Review Bombing Impacted “Highguard,” “Starsand”
Even more so than films, audience review scores for video games seem decidedly open to manipulation on even some of the most secure storefronts. Recently, two games have found themselves the subject of apparent review bombing from users – albeit in very different directions.
The first is “Highguard,” Wildlight Entertainment’s title, which closed out December’s Game Awards with a poorly received trailer. It was released as a free-to-play title for PC and consoles on January 26th and launched with nearly 100,000 concurrent players on Steam – seemingly a successful debut.
But mixed reviews and issues with the title saw it lose up to 95% of that player base rapidly. In less than a month since it came out, the numbers have dropped enough that the title hasn’t passed 5,000 concurrent Steam players this week.
It would seem a fairly straightforward rejection of the game based on its quality. But tech artist and rigger Josh Sobel, who was laid off from the developer, took to X this week (via IGN) to criticise how content creators smeared the game, which led to attacks against the game and him personally. It all seemingly began with that Game Awards trailer launch:
“The trailer came out, and it was all downhill from there… We were turned into a joke from minute one, largely due to false assumptions about a million-dollar ad placement, which even prominent journalists soon began to state as fact. Within minutes, it was decided: this game was dead on arrival, and creators now had free ragebait content for a month.
Every one of our videos on social media got downvoted to hell… At launch, we received over 14k review bombs from users with less than an hour of playtime. Many didn’t even finish the required tutorial.
In discussions online… it is often pointed out by gamers that devs like to blame gamers for their failures, and that that’s silly, as if gamers have no power. But they do. A lot of it.
I’m not saying our failure is purely the fault of gamer culture and that the game would have thrived without the negative discourse, but it absolutely played a role. All products are at the whims of the consumers, and the consumers put absurd amounts of effort into slandering Highguard. And it worked.”
The artist in question now appears to have deleted his account.
More unusual is what is happening over at Chinese developer Seed Sparkle Lab’s new game, “Starsand Island”. The anime-inspired life sim went on early access on Steam last week and is also available on Xbox Game Pass.
Now, the developer has posted an update on the game’s Steam page, concerned about the flood of ‘overly positive’ reviews the game is getting. They realised many of these comments were posted after very short playtime and were released at nearly the same time, suggesting bot or AI manipulation.
Leaving a review requires purchasing the game, and they discovered some of these accounts refunded the game immediately after posting their reviews. They worry this is “some kind of overpraise as an attack” and that it feels as if “someone may be doing this intentionally”.
They say making an indie game is “not easy” and want to focus on building a good product, asking the positive review bomber to “please stop”.