Review bombing is a common factor on websites lately, and on Steam we’ve suddenly seen a lot of negative reviews.

Take-Two is afraid for their wallet. We can say this with such certainty because they believe that negative reviews are a serious business risk. The rise of social media has only exacerbated what we have seen for a long time on review aggregator sites or user review sites (e.g. GameFAQs). In the early 2010s, Valve (Steam), Sony (PlayStation Network), and Microsoft (Microsoft Store) also began allowing users to leave reviews for games.

In a 10-K document summarizing its activities for the past fiscal year, Take-Two laid out its thoughts. This was reported by Stephen Totilo, editor of Game File. According to the publisher, it is important to get and keep high scores on these sites because it is not only about getting a good score, but also about making the game more discoverable on store shelves. Discrediting campaigns can therefore have a financial impact on the publisher’s results by reducing the number of players, the revenue from them, or both. This could increase Take-Two’s marketing costs to compete with negative review campaigns.

It sounds a lot like Take-Two is bribing people to inflate the average rating, because how else would they spend on marketing? Are they flooding the Internet with ads? We find that hard to believe. At least the publisher has acknowledged that a lot of negative reviews can be the fault of the product if it is substandard. The publisher previously received massively bad reviews for the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch ports of Red Dead Redemption because they weren’t true remasters (but you’d expect that from them, because 30 FPS on a PlayStation 5 in a game released nearly a decade and a half ago looks pretty bad).

Their point is understandable, but also a bit hilarious.

Source: GameRant, GameFile