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Randy Pitchford Not Happy With Borderlands Review Bombing, Threatens Future Releases On Steam

Kagey K

Banned
interested in what you mean by “the bullshit that comes with” gamers voices being heard, because it sounds like you’re already biased against the opinions of them.

We are supposed to be a group of hardcore gamers, interested in video games and none of the other bullshit.

Yet there is so much infighting here, we can’t even agree if a game is good or not.

How is anybody supposed to figure out what we (gamers) want if we are so busy fighting amongst ourselves?

It’s not a hard concept to grasp.
 
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Kadayi

Banned
user reviews are indeed bullshit. Go read reviews for any newegg product and you'll see 1's and 2's because the dummy didn't know how to install something correctly. Who has ever actually read a steam user review?

All the time. Loads of smaller games never receive much if anything in the way of press coverage, and even then given how cosy the indie scene is with a lot of game journalists, you can never tell whether they're giving out praise for something being strong & brave versus being a good game. With Steam reviews, it's pretty easy to sort the wheat from the chaff. There's a whole bunch of smaller games in my Steam library I'd have never bought if it wasn't for user reviews.

Also amused at the idea that Pitchford might remove Borderlands from Steam. Wouldn't that imply it was his decision to go to EGS also? I thought it was outside of his control :unsure:
 
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We are supposed to be a group of hardcore gamers, interested in video games and none of the other bullshit.

Yet there is so much infighting here, we can’t even agree if a game is good or not.

How is anybody supposed to figure out what we (gamers) want if we are so busy fighting amongst ourselves?

It’s not a hard concept to grasp.
We are not supposed/required to be anything as gamers. Being a gamer means you’re a fan of the medium. You can be hardcore or casual, no one cares. Games that I love are going to be different than games that you love and the notion that we need to be a hive mind that agrees on everything videogames is silly.

Developers also shouldn’t be looking at what gamers as a whole want, but rather what their target audiences within the gaming audience wants.
 

Kagey K

Banned
We are not supposed/required to be anything as gamers. Being a gamer means you’re a fan of the medium. You can be hardcore or casual, no one cares. Games that I love are going to be different than games that you love and the notion that we need to be a hive mind that agrees on everything videogames is silly.

Developers also shouldn’t be looking at what gamers as a whole want, but rather what their target audiences within the gaming audience wants.
I think that’s where I was getting to, I just wanted to pull some teeth for a bit, and this seemed like a good topic to do it in.
 
I will never forgive Randy for Alien CM. Why? Because I vividly remember all of the doc videos he and his team made to show how “passionate” they were about the Alien universe and I bought that shit because I’m a huge alien fan.

He lied in the face of every single alien fan and worse of all he will never admit it was wrong and the game was SHIT. Randy Pitchford is a modern snake oil salesmen for video games.

Good thing I don’t care about borderlands and thank GOD we had Alien Isolation.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
Ummm, if you want to bring up the ghost of A:CM in relation to arguments for/against curation, then shouldn't you be pissed off at SEGA, because they were the ones that published the game?

The analogy being of course that as publisher SEGA were the ones who decided that the game was good enough to sell, regardless of the state it was in, how are they different from Steam's "anything goes" model.
 

Azurro

Banned
Randy please


Perhaps don't piss off the Steam users who would have bought your game if you had just released it there also.


So, all of these pissed off messages is because of the BL3 exclusivity to the icon slightly to the right on your desktop? My god, it is silly, steam fanboys are amusing to watch.

On topic I think he has a point, it should not be the customer's job to tell other customers that the stuff on the store's shelves is literal shit.
 
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So, all of these pissed off messages is because of the BL3 exclusivity to the icon slightly to the right on your desktop? My god, it is silly, steam fanboys are amusing to watch.

On topic I think he has a point, it should not be the customer's job to tell other customers that the stuff on the store's shelves is literal shit.

sol_bad sol_bad replied with a well thought out and quite long post to your over simplistic drive by in the last thread about the Epic games store and you ignored him, why didn't you reply to them?

You're just parroting the exact same 'hur dur Steam fanboys so pathetic, its just an extra icon' in this thread.

Stop trolling for attention/reactions.
 
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Azurro

Banned
sol_bad sol_bad replied with a well thought out and quite long post to your over simplistic drive by in the last thread about the Epic games store and you ignored him, why didn't you reply to them?

You're just parroting the exact same 'hur dur Steam fanboys so pathetic, its just an extra icon' in this thread.

Stop trolling for attention/reactions.

It's not trolling or craving attention. I'm looking at the conversation in this thread and it's a lot of people with their pitchforks out when it's quite clear what is meant by crappy games. Steam is flooded with asset flips, games with barely functional graphics and pieces of software that barely function and relying on user reviews to tell others if it's a bad game or not. The replies mentioning Colonial Marines are in bad faith since that game is of a low quality, but it still meets a baseline level of quality where at least assets were created for the game, functional systems and so on. 95% of the games of steam don't reach this baseline quality, so it's an absurd complaint.

It's more steam fanboys leashing out because another icon next to the desktop has exclusivity for 6 months.
 

MMaRsu

Banned
It's not trolling or craving attention. I'm looking at the conversation in this thread and it's a lot of people with their pitchforks out when it's quite clear what is meant by crappy games. Steam is flooded with asset flips, games with barely functional graphics and pieces of software that barely function and relying on user reviews to tell others if it's a bad game or not. The replies mentioning Colonial Marines are in bad faith since that game is of a low quality, but it still meets a baseline level of quality where at least assets were created for the game, functional systems and so on. 95% of the games of steam don't reach this baseline quality, so it's an absurd complaint.

It's more steam fanboys leashing out because another icon next to the desktop has exclusivity for 6 months.

Ahh yes the "Steam fanboys" argument.

Fuck off
 
The term "bad faith" is stupid. What does it even mean?

Bad faith is the opposite of good faith, which is extremely important for any dialog.

Good faith is the belief that you should never assume negative intentions, motivations, or a lack of intelligence, when it comes to the person you're talking to. Unfortunately, good faith often isn't treated as a two-way street by those who talk about it when their own actions and motivations are being questioned.

Basically, if you hold others to a standard that requires them to not treat you with hostility or assume you're a bad person, then you darn well better return that expectation.

As an example in this thread, reducing people's arguments to "you only think that because you're fanboys" is arguing in bad faith.
 
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Solomeena

Banned
I am not even sorry to say that if you agree with Randy the douchebag about not having reviews for games you are either trolling, getting paid by the industry to astroturf or are just ignorant as hell. Gamers have no say in anything when it comes to how games are made or produced and leaving reviews are practically our only way to fight back against shitty fuckheads like Randy the douchebag. Randy, fuck you if you are reading this, i will never give you my hard earned money for your shitty games with the way you shit on gamers, you know the people who lines your pockets so you can live well, fuckhead asshole.
 
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FatboyTim

Member
I use Steam reviews all the time. I find them very useful:
  • If a game has positive Overall and Recent reviews, it is probably worth my time if it interests me.
  • If a game has negative Overall and Recent reviews, it is probably not worth my time even if I think it might interest me at first glance.
  • If a game has Overall negative reviews but Recent positive ones, it probably means the developer has gone out of their way to turn a previously disappointing game around (No Man's Sky for example.) Perhaps I might buy it now, after all?
  • If a game has Overall positive reviews but Recent negative ones, it probably means that recent developments to the game are a let down or the developer has done something stupid (like, I don't know, signing an exclusivity deal with an unpopular rival distributor and then doubled down by criticising his own customers. Maybe.) I'll probably steer clear of this one. Caveat emptor!
Nothing broken about that.
 
I am not even sorry to say that if you agree with Randy the douchebag about not having reviews for games you are either trolling, getting paid by the industry to astroturf or are just ignorant as hell. Gamers have no say in anything when it comes to how games are made or produced and leaving reviews are practically our only way to fight back against shitty fuckheads like Randy the douchebag. Randy, fuck you if you are reading this, i will never give you my hard earned money for your shitty games with the way you shit on gamers, you know the people who lines your pockets so you can live well, fuckhead asshole.

Fight back, lmao.
 

MMaRsu

Banned
I agree with Randy and have had this opinion for a long time. Steam reviews are bullshit and totally unnecessary.

How are they unnecessary?

As a consumer I like to inform myself about the state of a product and generally (ignoring troll reviews, which is easy) reviews have given me a lot of usefull information.
 
Through Steam reviews? I think you have a lot of better resources available to you like... oh IDK, GAF.

Now, we just need someone to defend the toxicity, a Brit kid to call me a cunt and someone to look up my Steam profile and it'll be a real party. :messenger_beaming:
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
honestly, at this point i would refuse to buy the game on Steam.

buying it on Steam even after the exclusivity doesn't do anything. it only shows them it's fine that they can get away with pulling this exclusivity bullshit and still make more money on top of it.

if you really want to make a statement then don't buy the game at all. every single Epic Games exclusive title that i was interested in i am no longer buying it even if it's available elsewhere at another point. so yeah Fuck Metro, Fuck Outer Worlds, Fuck Borderlands.
 

BlackTron

Member
So in this world of curated game stores, who decides which games are good enough to present? The companies?

Every gamer will always have different tastes in gaming, trying to decide what's best for them is a fool's errand.

Any storefront without a review system, ie Nintendo, I just look on Metacritic and/or check out impressions on other platforms. The community at large will always come out with its own solution.

There is of course a problem with people abusing their ability to review games en masse, you see both 0's and 10's for games that aren't even out yet, but the fact that free speech can be abused doesn't mean the solution is to take it away altogether. Can it be unfair? Yep. Too bad, deal with it.

While we're at it let's ban cars to protect pedestrians from having to look when they cross the street.
 

MMaRsu

Banned
honestly, at this point i would refuse to buy the game on Steam.

buying it on Steam even after the exclusivity doesn't do anything. it only shows them it's fine that they can get away with pulling this exclusivity bullshit and still make more money on top of it.

if you really want to make a statement then don't buy the game at all. every single Epic Games exclusive title that i was interested in i am no longer buying it even if it's available elsewhere at another point. so yeah Fuck Metro, Fuck Outer Worlds, Fuck Borderlands.


truth
 

Hendrick's

If only my penis was as big as my GamerScore!
His Twitter tantrum the past few days has been embarrassing. This guy is such a piece of garbage.
 

Ichabod

Banned
I think Gaben should call Randy's bluff. Stop selling all of Gearbox's games on Steam.

Now that would be hilarious.

On a side note, asking for steam reviews to be done away with is just absurd. An elementary level of reading comprehension and common sense should be more than enough for a person to be able to differentiate between reviews of substance versus someone who's venting or trolling.
 
I really dislike Randy. He's quite the bitch. Fans voice displeasure through reviews when they aren't listened to. Listen to the fans numb nuts.
 

MMaRsu

Banned
gabe isn't a little baby bitch so i doubt he'd do this

he'll win by doing what he's always done, putting the mother fucking work in

I dont think calling the shots and telling randy hey you dont want to be on our store, goodluck we dont need or want you either has anything to do with being a little baby bitch and more about standing up for your storefront.
 

Lanrutcon

Member
Guys.

If you think this is keeping Gabe from sleeping peacefully on his pile of gold every night, you are sadly mistaken.
 

MMaRsu

Banned
Through Steam reviews? I think you have a lot of better resources available to you like... oh IDK, GAF.

Now, we just need someone to defend the toxicity, a Brit kid to call me a cunt and someone to look up my Steam profile and it'll be a real party. :messenger_beaming:

Yes ofcourse GAF the beacon of informing yourself if a game is good..

You are a daft fucker aint ya?
 

Kadayi

Banned
I agree with Randy and have had this opinion for a long time. Steam reviews are bullshit and totally unnecessary.

I think we've determined before that you're not exactly the most invested of Steam users, so the value of you input is pretty suspect when all is said and done.
 

Kadayi

Banned
On a side note, asking for steam reviews to be done away with is just absurd. An elementary level of reading comprehension and common sense should be more than enough for a person to be able to differentiate between reviews of substance versus someone who's venting or trolling.

Most of the advocates for removing Steam reviews in this thread struggle to even form sentences coherently, and for some the idea of paragraphs is pure 'There be Dragons' territory. These are the ankle biters of the forum. Reasoned discussion and debate is simply beyond them. The idea of a modicum of effort and investment when using software is asking too much of their limited faculties. Feel pity for them.
 
I think we've determined before that you're not exactly the most invested of Steam users, so the value of you input is pretty suspect when all is said and done.

I'm a gamer. That's what matters.

An opinion isn't worth more because someone likes to collect digital licenses and trading cards on Steam.
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
So, all of these pissed off messages is because of the BL3 exclusivity to the icon slightly to the right on your desktop? My god, it is silly, steam fanboys are amusing to watch.

On topic I think he has a point, it should not be the customer's job to tell other customers that the stuff on the store's shelves is literal shit.

 
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Ummm, if you want to bring up the ghost of A:CM in relation to arguments for/against curation, then shouldn't you be pissed off at SEGA, because they were the ones that published the game?

The analogy being of course that as publisher SEGA were the ones who decided that the game was good enough to sell, regardless of the state it was in, how are they different from Steam's "anything goes" model.
SEGA also published Alien Isolation. SEGA are not to blame I’m sure they had money invested in CM and just the Alien license. CM was in development hell for so long I don’t blame them for trying to re coup their loss on that shit stain.
 
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M0G

Member
Yeah I use Steam reviews but I generally don't base a purchase decision on them. If I want an opinion on an aspect like the controls, graphics or story I'll take a quick look to get an idea. Hell sometimes I look to see if people are bitching about something particular because it means I might actually like it. They don't need removing because they're better there than not there. If you don't like them it's so fucking easy to not look at them. This bell end would be opposed to them just as I'm opposed to giving his chicken shit outfit any of my money. Never fucking forget.
 

DonF

Member
Its either curation or review system. Review bombing its childish and lame, specially here, where the intent is just damage a good game. Valve/Steam should lock reviews when there is too much uncalled for traffic. Like wikipedia that locks articles.

I mean, if the game is X years old and gets tons of reviews, its suspicious. I know that steam has a review history graph, but thats not enough when google search shows you the current score.
 
e7a.jpg
 

RedVIper

Banned
Its either curation or review system. Review bombing its childish and lame, specially here, where the intent is just damage a good game. Valve/Steam should lock reviews when there is too much uncalled for traffic. Like wikipedia that locks articles.

I mean, if the game is X years old and gets tons of reviews, its suspicious. I know that steam has a review history graph, but thats not enough when google search shows you the current score.

Positive review bombing happens aswell and nobody cares, why is one ok and the other not?

If it's an old game it's sales aren't going to be majorly impacted anyway.
 

DonF

Member
Positive review bombing happens aswell and nobody cares, why is one ok and the other not?
I never said that. I fact, re read what I said. I just said "review" never positive or negative.
"lock reviews when there is too much uncalled for traffic" this could be positive or negative.

If it's an old game it's sales aren't going to be majorly impacted anyway.

In this case it might. The game got a huge 4K patch, so people might be inclined to buy it or not depending on reviews.

As a matter of fact, all 3 borderlands games are as of today in the top 100 games in player count.
 
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