Review bomb

Last updated

A review bomb is an Internet phenomenon in which a large number of people or a few people with multiple accounts [1] post negative user reviews online in an attempt to harm the sales or popularity of a product, a service, or a business. [2] While a large number of negative reviews may simply be the result of a large number of customers independently criticizing something for poor quality, a review bomb may also be driven by a desire to draw attention to perceived political or cultural issues, [3] perhaps especially if the vendor seems unresponsive or inaccessible to direct feedback. [4] [5] Review bombing also typically takes place over a short period of time and meant to disrupt established ratings that a product already has at review sites, sometimes backed by campaigns organized through online message boards. [4] It may be used as a mass-movement-driven coercion tactic, as a form of protest, or may simply be a form of trolling. [2] Review bombing is a similar practice to vote brigading.

Contents

The practice is most commonly aimed at online media review aggregators, such as Steam, Metacritic, IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, or app stores. It may be motivated by unpopular changes to an established franchise, political or cultural controversies related to the product or service, or to the actions of its developers, vendors, or owners. [2] Some owners of aggregate systems have devised means to detect or prevent review bombing.

Origin

One of the first appearances of the term "review bomb" was in a 2008 Ars Technica article by Ben Kuchera describing the effect in regards to Spore , in which users left negative reviews on Amazon citing the game's perceived lackluster gameplay and digital rights management system. Kuchera wrote "Review-bombing Amazon is a particularly nasty way of getting the point across as well; casual gamers who aren't aware of this campaign may not bother to read the content of the reviews and only assume the game isn't very good." [6]

History

Video games

The increasing prevalence of review bombing was precipitated by the increase in influence of online user reviews in the main storefronts where games are sold, combined with little to no oversight of the content of these reviews. This is particularly true in the case of Steam, the predominant seller of PC games, where user reviews are often the only way for indie games to gain attraction on the service. [2] According to Steam Spy, review bombing generally has little effect on a game's sales, and may in fact even increase them due to the resulting wave of publicity. [7] However, it may be a symptom of decreased customer goodwill, which can have a more long-lasting effect on the publisher, developers or game series being criticized. [7] Depending on how such situations are resolved, the effects of a review bomb may be reversed by the removal of negative reviews as in the case of Titan Souls , [8] Death Stranding , [9] [10] and Helldivers 2 . [11]

Film and television

Theatrical films and television series have also been subject to review bombing, typically due to perceived social issues related to the cast and crew and not due to any aspect of the film or series itself. This extends not only to user review scores on sites like Rotten Tomatoes but to the film's promotional trailers on YouTube.

Amazon Prime Video series The Boys ' second season was review bombed due to its release schedule, and fourth season due to its politics. [12] [13]

YouTube

YouTube's voting system has also been used for review bombing, where dissatisfaction over a creator or a video's content may attract campaigns to "dislike" a video on mass scale, with a goal to be among the most-disliked videos on the service.[ citation needed ] In December 2018, YouTube Rewind 2018 overtook Justin Bieber's "Baby" music video as the most disliked video; it was universally panned and faced criticism for its exclusion of various top personalities on the service, as well as other factors relating to controversies affecting video authors and criticism of YouTube itself. [14]

Businesses

Websites offering user reviews of businesses and other establishments, such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, can also be subject to review bombing in relation to controversies surrounding their proprietors. A notable example included an Elizabeth, New Jersey restaurant owned by the family of the 2016 New York and New Jersey bombings suspect (with many reviews jokingly referring to its chicken as being "the bomb"). Yelp intervened by removing reviews not based on first-hand experience with the restaurant. [15] [16] [17] [18]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some restaurants have faced review bombs from the anti-vaccination community for enforcing vaccine passport rules. [19] [20]

Effects

In some cases, storefronts and aggregates have intervened to stop review bombs and delete the negative reviews. [2] In February 2019, Rotten Tomatoes announced that it would no longer accept user reviews for a film until after its official release. [21]

In 2017, Valve added review histograms to Steam user review scores to show how these change over time; according to Valve's Alden Kroll, this can help a potential purchaser of a game recognize a short term review bomb that is not indicative of the game itself, compared to a game that has a long tail of bad reviews. Kroll said they did not want to silence the ability of users to leave reviews but recognized they needed to highlight phenomena like review bombs to aid customers. [22] In March 2019, Valve stated that it would employ a new system to detect spikes of negative "off-topic" reviews on games: if it is determined that they were the result of a review bomb campaign, the time period will be flagged, and all reviews made during that period (whether negative or positive) will be excluded from the user rating displayed for a game. [23] This system was first publicly triggered upon the Borderlands 3 review bombing in April 2019. [24] Similarly, Valve stepped in to stop negative reviews of Rocket League , following the May 2019 announcement that its developer Psyonix had been acquired by Epic Games (leading to uncertainty over whether it would eventually become exclusive to the Epic Games Store). [25] Valve said that they had to intervene 44 times in 2019 to stop review bombing on Steam. [3]

In 2018, Rotten Tomatoes attempted to broaden and diversify its list of approved critics, who were largely white and male, in an attempt to improve its rating experience. By March 2019, the site no longer accepted audience reviews of a film until after its premiere, as part of an effort to counter pre-release review bombing. [21] Further, it would only accept reviews from persons that have been confirmed to have seen the movie, as verified through theater chains like Regal Cinemas, Cinemark, and AMC Theatres, or through online ticket sales though Fandango. [26] [27] [28]

In February 2020, Kunai by TurtleBlaze was review bombed on Metacritic, decreasing its user rating from 8.1 to 1.7 within a day. The studio, having no idea what they had done to trigger this, found that the review bomb was initiated by a single user, using numerous freshly created email addresses to register accounts at Metacritic as to bring down the user rating, all to demonstrate that a single person could have this effect. As Metacritic had no policy to handle or identify review bombing, this scoring impacted the game. [29] Following the review bombing of The Last of Us Part II in July 2020, Metacritic added a 36-hour delay for user reviews to be added for a newly released game, with users given the message "Please spend some time playing the game" during this period. This was intended to prevent users from adding reviews without having completed a game and minimize the number of reviews that may be added as a result of a review bomb. [30]

Reverse review bomb

Infrequently, a review bomb may be used to praise the game, developers or publishers for other actions that players see as beneficial. One such case was for Assassin's Creed Unity , in the week following the Notre-Dame de Paris fire in April 2019. Ubisoft had made Unity free via its storefront UPlay, as the game included a recreation of the Notre Dame Cathedral. [31] Steam users left numerous positive reviews for the game in the days that followed, with many thanking the developers for the free game and others expressing appreciation for the cathedral's recreation. [32] Unity, which was released in 2014, had received mixed reviews prior to this event due to bugs and technical problems with the game's launch. [33] While such an event had triggered Valve's safeguards against review bombs, they opted to not enforce it since the effect was meant to be positive. [34] [35]

A reverse review bomb may also be initiated by users to try to counter generally negative reviews from critics. Balan Wonderworld was panned upon its launch with a sub-50% Metacritic aggregate score as well as negative user reviews early after its release, but after a few days, a suspect reverse review bomb began with users submitting perfect reviews with similar commentary to reverse the user trend's scores towards a more positive value. [36]

Like negative forms of review bombs, positive review bombs have also occurred as form of protest, such as in the case of anime series Interspecies Reviewers , where it was subject of a positive review bomb campaign targeting the series' MyAnimeList page. The campaign was initiated by anime YouTuber Nux Taku in response to Funimation removing the series from its online streaming platform. [37] [38] In wake of the closure of Tango Gameworks by Microsoft Gaming in May 2024, players used positive review bombing of its games like The Evil Within and Hi-Fi Rush on Steam to protest the studio's closure. [39]

A negative review bomb can also backfire and incite a positive review bomb of the same target. For example, AI: The Somnium Files was review bombed on Metacritic in February 2020 by a single person through the use of numerous sock puppet accounts. The individual initially claimed that this was meant to highlight the flaws of Metacritic's user review system, but later admitted it was actually because they were upset with how a character in the game was written. Before the cause of the review bomb was known, the game's director Kotaro Uchikoshi used social media to ask for help from fans, who responded by posting positive reviews of the game in an effort to cancel out the negative review bomb. When Metacritic became aware of the review bombing, the negative reviews were removed from the game's page but the positive reviews that were posted in response remained, inflating the game's user score and causing it to temporarily be the website's top-rated Nintendo Switch game of all time while drawing further attention to the game as a result of the failed review bomb attempt. [40]

Fallout 76 had been originally released to negative reviews by both critics and players on its initial release, but its developers Bethesda Softworks put effort into improving the game over the following year. By the time the game released to Steam in April 2020, many[ who? ] considered the game to have been reinvented for the better in a manner similar to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and No Man's Sky . However, players still upset over several faults with the game's launch attempted to review bomb the game on Steam at this point. The game's community worked to counter this review bomb by posting positive experiences and reviews of the game at Steam and at other community sites to prove the game had been much improved upon the initial release. [41] [42]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Valve Corporation</span> American video game company

Valve Corporation, also known as Valve Software, is an American video game developer, publisher, and digital distribution company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. It is the developer of the software distribution platform Steam and the game franchises Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead and Dota.

Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged. Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc Doyle, and Julie Doyle Roberts in 1999, and was acquired by Fandom, Inc. in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rotten Tomatoes</span> American review aggregator for film and television

Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang. Although the name "Rotten Tomatoes" connects to the practice of audiences throwing rotten tomatoes in disapproval of a poor stage performance, the direct inspiration for the name from Duong, Lee, and Wang came from an equivalent scene in the 1992 Canadian film Léolo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steam (service)</span> Video game digital distribution service

Steam is a digital distribution service and storefront developed by Valve Corporation. It was launched as a software client in September 2003 to provide game updates automatically for Valve's games and expanded to distributing third-party titles in late 2005. Steam offers various features, like game server matchmaking with Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) measures, social networking, and game streaming services. The Steam client offers features such as automatic updates, cloud storage, and community features such as direct messaging, an in-game overlay, discussion forums, and a virtual collectable marketplace. The storefront also offers productivity software, game soundtracks, videos, and sells hardware made by Valve, such as the Index and Steam Deck.

<i>Counter-Strike: Source</i> 2004 video game

Counter-Strike: Source is a tactical first-person shooter video game developed by Valve and Turtle Rock Studios. Released in October 2004 for Windows, it is a remake of Counter-Strike (2000) using the Source game engine. As in the original, Counter-Strike: Source pits a team of counter-terrorists against a team of terrorists in a series of rounds. Each round is won either by completing an objective or by eliminating all members of the enemy team. The game was initially bundled with all retail and digital copies of Half-Life 2, before being released standalone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yelp</span> Directory service and online review forum

Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publishes crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Potato Sack</span> Alternate reality game

Potato Sack is an alternate reality game (ARG) created by Valve and the developers of thirteen independent video games to promote the release of Valve's game Portal 2, in April 2011. Valve president Gabe Newell envisioned the game as a "Cross Game Design Event" in December 2010, and allowed the developers free rein to design the game using Valve's Portal intellectual property. The game, requiring players to find and solve a number of puzzles hidden within updates of the thirteen games, led to the opportunity for players to release Portal 2 about 10 hours earlier than its planned release by playing games under the pretense of powering up GLaDOS, the sentient computer from the Portal series. The ARG's theme of potatoes is based on plot elements within Portal 2, specifically that for part of the game, GLaDOS's personality module is run off a potato battery.

<i>Counter-Strike: Global Offensive</i> 2012 video game

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) is a 2012 multiplayer tactical first-person shooter developed by Valve and Hidden Path Entertainment. It is the fourth game in the Counter-Strike series. Developed for over two years, Global Offensive was released for OS X, PlayStation 3, Windows, and Xbox 360 in August 2012, and for Linux in 2014. In December 2018, Valve transitioned the game to a free-to-play model, focusing on revenue from cosmetic items.

Early access, also known as alpha access, alpha founding, paid alpha, or game preview, is a funding model in the video game industry by which consumers can purchase and play a game in the various pre-release development cycles, such as pre-alpha, alpha, and/or beta, while the developer is able to use those funds to continue further development on the game. Those that pay to participate typically help to debug the game, provide feedback and suggestions, may have access to special materials in the game. The early-access approach is a common way to obtain funding for indie games, and may also be used along with other funding mechanisms, including crowdfunding. Many crowdfunding projects promise to offer access to alpha and/or beta versions of the game as development progresses; however, unlike some of these projects which solicit funds but do not yet have a playable game, all early access games offer an immediately playable version of the unfinished game to players.

Counter-Strike (CS) is a series of multiplayer tactical first-person shooter video games in which teams of terrorists battle to perpetrate an act of terror while counter-terrorists try to prevent it. The series began on Windows in 1999 with the release of the first game, Counter-Strike. It was initially released as a modification ("mod") for Half-Life that was designed by Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess "Cliffe" Cliffe before the rights to the mod's intellectual property were acquired by Valve, the developers of Half-Life, who then turned Counter-Strike into a retail product released in 2000.

<i>Hatred</i> (video game) 2015 video game

Hatred is an isometric shoot 'em up video game developed and published by Destructive Creations that was released on June 1, 2015, for Microsoft Windows. The player character is a misanthropic mass-killer referred to as "The Antagonist", who begins a "genocide crusade" to kill as many human beings as possible. The developer described Hatred as a reaction to video game aesthetic trends such as political correctness, politeness, vivid color, and games as art. Its October 2014 announcement trailer was characterized as "controversial" by multiple video game journalists. The game was shortly removed by Valve from their Steam Greenlight service due to its extremely violent content but was later brought back with a personal apology from Gabe Newell. It was greenlit for a second time on December 29, 2014, and released on June 1, 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital Homicide Studios</span> American video game developer

Digital Homicide Studios L.L.C. was an American video game developer based in Yuma, Arizona. James and Robert Romine founded the company in 2014 and released poorly received games in quick succession. The studio produced roughly sixty games until September 2016, including The Slaughtering Grounds, Temper Tantrum, and Galactic Hitman. The Slaughtering Grounds, Digital Homicide Studios's best-known title, was released via Steam in October 2014. James Stephanie Sterling's criticism of the game led to a dispute with Digital Homicide Studios and eventually a lawsuit by James Romine against Sterling. Romine also filed a lawsuit against 100 anonymous Steam users in September 2016, accusing them of harassment. In response to the latter, Valve removed all Digital Homicide Studios games from Steam, which Romine stated "destroyed" the studio by October 2016. He subsequently withdrew the lawsuit, while that against Sterling was dismissed with prejudice in February 2017.

<i>Job Simulator</i> 2016 video game

Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives, commonly referred to as simply Job Simulator, is a virtual reality simulation video game developed and published by Owlchemy Labs for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Apple Vision Pro, Oculus Quest, Oculus Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3, in which players participate in comical approximations of real-world jobs. A sequel, Vacation Simulator, was released in 2019 and has a completely different premise.

<i>Arizona Sunshine</i> 2016 video game

Arizona Sunshine is a zombie survival first-person shooter video game released on December 6, 2016. The game is compatible with the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest, Valve Index and PlayStation VR virtual reality headsets. A sequel, Arizona Sunshine 2, was released in 2023.

Vote brigading is massively coordinated online voting. It refers to the practice of affecting reviews or scores on websites that feature crowdvoting, such as online stores or review websites, by calling on large numbers of people to submit reviews, thus boosting or decreasing ratings artificially. This may be done for political reasons; for example, to harm the commercial prospects and credibility of films dealing with controversial or sensitive subjects. Vote brigading is a form of participation bias, which can decrease the reliability of the aggregated score.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Epic Games Store</span> Digital video game storefront

The Epic Games Store is a video game digital distribution service and storefront operated by Epic Games. It launched in December 2018 as a software client, for Microsoft Windows and macOS, and online storefront. Android and iOS versions of the store launched in August 2024, with the iOS version only available for European users. The service provides friends list management, game matchmaking, and other features. Epic Games has further plans to expand the feature set of the storefront but it does not plan to add as many features as other digital distribution platforms, such as discussion boards or user reviews, instead using existing social media platforms to support these.

References

  1. "Random: AI: The Somnium Files Got Review-Bombed By Someone Obsessed With One Of Its Characters". Nintendo Life. February 12, 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Grayson, Nathan (19 April 2015). "Steam 'Review Bombing' Is A Problem". Steamed. Archived from the original on 10 August 2017. Retrieved 10 August 2017.
  3. 1 2 Hall, Charlie (February 6, 2020). "Valve intervened in 44 'review bomb' incidents on Steam last year". Polygon . Retrieved February 19, 2020.
  4. 1 2 Kuchera, Ben (October 4, 2017). "The anatomy of a review bombing campaign". Polygon . Archived from the original on October 5, 2017. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  5. Klepek, Patrick (September 19, 2017). "Valve's "Solution" to Review Bombing Ignores Steam's Longstanding Problems". Vice . Archived from the original on September 19, 2017. Retrieved September 19, 2017.
  6. Kuchera, Ben (September 8, 2008). "Gamers fight back against lackluster Spore gameplay, bad DRM". Ars Technica. Retrieved November 18, 2019.
  7. 1 2 "Steam review bombing is working, and Chinese players are a powerful new voice". pcgamer. 28 June 2017. Archived from the original on 10 August 2017. Retrieved 10 August 2017.
  8. McKeand, Kirk (October 12, 2017). "A brief history of how Steam review bombing damages developers". PCGamesN . Archived from the original on October 12, 2017. Retrieved October 12, 2017.
  9. Ramsey, Robert (December 7, 2019). "Death Stranding User Score Spikes as Metacritic Removes Over 6000 Negative Ratings". Push Square. Retrieved December 9, 2019.
  10. Adams, Robert (December 6, 2019). "Over 6000 negative Death Stranding reviews removed by Metacritic". Game Revolution. Retrieved December 9, 2019.
  11. Yin-Poole, Wesley (May 7, 2024). "Helldivers 2's Operation Clean Up Is a Community-Driven Major Order to Post Positive Steam User Reviews After PSN Backlash — and It's Working". IGN . Retrieved May 7, 2024.
  12. "Here's Why Fans Flooded 'The Boys' Season 2 With Bad Reviews". UPROXX. September 12, 2020. Retrieved June 19, 2024.
  13. Ulatowski, Rachel (June 18, 2024). "How Did It Take Four Seasons for MAGA To Realize 'The Boys' Is About Them?". The Mary Sue. Retrieved June 19, 2024.
  14. Alexander, Julia (December 13, 2018). "YouTube Rewind 2018 is officially the most disliked video on YouTube". The Verge. Retrieved March 25, 2019.
  15. Danovich, Tove (September 22, 2016). "What Happens When Yelp Restaurant Reviews Turn Political?". NPR. Retrieved March 25, 2019.
  16. "Yelp reviewers drag chicken restaurant owned by NYC bombing suspect's family". mic.com. September 20, 2016. Retrieved March 25, 2019.
  17. Kinstler, Linda (August 17, 2018). "How TripAdvisor changed travel". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved March 25, 2019.
  18. "Yelp vs Google: How they deal with fake reviews". Search Engine Land. November 1, 2018. Retrieved November 13, 2019.
  19. Kadvany, Elena (August 5, 2021). "Amid spike in 'review bombing,' Yelp gives restaurants the option to show vaccine policies". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved August 13, 2021.
  20. "Restaurant reviews: The newest victim of vaccine animosity". thestar.com. August 8, 2021. Retrieved August 13, 2021.
  21. 1 2 Polo, Susana (February 26, 2019). "Rotten Tomatoes will no longer allow audiences to review movies before release". Polygon. Archived from the original on February 26, 2019. Retrieved February 26, 2019.
  22. Sinclair, Brendan (September 19, 2017). "Steam adds histograms to address review bombing". GamesIndustry.biz . Archived from the original on September 19, 2017. Retrieved September 19, 2017.
  23. Liptak, Andrew (March 15, 2019). "Valve says it will investigate Steam review bombing campaigns and hide bad-faith scores". The Verge. Retrieved March 25, 2019.
  24. Orland, Kyle (April 5, 2019). "Borderlands review bomb triggers Steam's "off topic" fix". Ars Technica . Retrieved April 6, 2019.
  25. Watts, Steve (May 3, 2019). "Rocket League Review Bombed After Epic Acquisition Announced; Steam Steps In". GameSpot . Retrieved May 3, 2019.
  26. Sims, David (March 4, 2019). "A Change for Rotten Tomatoes Ahead of 'Captain Marvel'". The Atlantic.
  27. Alexander, Julia (May 23, 2019). "Rotten Tomatoes is changing audience review capabilities to tackle review bombing". The Verge . Retrieved May 23, 2019.
  28. "We're introducing Verified Ratings and Reviews to Help You Make Your Viewing Decisions" . Retrieved November 13, 2019.
  29. de Jager, Benjamin (February 19, 2020). "Our indie game KUNAI got review bombed to a 1.7". Gamasutra . Retrieved February 21, 2020.
  30. Fisher, Christine (July 17, 2020). "Metacritic changes its user review policy to combat score bombing". Engadget . Retrieved July 17, 2020.
  31. Horti, Samual (April 20, 2019). "Assassin's Creed Unity gets reverse-review bombed following Ubisoft's Notre Dame support". PC Gamer . Retrieved April 20, 2019.
  32. Orland, Kyle (April 19, 2019). "Reverse review bomb? AC: Unity draws praise for Notre Dame preservation". Ars Technica. Retrieved November 18, 2019.
  33. Khan, Imran. "Assassin's Creed Unity Is Getting Reverse-Review Bombed With Positivity". Game Informer. Archived from the original on April 20, 2019. Retrieved November 18, 2019.
  34. Good, Owen (May 22, 2019). "'Positive review bomb' of Assassin's Creed Unity posed a quandary to Steam". Polygon . Retrieved May 22, 2019.
  35. "Steam :: Steam Blog :: Positive "Review Bombs"". steamcommunity.com. May 21, 2019. Retrieved November 13, 2019.
  36. Grey, Kate (March 30, 2021). "Balan Wonderworld Is Getting A Suspicious Amount Of 10/10 Metacritic User Reviews". Nintendo Life . Retrieved April 11, 2021.
  37. Hodgkins, Crystalyn (January 31, 2020). "Funimation Removes Interspecies Reviewers Anime as it 'Falls Outside' Company's Standards". Anime News Network. Retrieved February 11, 2020.
  38. Luquin, Eduardo (February 22, 2020). "Interspecies Reviewers: 10 Things You Need To Know About This Controversial Anime". CBR.com. Retrieved February 23, 2020.
  39. "Hi-Fi-Rush and the Evil within games being "positive" review bombed on Steam". May 10, 2024.
  40. Denzer, TJ (February 13, 2020). "AI: Somnium Files review bomb backfires, becomes top user-reviewed Switch game". Shacknews . Retrieved February 19, 2020.
  41. Marshall, Cass (April 16, 2020). "Fallout 76 fans are ignoring review bombs, laying out the welcome mat". Polygon . Retrieved April 17, 2020.
  42. Beckhelling, Imogen (April 16, 2020). "Steam users tried to review bomb Fallout 76, but some of its fans are having none of it". Rock Paper Shotgun . Retrieved April 17, 2020.

Further reading