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!
Is it not? What is “review bombing”? I thought it was just when a bunch of negative reviews were submitted in a short period of time.
there’s probably no official definition, but you could argue it is supposed to refer to negative reviews that have nothing to do with the product. Like when a bunch of idiots gave Captain Marvel 1 star reviews because they hate Brie Larson.
This is how I assume it would be used, but some people use it to mean “this got a lot of negative reviews right away”
Not going to lie, needing a PlayStation account feels pretty unrelated to the actual game to me. Akin to complaining about how something shipped on Amazon instead of, you know the actual product.
Your difficulties with needing a PlayStation account, like shipping, is going to wildly vary depending on location.
It is a hard requirement and thus part of the experience.
Review bombing is an intentional attack (e.g. someone posts a story about a shitty restaurant owner and everyone on the internet starts leaving negative reviews for that restaurant even though they’ve never been there). Just getting negative reviews organically for being bad is not review bombing.
If a bunch of people are intentionally buying the game, reviewing and refunding without playing it, isn’t that the same?
If they’re reviewing it negatively and then enjoying the game without refunding, I’ve gotta laugh.
How much of a problem is it really though?
I don’t like it but eh.
Its a huge problem, for a variety of reasons.
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It means Sony won’t sell the game in countries where they don’t allow PSN accounts.
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Their servers suck ass. I’m literally unable to play this game, even if I wanted to, because I get one generic server error after another when trying to make an account. This is the same reason it was originally removed from Helldivers 2.
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Sony has a horrific track record of data breaches.
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They’re collecting and selling data about you for profit.
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Its a completely arbitrary and anti-consumer requirement that has zero benefits to you as the consumer.
- It means Sony won’t sell the game in countries where they don’t allow PSN accounts.
That isn’t a problem for all the users that review the game though.
- Their servers suck ass. I’m literally unable to play this game, even if I wanted to, because I get one generic server error after another when trying to make an account. This is the same reason it was originally removed from Helldivers 2.
I don’t know about that since I have never connected my PSN account. The only game I own which supports it is Ghost of Tsushima and I haven’t connected my account to that game.
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Sony has a horrific track record of data breaches.
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They’re collecting and selling data about you for profit.
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Its a completely arbitrary and anti-consumer requirement that has zero benefits to you as the consumer.
Fair enough but I don’t think it’s actively anti consumer, I place that bar higher than this.
Sony has a horrific track record of data breaches.
They’re collecting and selling data about you for profit.
I place that bar higher than this.
For my own personal amusement, what else would they have to do to meet the level your personal anti-consumer bar is set at?
I was referring to their last point.
About it being completely arbitrary and anti-consumer? It 100% is.
I mean it’s definitely not user-friendly
That’s true. It’s not user-friendly or pro-consumer.
I’m not gay but i still support gay people and dislike people who hate them.
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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.”
What is the “proper use”?
It’s a set of criteria. Reviews are organized from outside the review site, are negative, and generally come from people without any real interest in the piece of media.
Thats what I thought. Essentially brigading right? Having a universally panned ‘feature’ in a game and receiving negative reviews should not have the negative connotation that review bombing brings
exactly. Their complaints are actually relevant to the game, not some unrelated ideology
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.
I hope it does. Then they can fuck off and die nameless, cause I’m not buying it if it’s not on steam or gog, and I’ve recently aso begun not buying it if it requires a PSN account. Take your shitty business practices and stuff them up your console’s ass.
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.
I’m guessing they tried to allow it temporarily, hoping it would reduce the backlash, then flip on the requirement later.
The fact that there’s a giant box that says account linking is required is enough for me to never touch it. Fitgirl already has a repack so I guess I need to reinstall Windows to get it installed…
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Okay?
There’s actually a repacker that happens to think that LinuxRuleZ and those work out the box for Linux. And this game is already there
Which one dis
Literally named LinuxRuleZ on the torrminatorr forum. Welcome to the club
the torrminatorr forum.
It won’t even let me in the forum.
Install it in a Windows VM, then copy the game’s install directory to your Linux install. Might need to fiddle with Proton a bit, but should work fine.
Oh no. Lemmy keeps showing me things I need to look into for my move to Linux. No more FitGirl, or is it this game (among others of course) specifically?
All fitgirl repacks need to be installed using Windows, AFAIK
That’s what I was afraid of. Thanks for letting me know! Time to look for alternatives. I’ll start with Rin I suppose
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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?
For trying a game, trying it, disliking it and refunding it, a series of events that is completely normal and allowed by steam’s refund policy? Well it’s probably getting changed when gaben dies and someone else takes over, but I’m not sure we should be rooting for that…
There’s a transactional cost to processing the sale, hosting the giant download and then issuing the refund. If people organized and manipulated the system and this became a financial burden, then the policy would almost certainly change.
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
