It does kind of have “We would have gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids!” energy to me.

There’s no way they thought the PSN thing would’ve been a well-received update.

Not our fault the entire tech industry keeps engineering new ways to give people trust issues.

These reviews will have a lasting effect on the game even though the drama bubble has now popped.

Steam has a specific thing that appears when you keep playing a lot on a game that you’ve negatively reviewed asking if you want to change it. I think a game is rarely impacted long-term by review bombing for a resolved issue, unless the reviewers actually dropped the game and went on with their lives.

This is why Steam reviews should be taken much more seriously. This was impossible to avoid due to the enormous amount of bad press and devs themselves jumping on the hate train, but I’m betting that a lot of review bombing attempts have been quietly offset by the company just paying people for fake reviews. It’s especially obvious when the game has relatively low reviews for months and months, then suddenly bad stuff happens and along with the justified dump of negative reviews, positive ones also skyrocket (99% of which composed of “good game”, random memes or ascii art).

Well yes, maybe going that far back it was kind of a shot in the dark, but the late ‘90 to early ‘10 period was a time where you had internet (or at least tv/magazines) to know which games were “popular”, most of those were actually well done, and you’d rarely have an AAA title launch as a bugridden mess.

Reviews are also a hit-or-miss because they’re highly subjective. The Steam review system sucks as well, being only positive/negative and with troll reviews always at the top.

The difference is back in the day the great games were the highly advertised “big ones” and the “stinkers” usually fell flat. Now you have a mountain of AAA stinkers and have to go scavenging for indie gems.