It’s like the Helldivers 2 incident, but for a single-player game, there’s no excuse.
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God of War Ragnarok PC port
suffersearns review bombing on Steam due to PlayStation Network account requirementFixed it for them
It’s not review bombing when there’s a legitimate problem!
Is it not? What is “review bombing”? I thought it was just when a bunch of negative reviews were submitted in a short period of time.
How much of a problem is it really though?
I don’t like it but eh.
Its a huge problem, for a variety of reasons.
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It means Sony won’t sell the game in countries where they don’t allow PSN accounts.
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Their servers suck ass. I’m literally unable to play this game, even if I wanted to, because I get one generic server error after another when trying to make an account. This is the same reason it was originally removed from Helldivers 2.
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Sony has a horrific track record of data breaches.
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They’re collecting and selling data about you for profit.
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Its a completely arbitrary and anti-consumer requirement that has zero benefits to you as the consumer.
- It means Sony won’t sell the game in countries where they don’t allow PSN accounts.
That isn’t a problem for all the users that review the game though.
- Their servers suck ass. I’m literally unable to play this game, even if I wanted to, because I get one generic server error after another when trying to make an account. This is the same reason it was originally removed from Helldivers 2.
I don’t know about that since I have never connected my PSN account. The only game I own which supports it is Ghost of Tsushima and I haven’t connected my account to that game.
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Sony has a horrific track record of data breaches.
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They’re collecting and selling data about you for profit.
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Its a completely arbitrary and anti-consumer requirement that has zero benefits to you as the consumer.
Fair enough but I don’t think it’s actively anti consumer, I place that bar higher than this.
Sony has a horrific track record of data breaches.
They’re collecting and selling data about you for profit.
I place that bar higher than this.
For my own personal amusement, what else would they have to do to meet the level your personal anti-consumer bar is set at?
I was referring to their last point.
About it being completely arbitrary and anti-consumer? It 100% is.
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Publishers are trying to exclude “review bombing” because they think it’s just social manipulation, while just casually ignoring that there are actual problems with the game. Review bombing used to be something else, but now be wary of it because it’s usually them just trying to discredit actual concerns.
I sympathize with fellow PC gamers for this needles requirement (even though PSN account is my main account). I’m just surprised there’s no similar backlash for other devs requiring respective account creation (EA, BioWare, Blizzard etc. etc.). Sony did not invent this practice.
. This is just gamer rage against a console maker. They’ve all got ea accounts, Ubisoft, blizzard , discord, twitch, YouTube dozens of accounts all over the place .
But when a console maker does it’s different.
There is. Newer EA games, anything with Epic Online Services (but especially with a login), etc. They get negative reviews fairly consistently.
Some older games get overlooked, but even then adding in a third party software (not even necessarily needing an account) often lowers a game to a mixed rating on Steam for recent reviews.
The account creation sucks, but it’s mostly in multiplayer games or for a multiplayer feature in a game, to enable things like cross-launcher play and such (not needed if they made it right, still an attempt at data collection). God of War is a singleplayer game that has no need for an account requirement, so it’s just there for data collection, singleplayer games shouldn’t even be connecting to the internet.
I feel like The Jedi Fallen Order had this requirement through EA?
According to Steam it does. I stay away from AAA bullshit myself anyway.
Well if it blocks playing on steam deck and Linux it’s not like other devs requiring account creation.
Edit: looks like this one works on steam deck actually so disregard. Looks like it requires an internet connection to play though which is wack.
Also weird, the game includes the unnecessary PlayStation overlay, which makes it unable to run on Linux. The devs were nice enough to specifically disable the overlay on Steam Deck, but all other Linux players have to set a special launch option to fake being a steam deck in order to get the game to run.
Don’t you need to have the game in order to review it? Or did that change?
People are buying it, unable to play because of PlayStation account requirement (the PlayStation servers are having issues and not letting people log in or create an account), and then leaving an angry review and refunding it.
For reviewing a game it is needed to buy it on Steam (my logical thinking would say, yes.).
If that is correct then I think a better way to express your disagreement with this game would be simply don’t buy it, or just pirate it (if it is possible).
Steam has a very generous 2 hours played policy where the system will basically refund you no questions asked so long as you have played less than 2 hours of the game (refunds beyond that are totally possible but usually require manual review before approval).
This means that you can buy the game, open it once, leave a negative review, and get it refunded. Which is more impactful on Sony’s bottom line than leaving a review on Metacritic or something because it directly affects the game’s rating on the largest platform for PC gaming, and is therefore more likely to see action taken to fix the issue. Sony doesn’t care if people make angry social media posts, but they will care if they can directly see it impacting their profit margins.
This is actually a fantastic idea. How long will it take Valve to threaten account bans for doing it?
People have been doing it for years as far as I know. It’s kinda where this whole “review bombing” thing comes from. It seems like Valve’s policy is to label these kinds of mass reviews as “off-topic activity” and remove them from affecting the normal rating for the game. If you see a game with an asterisk next to its score on Steam, hovering over the asterisk will tell you that some reviews have been removed from the score for this reason. They’re still publicly there, and you can go into the details of the score to see those periods highlighted, but they no longer affect the score that you see on the storefront.
For trying a game, trying it, disliking it and refunding it, a series of events that is completely normal and allowed by steam’s refund policy? Well it’s probably getting changed when gaben dies and someone else takes over, but I’m not sure we should be rooting for that…
There’s a transactional cost to processing the sale, hosting the giant download and then issuing the refund. If people organized and manipulated the system and this became a financial burden, then the policy would almost certainly change.