Just some well-meant advice: Be careful with statements like that. Reviews that are insulting aren’t “review bombing.” Review bombing refers to a coordinated attempt to negatively affect a game. Steam has specific measures against that. The increase in negative reviews coincides with the release of the “The Breach” update. The term “review bombing” shouldn’t be used as a way to shift responsibility.
You might want to bring to Thomas’ attention that Steam’s developer guidelines could be interpreted to show that asking for positive reviews while implying the studio might close down potentially violates Steam’s rules:
“Don’t attempt to abuse or artificially manipulate the review system.”
(User Reviews (Steamworks Documentation))
Also, the review system on Steam cannot be disabled. Valve considers it an integral part of their platform.
I genuinely wish you all the best - you have a great product. I’d just hate to see you build a reputation as a manipulative studio. That could haunt you more in the long run than a temporary burst of negative reviews.
That would work both ways though - it would also invalidate all positive reviews posted for older builds. This would probably hurt studios more than it helps them combat negative reviews.
Steam already does quite a lot to make reviews both fair and useful. While no system is perfect, and any system can potentially be abused by either side, their current approach generally works well.
The link I posted above provides really interesting insights into how reviews are handled, especially regarding Early Access games.
For those who don’t want to search back through the thread:
just to clarify, i am not associated with the developers in any way, i am just a passionate fan of the project, like everyone else, and what i say is my personal opinion.
that being said, i personally do consider countless reviews that are just insulting and all written in the same language as some sort of review bombing. they are not productive in any way. no critique is stated or anything, just blank insults. besides the point, that those should not even be possible to post on steam, they should at least not count.
and isn’t it possible to not activate the review system when having EA? thought i saw some EA games not having review scores. might be wrong tho.
You could just make the review validation only apply to outdated negative reviews and it would prevent removing positive ones.
This would do little to address the asinine “the owner is a nazi” negative reviews.
Those kind of politically motivated reviews should be reportable, removed, and the offending account muted from being able to review games for one year leading to permanent ban with repeat offenses.
guys i moved the discussion here, so we can keep the updates thread clean. hope u don’t mind. that update thread is already super huge, i think everyone would enjoy less scrolling when looking for latest news from discord
That would defeat the whole purpose of the review system, wouldn’t it? If negative reviews become outdated due to a newer build, positive reviews would need to be outdated as well, otherwise you can just abuse the system as a developer to hell and back, making reviews nothing more than another marketing tool. You cannot have the good without the bad.
I agree that plainly insulting reviews should be addressed, but that is already possible: You can flag them. Both as a user and a developer.
On the other hand, Thomas has made some rather “questionable” remarks from time to time. That should never be an excuse for actual insults, but it’s also not conducive to fostering a positive community if people post feedback threads with valid criticism, while Thomas is mainly responding to threads asking “is this game woke.” This paints a rather unflattering picture that could be perceived as “fishing for purchases” on one side of the political spectrum, with the reactions being, as they are, not entirely unexpected.
Flagging reviews currently does nothing. I’ve flagged many such reviews that are blatant name calling or just insults/epithets, and I have come back 1-2 weeks to check and nothing has been done about it.
Because the system is automated, and guess how it works? It needs to be mass reported to trigger an item being actioned. There’s one problem with that, almost nobody but the developer actually bothers with reading and curating other reviews in a sea of reviews.
The system is broken. A positive review being outdated on a new build doesn’t negatively impact anyone, so I don’t see how it’s any abuse. If the user feels a new build has made the game worse, they will change it anyways.
On one hand, you want Steam to implement features to prevent abuse from players towards developers, because the players don’t bother to report abusive reviews, but on the other hand, you also don’t want to prevent abuse from the developers towards users, because players would bother updating their own reviews. You effectively want to replace one broken system with another.
You don’t even need to be very creative to see how outdated positive reviews can negatively affect a game. Just look at all the gacha games out there. Start a game with unintrusive microtransactions, garner positive reviews, push your real monetization strategy afterwards, wait a week for the ensuing shitstorm to settle, push another minor update to invalidate the negative reviews.
All players who forgot or didn’t bother to update their positive reviews are still recommending a game that is worse than it was when they reviewed it, but the negative reviews warning others of the developer have vanished.
Steam has been doing this for 22 years now. Don’t you think that they would have implemented a different system by now if there were any system that is objectively better, and not prone to just another form of abuse?
that update thread is already super huge, i think everyone would enjoy less scrolling when looking for latest news from discord 