I know I've ranted many a time about steam before but with the absolute review bombing I'm seeing happening to most studios across the board it's very curious how these games that clearly no one damn likes keep bumping their way up to the top sellers list. I check out the top sellers list quite often just to see what's trending in the industry because it's usually a decent benchmark.
The fact that the positive reviews are always gibberish on these games as well make me deeply suspicious. Is it really the normies being normies? Or are even they sick of the state of the games industry constantly releasing broken game titles and is there some major shenanigans going on? I bring up the steam reviews so often because even in the comments pages people think they're bots and such. I mean don't get me wrong, normies are really really dumb, but I think even they'd be pissed off after awhile if they kept on pre-ordering broken products. I'm thinking of games like Pharaoh Total War which no one asked for somehow getting to the top sellers list.
If any indie developer did this they'd be called on it and wiped out and by the way I know that devs fuck with their review sections on steam all the time.
You're probably better off not trusting reviews at all unless you trust a reviewer. Watching video of gameplay is a decent way to gauge whether you would enjoy the game.
Oh I agree, that's what I do if I'm looking to buy a game, however I just found it interesting to note I think stats on steam are being fucked with and more than usual now too.
Gotcha. I always assume that wokies are cooking the books in the absence of evidence that they're not.
So we can soon expect blizzard math in the book cooking, that will be fun :D
"<insert game> no commentary gameplay"
There are reviews on steam? /half serious sarcasm
I've been on Steam for 17 years, and in all that time, I haven't looked at a review on the social side of Steam even once. I barely pay any attention to the social side of Steam at all, other than the workshops for the games I own.
Perhaps more people need to do that....
I just get curious about what the normies are doing and how they're judging things which helps me understand why they have such bad taste in everything and continue to be normies.
I haven't trusted review platforms for years now, it's too easy to bot reviews or for the publisher to pay the platform to fudge the stats in their favour. Less so on steam as they have no loyalty to the publishers and they are actually too big to fail.
The only time I check them out on a steam game is when they're mixed or mostly negative out of curiosity. So for this reason if you're curious give them a read, otherwise just stay away and/or build a list of YouTubers who do unsponsored reviews who you can align your likes to.
If you want to get on the top of the NYT Best selling book list, you buy something like 5,000 copies of your own book from Amazon. Then sit on them for a while, put a fresh slip cover on them, and re-list them. It costs relatively little (because you're buying them from yourself) and getting to the top of that list gives you a lot more sales.
It would not surprise me if a similar scheme was done with video games.
But reselling games on steam etc require the entire account to be sold which usually means you sell it for half of the price so a bit harder to recoup the costs right?
Perhaps I should have left that detail out. Reselling the book is merely a means to recoup some of the costs. Even if the books were thrown away, getting to the top of the chart is a relatively cheap way to boost real sales.
I don't disagree with you, but Pharaoh may be a poor example. Hordes of gamers will buy any Total War game, no matter how good or bad it turns out. It's just a benefit of that series' lineage.
Nah CA have really been pissing people off with their business practices and attitude lately, some bratty SJW definitely got put in charge of their PR and it's backfiring.
What do you mean the AI was trained on SJW PR, it Ensured we could get a intern to just oversee the entire department (with a manger ofc still keeping his full salary). Best decision made according to the board.
lmao honestly that wouldn't even surprise me at this point.
Aye, there's definitely some weird shit with Steam's stats and rating/review results. And "recent reviews" tends to be implemented rather poorly, to the point to where a game that's only received 8 or so reviews in the past month can lead to "mixed review" status based on 3/8 of those reviews being negative. Even if they're negative for shitty reasons.
Also, how utterly short and meaningless most reviews are. I've actually AVOIDED writing reviews for years because I felt like I needed to be overly detailed and verbose, and didn't have the time to do that. Maybe I should've said fuck it and given games I like positive low effort reviews anyway? I dunno.
One thing I'd like to bring up, since it's something I often tune out, fail to notice, or forget, is how awesome and useful some of this NextFest stuff is that Steam's been promoting lately. Games with playable demos and the like, giving people a proper chance at previewing and trying before buying. Still plenty of shovelware but I've played at least a few demos that were legitimately enjoyable and/or seemed like they might have decent potential.
This is the same company that didn’t just release a shitty cash grab Counter-Strike 2, they also removed CS:GO for people who paid for it in favor of free-to-play shit.
I would say that virtually all the large game companies deserve to have their games pirated at this point, but in most cases that’s more than they deserve. Give your mindshare to retro games that are more deserving.
Steam lets anyone review, so naturally there will be bot farms gaming the system. individual reviews are not useful, but aggregating them can be. look for trends in the negative and positive reviews and ignore the overall score.
for instance, you can tell if a recent patch broke something by looking at the most recent reviews. You can also tell how much of your time the game demands by looking for people complaining about grind or praising it for "tons of content".
Steam also differentiates between all reviews and the most recent, as well as lets you see review trends over time in a graph, which can help you detect anything artificial happening.
IMO, Steam has the best reviewing system and I wish it was adapted for other things as well.
I tend to just look at the negative reviews and they're often the most honest about getting to the point, failing that I look at the gameplay itself.
I used to be a mod for an indie steam game, and I can kinda confirm this. Steam has a pretty lenient policy on what companies do to reviews, or more accurately they're under the impression "it's better to be in the center of attention even if it's bad". While I can't speak for all games, many b-tier indie ones will intentionally pay bots/companies to boost their reviews. It's not cheap (I know the game company I was with was paying about $15-20k a month to "boost" their reviews), so not all companies go for it.
I know for a fact based on my experiments you can get it to happen for free depending because of stuff like trading cards which yes people trade each other money for for some reason. There's also other methods as well that aren't necessarily nefarious like key packs and so on, those methods I don't mind so much but reviewers are potentially getting the game for free with the pack and leaving reviews on it.
Paid botting does not surprise me I have to wonder being a conspiracy theorist and pointing the old weaponised autism if there are companies not specifically investing money into buying copies with multiple of hundreds if not thousands of fake accounts to give themselves an initial boost especially in the early stages because that means they get way more attention on initial release than if they did things normally like everybody else.
This is why I consider even platforms like Itch to be way more valuable, it's not worth botting on those kinds of sites so you're more likely to get feedback from real human beings.
Hmm, do they eat the cost or try and recoup it with selling the accounts on the black market, I presume the the former since I have not heard any obvious connections of accounts changing review stance.
I don't have concrete proof but even steam commenters have been pointing out how suspicious a lot of these reviews are. I was wondering why so many of them were just accounts reposting dumb memes but this seems way too plausible for my liking.
Could well be that like a lot of big sites and platforms, Valve is simply sitting pretty and don't care because they make so much money. The whole fakeness of users reminds me a lot of dating sites when I took a look at them, same tactics. I see games like Rainbow Six Siege for example regularly getting in the top sellers list but it does beg the question given how allegedly broken it all is now according to users who is playing this sort of game?
I can at least put two and two together on the F2P garbage because it's clearly bot accounts gaming the system so weirdos can collect their shinies so it makes me wonder about another situation at play here.
Well, to my knowledge the sales list is also not based on Units but on amount of value sold and DLC or just a higher value is supposed to push it higher on the list, More interesting since it would cost more atm would be concurrent users on the game.
I dont rely much on steam reviews, if i see a game that interest me, ill go look up the gameplay on youtube, there's bound to be one even for smaller titles. If it looks good there too then ill pirate and if i do like it then ill buy it... when there's a discount.
Only reviews I'll ever look at is the negative ones, see what pattern I can make out and ask myself if those negative features would bother me while I look at gameplay online.
After that I may give a game a shot if it has a demo or a "demo". Or I might jump the first step and try the demo first.
If I like it then I'll consider dropping cash for it if I think the game will entertain me for a suitable amount of time.
I don't think I've read a positive review in decades
I only buy old games that are on sale and by old I mean years and years old.
Most gamers don't give a fuck about the state of the industry they barely can even handle a game with story (for me story is the most important factor of a good game). They are just retards who want multiplayer shooty bang bang. I'm in the old world camp of wanting the entire game industry to collapse into complete ruin. I don't care how many of my favourite IPs must be sacrificed, the 80s video game crash needs to happen again, and much more severely. Total war is a very bad example to use because the moron historical total war crowd are zealous and will get anything not warhammer in an attempt to try and prove something about fantasy not being good.