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.
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.