It’s like the Helldivers 2 incident, but for a single-player game, there’s no excuse.
It’s not review bombing when there’s a legitimate problem!
How much of a problem is it really though?
I don’t like it but eh.
Publishers are trying to exclude “review bombing” because they think it’s just social manipulation, while just casually ignoring that there are actual problems with the game. Review bombing used to be something else, but now be wary of it because it’s usually them just trying to discredit actual concerns.
You can have actual concerns without abusing the review function, though. If you don’t own and never planned to play the game and are “reviewing” it because something on the internet made you angry, then that just discredits the actual review platform as a whole.
Reviews should be an actual review, not a tweet reply. If you haven’t actually played the game, don’t review it.
Sure - problem is that publishers are not making that distinction and calling any mass negative review (like a bad release, or game crashing bug) “review bombing”.
How much of a problem it is will vary by how much it impacts and upsets a customer. For you, sounds like it’s not that big of an issue.
But the fact that they pulled out the “review bombing” exscuse means that it qualifies as a problem to a significant percentage of customers.
I hate the “review bombing” term.
It’s been diluted by improper use, not unlike “trolling” or “incel.”
God of War Ragnarok PC port
suffersearns review bombing on Steam due to PlayStation Network account requirementFixed it for them
God of War Ragnorak earns thousands of bad reviews as Sony launches inferior product
FTFY
“Review Bombing” implies these aren’t legitimate reviews from miltiple real peoples.
Sony is just selling an inferior product, that should be the headline.
Exactly.
I hate that the term “review bombing” completely generalized to just “a lot of negatively reviewing something”. Review bombing is supposed to be negative reviewing that’s not relevant to the game, like when it was originally used to speak out against publishers, because, you know, that’s the only thing that seemed to get their attention. Now we just have the tools and excuses to just kill genuine criticism.
Remember when this happened with Helldivers and a bunch of people switched their review back from negative to positive when Sony backed off the requirement? Because they’d “learned their lesson”? Lol
Sony still left the rootkit in the game, though. I think Helldivers 2 might still be active if not for that.
G*mers are some of the most entitled, weak-willed people in existence.
I sympathize with fellow PC gamers for this needles requirement (even though PSN account is my main account). I’m just surprised there’s no similar backlash for other devs requiring respective account creation (EA, BioWare, Blizzard etc. etc.). Sony did not invent this practice.
There is. Newer EA games, anything with Epic Online Services (but especially with a login), etc. They get negative reviews fairly consistently.
Some older games get overlooked, but even then adding in a third party software (not even necessarily needing an account) often lowers a game to a mixed rating on Steam for recent reviews.
I think the only game I’ve actually gone and made the external account for was SWTOR.
I noped the fuck out of Multiversus, the Avengers demo, and others because of the account requirement. And God forbid you get a Ubisoft game anywhere that’s not a console because you’re forced to launch their shitty launcher even if you try to start it from steam.
On console you still have to wait an absurdly long time for the ubishit to load, even if you never use any of it. Pretty sure they threw their launcher in there, too, and just hid it a bit.
Fenyx, a game I love from 2020, takes several extra minutes to boot (and the launch screen completely freezes for the duration, so you don’t know if it’s going to launch successfully or hang) because it has to query the server every single damned time to see if there’s new dlc or news nobody cares about or whatever. Like guys, I didn’t care the first dozen times you tried to get me to check out ways to give you money…
The worst part is I actually did buy one of the dlc for it on switch. I was intensely disappointed. It was not just not worth the money, it wasn’t worth the time to download it; I didn’t even bother finishing it. And still every time it boots up it tells me all about this marvelous new dlc I could buy (there’s another dlc I didn’t buy, but that’s not the one it showcases)! So it takes forever to query the server and then does fuckall with that information. Cool.
I liked the premise of the game. Hell I even 100% the base version, then bought all the DLC because I actually had a damn good time. I burned myself out on the game though because I went right into the DLC after finishing the main game (and first DLC in Olympus)
The account creation sucks, but it’s mostly in multiplayer games or for a multiplayer feature in a game, to enable things like cross-launcher play and such (not needed if they made it right, still an attempt at data collection). God of War is a singleplayer game that has no need for an account requirement, so it’s just there for data collection, singleplayer games shouldn’t even be connecting to the internet.
I feel like The Jedi Fallen Order had this requirement through EA?
According to Steam it does. I stay away from AAA bullshit myself anyway.
Well if it blocks playing on steam deck and Linux it’s not like other devs requiring account creation.
Edit: looks like this one works on steam deck actually so disregard. Looks like it requires an internet connection to play though which is wack.
Also weird, the game includes the unnecessary PlayStation overlay, which makes it unable to run on Linux. The devs were nice enough to specifically disable the overlay on Steam Deck, but all other Linux players have to set a special launch option to fake being a steam deck in order to get the game to run.
. This is just gamer rage against a console maker. They’ve all got ea accounts, Ubisoft, blizzard , discord, twitch, YouTube dozens of accounts all over the place .
But when a console maker does it’s different.
As it should.
I think this will end with playstation making yet another launcher on PC. No paying Gabe a cut, PSN all they want, tight review control. Really hope it doesn’t come to that.
Then they can join the list of ‘AAA’ game publishers that have had to eat crow and (re)release on steam after their own launchers flopped horribly.
Don’t you need to have the game in order to review it? Or did that change?
People are buying it, unable to play because of PlayStation account requirement (the PlayStation servers are having issues and not letting people log in or create an account), and then leaving an angry review and refunding it.
People will buy it, review, and then get a refund within the return window.
I was thinking that after I commented. Sounds right.
That does sound like review bombing then. People elsewhere in the thread are arguing about definitions.
I read those conversations. I wouldn’t call this review bombing. This is people buying it and being upset with the product, then leaving a review and returning it.
That’s part of what a review system is meant for.
I doubt the majority of those incidents are people who bought it without knowing about the controversy first. Thats why they can be grouped and labeled as something other than standard reviews.
The majority of people aren’t serially online and reading gamer drama forums.
I’ve already beaten the game. It hasn’t asked me to sign in. There’s still a “sign in” button in the main menu.
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Funny, I don’t remember PC gamers flipping out when they had to make UPlay accounts and Rockstar Social Club accounts to play those games on Steam. Those were single player as well.
I was one of those people flipping out about the Rockstar Social Club and Ubisoft Connect crap. There’s zero need to force additional DRM on paying customers. We might not have all been vocal but we were around.
Considering the requirement doesn’t impact me personally as I have an account. I do understand part of the backlash. Requiring players to sign up to an account for a single player game that then asks you for to upload your government ID is kinda a bit much. I’d be sour too if I had to do likewise.
For reviewing a game it is needed to buy it on Steam (my logical thinking would say, yes.).
If that is correct then I think a better way to express your disagreement with this game would be simply don’t buy it, or just pirate it (if it is possible).
Steam has a very generous 2 hours played policy where the system will basically refund you no questions asked so long as you have played less than 2 hours of the game (refunds beyond that are totally possible but usually require manual review before approval).
This means that you can buy the game, open it once, leave a negative review, and get it refunded. Which is more impactful on Sony’s bottom line than leaving a review on Metacritic or something because it directly affects the game’s rating on the largest platform for PC gaming, and is therefore more likely to see action taken to fix the issue. Sony doesn’t care if people make angry social media posts, but they will care if they can directly see it impacting their profit margins.
This is actually a fantastic idea. How long will it take Valve to threaten account bans for doing it?
People have been doing it for years as far as I know. It’s kinda where this whole “review bombing” thing comes from. It seems like Valve’s policy is to label these kinds of mass reviews as “off-topic activity” and remove them from affecting the normal rating for the game. If you see a game with an asterisk next to its score on Steam, hovering over the asterisk will tell you that some reviews have been removed from the score for this reason. They’re still publicly there, and you can go into the details of the score to see those periods highlighted, but they no longer affect the score that you see on the storefront.
Or review it on other platforms
