texhnolyze
Banned
This has been bugging my mind since last year, and it has happened a lot. The fact that you can post a review even after playing for a minute boggles my mind. How can someone review a game within minutes? I agree that if it's due to performance issues, people should be able to say something about it. However, I don't think that kind of report should count as reviews. It's just a report that the game is not running well on their PCs. It's just one aspect of the many aspects that should be included in a review.
Additionally, Steam refund is highly abuse-able due to this. People can easily troll games that they basically have no interest to begin with, or just simply hate for whatever reason, by buying the game, throw a negative 'review', and ask for a refund. To make things worse, most people wouldn't bother to revise or remove their reviews so they'll stick for eternity. The 'recent' and 'overall' reviews that has just introduced recently is not enough to cover the real problem of Steam reviews.
I'm talking about this kind of 'reviews'.
An example of 'review bombing':
Additionally, Steam refund is highly abuse-able due to this. People can easily troll games that they basically have no interest to begin with, or just simply hate for whatever reason, by buying the game, throw a negative 'review', and ask for a refund. To make things worse, most people wouldn't bother to revise or remove their reviews so they'll stick for eternity. The 'recent' and 'overall' reviews that has just introduced recently is not enough to cover the real problem of Steam reviews.
I'm talking about this kind of 'reviews'.
I think Valve really should do something about it. For a start, reviews should be separated from port quality. People need to play for certain amount of time before able to review games. I know, not every games are longer than 10 hours, but it can be done if Valve request the game's length to the developer before greenlighting the game. So everything can be automated. Therefore, there'll be another box just below the review box for people to put their impressions on the performance of the game, how it runs on their system, is the game crashing or not, etc. It might be a text-based box, or just points to choose (from 1-5). Hopefully this can help people make better decisions whether or not they should buy a game.
An example of 'review bombing':
Some people seem to not be aware, but there are groups that focus on certain games/type of games to negative review bomb, some with even hundreds or thousands of users.
Here's a Kotaku article written on it a year ago: http://steamed.kotaku.com/steam-review-bombing-is-a-problem-1701088582
But if you look around you can see it happen in a number of places. These groups include people who take some kind of vendetta upon something, be it a group of GamerGaters, people who hate microtransactions in any way, shape, or form, people who go on a vendetta against certain genre of games that have popular 'shitty' entries from developers (but effect even those games that are actually good), etc. Some are just voices wanting to be heard, some are this weird growing circle of 'video game hate groups', that have found a place recently.
There's also the opposite and some shitty developers will pay to get positive review bombed on their game to try to create the illusion that it's good. That happens less, but it most certainly has happened.
I'm not suggesting anything be done about it since this is the unfortunate effect of giving anyone a platform to be a voice, putting needless restrictions on the system would either hurt legitimate customers and probably not effect the groups anyway. Again, I think the best thing to do is just raise awareness.
The times it's most obvious is when there's a page that's mostly positive reviews but people have gone out of their way to thumbs down all the positive reviews and thumbs up all the negative ones.