If you have taken a look at Firewatch on Steam lately you will see a game that had been "very positive" in its reviews has lately gone down to "mixed". You don't have to do too much digging to find the internet rage machine is in full effect. The creator of Firewatch hit PewDiePie with DMCA takedowns for PewDiePie's use of derogatory words and his fanbase did what all kids do best. I am going try to leave the politics behind on this and just get into Steams response.
For those new to the term of "review bombing" its when people blast a game with negative reviews. They also mark all views that agree with them as helpful and mark those they don't agree with as unhelpful.
This isn't the first time a game has been at the mercy of internet wrath and yesterday Steam laid out a blog with their answer. A breakdown of the post is that they have seen this before and have been working on this solution for a while. After talking through several ideas they explain they settled on a chart that now displays the voting trends of the game. This chart is a bar chart where you can see the negative to positive vote ratio over time and if you see any spikes you can filter them or click on the graph to see what people are saying.
While I am not sure that review sections are the best place for political discourse I do think that Steam allowing the reviews to continue in place of censoring was a good move. This way people who need to be angry at something can unload their repressed rage against something that means so very little in the long run and the rest of us don't miss out on something good because someone wants to interject politics into the room. Then again if there is a bad patch release it will give people the ability to warn possible future consumers of the garbage that awaits. You can also see if the garbage was fixed.
I have been reading a lot of responses to this news and one of the biggest complaints is now you have to read more, which you really don't. If you see that there was a spike on the graph in negative activity after nothing but positives and the game hasn't been updated in a year, you don't have to be a fucking Scottland yard detective to see something happened. Also when you spend the excruciating amount of energy to scroll down to the comment section and some of the first comments are, "OOoOOOooo iM gOnNA fiLE a dMcA cLaIM OoOoOOoo." or "salty SJW developer" then you have a pretty good idea that some hormonal snowflakes were triggered. 8 fucking seasons of sexual drama and a million spin-offs is not needed to discern what has happened here.
Review bombing and vote brigading are nothing new but it's nice to see someone taking a look at ways to resolve it. Granted at this point it might not the best solution but what it does is arm the consumer with more knowledge than they had before. If the consumer thinks that there is just too much work involved than that is on them but for the rest of us its a benefit. As someone who considers themselves a patient gamer, this is something I will greatly benefit from and I am glad they are doing it.
Comments
Post a Comment