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
As fot the reviews, Steam reviews are esdentially useless. They are not, but the "score" is way to unrefined; only good or bad essentially.
Word of mouth works too, but that's basically it. I purchase a lot on Steam this way. I'm usually happy enough. Firewatch is good btw..
as for the question, showing the graph is quite the opposite of censoring opinions... in fact it shows an interestingly large amount of positive ratings at the same time as the negative... how is this censoring? when reviews or negative threads get deleted, that's censoring, but if a mob is bullying a store page, regular people have the right to know that there is a mob present
That didn't work for Greenlight, it doesn't work for reviews, and Valve needs to start using some of that pile of cash they're sitting on to curate their platform and weed out the mountains of crap that are making it a sad joke.
If you MUST use Steam reviews for your purchasing decisions, look only at those from reviewers who actually give a shit, such as the pcmasterrace curator group.
This is more useful for things like the GTA offline mods being banned.
However, I think they should have handled it differently. They should have contacted him directly first and asked him to remove all the videos related to their game from his channel and to not post any videos related to their games in the future. If he refused, then you hit him with the copyright strikes.
Good on Steam for trying to show these types of actions for what they are.
But the ridiculous thing is that JonTron is an Iranian-American immigrant.
This is pretty much what happened a couple of months ago when Wargaming merely threatened Sir_Foch with a fake copyright strike for videos he made with their permission because they didn't like one video, it unleashed a colossal ****storm upon them that Campo Santo should really have learnt from.
It will only get worse before it gets better... and there will be no "learning" anytime soon. I wouldn't doubt that one is reading my post right now, thinking I'm some redneck who doesn't understand "minority" experiences and I'm too insensitive. Except I'm an Asian myself.. and have literally been chased by Neo-Nazis. I've dealt with true racism. Not pretend internet outrage. And even when they confront this, they're too self-righteous to have any shame. They'll just call me an Uncle Tom.
Today, everyone and their stupid ass cousin can post some retarded, off the wall review online or some gaming platform (such as Steam) and I find it very disheartening. You also have the problem that legit gaming sites, a good bit of reviewers also hold some kind of bias towards certain companies or types of games and their reviews are hard to rely on as well.....
Social media sites that allow mass sharing of information quickly can bring up a product just as fast as it can tear one down.
I still try to go by the fact that I get some information about a game as it moves through the development stages, avoid player reviews when a game launches (people will cry/bitch about the smallest things until it's patched) and quickly glance over actual gaming site reviews to get an idea of what a game holds once it releases.
These are the two prevailing arguments on the issue. That is what I'm reporting. I'm not telling you how to think, I'm asking What you think about those two sides. Really don't understand your post.
You said just because Jon tron is Iranian it is not surprising he made anti Semitic remarks. I pointed out he might easily be Christian, which group of believers are in modern times normally not haters of Jewish peoples.
Thus: Iranian background is not automatic anti-Semite.
And he's a millennial. Even when they're not hipsters, they're ironic smartasses anyways.