't prepared to press hate crime charges, they should have done nothing.Offending isn't a crime. If people really cared, they'd stop supporting him. If enough stop, he'd go away.
Back on topic, I welcome the historical data on Steam reviews. Good games get tanked forever because of a premature launch. If they fix the issues with subsequent patching, it should be easy to see that.
The historical data on steam reviews is good, because it just requires more filtering options. Right now its a big heap of chatter of which the vast majority of extremely low quality... although I somehow doubt that historical data will make quality go up. 10 year olds will be 10 year olds and stupid doesn't suddenly become smart.
But good games getting tanked forever because premature launch... that is really another one of Steam's big failures, the whole Early Access thing and the incredibly lacking quality control on that.
You'll get a mix of Titan Quest and Diablo II from this game. I've sunk a solid 200+ hours into the game. The company is releasing (soon, if I remember correctly) two new classes to the game and some other things, last I read about it....but that was 6 months ago. I think it's a large DLC, new area, new skills, a couple of classes. I'd venture to guess $10-20 for the DLC.
I'll pick up the DLC and play the crap out of the game again.
Which is funny, since that engine's gotta be old... It seems like I played Titan Quest like 10 years ago.
Not that you need much for this type of game though.
If you leave a negative review it gets bombared down because the fans feel bad for someone not liking what they like.
Because someone not liking something means its bad and them liking something that is bad makes them bad.
Idk people are very insecure it seems.
So its been bs for a while.
PewDiePie can die in a fire as well but that's unrelated.
though in this case, even mentioning the two sides is injecting an idea into the reader, i didnt even expect to have a side mention censorship, opening up stats is the opposite of censorship, in which case it makes a lot more sense to only ask 'what do you think' so that commenters start thinking about what they really think, we could end up with five sides instead of two, a solid two for any topic is problematic due to this constant 'us vs them' mentality in the world these years