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[Mibu no ookami]

I can't help but wonder whether the return of ratings on PSN might be the harbinger of verified reviews on Metacritic.

They should be able to easily use APIs to hook into Sony, Microsoft, and Steam at this point.

I noticed that you have to purchase, download, or add to the library in order to actually rate titles. Can't recall if that was the case in the past, so wondering if Metacritic will add verified reviews and if they do what they'll do with unverified reviews. Of course, they want the traffic from review bombing, so my guess is if they do integrate, they'll do something along the lines where there is a filter or toggle.

I think verified user reviews have been a long time coming and wonder if Sony might be doing this in advance of the release of Spider-Man 2 to prevent review bombing from impacting sales.

I don't think Nintendo has had to really deal with this as much, so maybe they'll sit this one out.

 

[willothedog]

Don't Steam and Xbox have quite generous refund terms so you can just buy, review bomb then refund? The only way to get review parity would be if they scrapped that and went with the PlayStation model.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

Would be more interesting if after you complete the game it asked you to rate it during the credits roll

So it requires a more valid full play-through before rating

 

[BennyBlanco]

Don't Steam and Xbox have quite generous refund terms so you can just buy, review bomb then refund? The only way to get review parity would be if they scrapped that and went with the PlayStation model.

Steam has had user reviews (and refunds) figured out for years. Display the person’s playtime and let you see their other reviews. Put recent reviews in a different pool for older games.

 

[Mibu no ookami]

Don't Steam and Xbox have quite generous refund terms so you can just buy, review bomb then refund? The only way to get review parity would be if they scrapped that and went with the PlayStation model.

Don't think you would have to scrape it. All you have to do is filter the reviews transmitted via API to those of active owners.

 

[Freelance Yakuza]

Who cares about Metacritic user reviews?

 

[ReBurn]

Don't Steam and Xbox have quite generous refund terms so you can just buy, review bomb then refund? The only way to get review parity would be if they scrapped that and went with the PlayStation model.

It would take a pretty dedicated troll to buy a game and refund it just to leave a negative review.

 

[SmokedMeat]

I don’t see the connection between PSN and Metacritic.

 

[fart town usa]

I don't think review bombing user scores actually affects anything because anyone with half a brain cell knows it's 90% rage nonsense.

I do think verified reviews would be cool though and would be even if you had to play through 51% minimum to leave a review.

Imagine if there were tags; boring, slog, filler, amazing, goty, gotg, etc. That'd be so interesting.

 

[SmokedMeat]

Don't Steam and Xbox have quite generous refund terms so you can just buy, review bomb then refund? The only way to get review parity would be if they scrapped that and went with the PlayStation model.

The PlayStation model of telling you nothing about what the person thought of the game.

No thank you.

 

[Mibu no ookami]

The PlayStation model of telling you nothing about what the person thought of the game.

No thank you.

I don’t see the connection between PSN and Metacritic.

Telling you nothing? I think them giving their grade on the game is telling plenty. The vast majority of people playing PS4/5 games don't have a keyboard and mouse connected to their console to write reviews, so it just doesn't make a ton of sense to solicit in-depth reviews.

I think I spelled out where the possible connection could be.

I do think that user reviews may have played a role in lower sales for Horizon, TLOUP2, and Gran Turismo 7. I think verified user reviews launching right before Spider-Man launches COULD mean that Sony is implementing this to tie into Metacritic user reviews in a way to prevent future review bombing. As I mentioned in the thread title, that's speculation on my part, but it does make sense.

They could even just utilize an api to verify that you own the game.

 

[willothedog]

It would take a pretty dedicated troll to buy a game and refund it just to leave a negative review.

Such people, sadly, do exist

 

[Freelance Yakuza]

Such people, sadly, do exist

Refund after 25 hours of gameplay?

 

[nial]

Such people, sadly, do exist

how do you even find that 2 likes-post

 

[Gameplay Gods Bless]

Would be more interesting if after you complete the game it asked you to rate it during the credits roll

So it requires a more valid full play-through before rating

Not even journalists are required to finish a game before giving a review.

 

[EverydayBeast]

“Five star ratings” had their moment on YouTube

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

Not even journalists are required to finish a game before giving a review.

Precisely

 

[Humdinger]

Would be more interesting if after you complete the game it asked you to rate it during the credits roll

So it requires a more valid full play-through before rating

Nah, that would tremendously skew user reviews to the positive. People who did not like the game enough to finish would be screened out, their opinions disallowed.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

Nah, that would tremendously skew user reviews to the positive. People who did not like the game enough to finish would be screened out, their opinions disallowed.

Okay, how about midway through? I think there should be some level of commitment before you’re qualified to review

 

[Fake]

Who cares about Metacritic user reviews?

Devs apparently. I mean, reviewers x users proved to have different opinions whatever you like or twist.

And many folks here try to generalize review bombs with people really putting effort into their personal review.


I mean, I can assure to you that patch notes are not target gaming reviewers instead of users.

 

[Fredrik]

Would be more interesting if after you complete the game it asked you to rate it during the credits roll

So it requires a more valid full play-through before rating

Means you would have to finish a game before rating it, means that only people who like the game will rate it.

I probably drop 95% of all games I play before the credits roll. Sometimes I stick around longer, like Halo Infinite which I think I dropped after 16 hours, but I never stay till the end on games I’m not enjoying.

On Steam you can filter reviews for min playtime, I think that’s perfect. Means you can filter out troll reviews by setting min playtime to a couple hours, means you don’t have to see reviews by people who never really gave a game a chance.

 

[DryvBy]

It would take a pretty dedicated troll to buy a game and refund it just to leave a negative review.

People think 10s of thousands of people did this for Starfield. It's a wild conspiracy.

 

[Aenima]

I think Sony is bringing back the user scores for PSN mostly because Metacritic usersoces are a dumpster fire of fanboys review bomb games they cant play.
Metacritic is not gonna do shit to improve they userscores, the best they could do would be to remove it.

 

[ReBurn]

People think 10s of thousands of people did this for Starfield. It's a wild conspiracy.

Gamers are weird. Bethesda shot themselves in the foot by favoring AMD and not optimizing for Nvidia. A ton of their negative reviews were for performance.

 

[Humdinger]

Okay, how about midway through? I think there should be some level of commitment before you’re qualified to review

Maybe, although the midpoint could be a problem with long games, something that takes 60 hours for instance. I don't think you need to play 30 hours to have an informed opinion. I don't even think you need to play 15. In most cases, I think you can form a decent impression of a game after about 3 hours. I'm not saying you're qualified to comment on the overall story arc, but after you've put in a few hours, you've probably got a pretty good sense of the game.

I wouldn't ask as much of user reviews as I do of professional reviews. Professional reviewers are getting paid for their opinion. They ought to play the full game, or at least a large percentage of it. But gamer reviews? I think of them like amazon reviews. As long as you've bought the book, you're qualified to give an opinion. And I don't need to read halfway through a book to know whether it's good or not. I can usually tell in the first couple of chapters. Again, this would be different if I were a paid, professional reviewer, but I'm just a guy, just another reader.

I understand what you're saying about level of commitment, though. Maybe they could do something similar to how Steam handles it. I'm not a Steam user, but as I understand it, Steam allows you to sort the reviews based on how long the person has played the game. So, if you want to look only at reviews by people who've played the game for 10 or 20 hours, you can do that.