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.
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.