Am I reading too much into this or are they essentially saying “don’t make us put too much stuff in our games that you think is profitable but players will widely hate and retaliate against us for”?
I think they’re complaining about overreaching demands from investors, not the review bombing.
Sometimes you get review bombed for shitty business practices.
Sometimes you get review bombed because your game includes a black character.
I'm not sure it's fair to say that you don't have to worry about review bombing if you so the right thing.
Do you have evidence of the second? Because the vast majority of the time, it's because they didn't bother to QA their product before launch, and customers/reviewers are rightly mad about the quality.
I think your take is outdated. Review bombs for non-gameplay, non-performance practices that do not affect the end user are commonplace today, and since the HD2 review bomb, have quintoupled in frequency. Racism and misogyny driving review bombings is also extremely old news, did you forget the general chatter surrounding the last of us? Nobody talked about the gameplay in a meaningful way, just the characters. Hundreds of medieval era games have been review bombed for "historical inaccuracy" and people complained night city (cp2077) had too many black NPCs. Hell, even ff15 had people losing their minds over the race variety of randomly generated townspeople.
I don't need to provide evidence, you need to be aware of games discourse. These idiots are everywhere. It's also worth noting that in a lot of cases, it's beyond the capabilities of a developer to gauge how large a launch will be - and being impatient while they scale a service really isn't "giving a review", it's complaining that you can't play. Wayfinder is a solid recent example, they accepted help from Digital Extremes for their initial launch, then when those servers were far less powerful than they were led to believe, ditched their publisher and refocused the game from an MMO to a session-based co-op title (and it's going great).
Tl;Dr: you are asking for evidence that is LITERALLY EVERYWHERE people talk about games online, from steam reviews to forum discourse. These have been awful places to learn about games for eons, and you come across as a reactionary that doesn't actually play games when you give them undue credit
HD2 review bomb...
That was because of stupid account restrictions. Yes it's not "gameplay," but it's something in the game that players didn't like. The game worked fine w/o the PSN account, and then they made it mandatory. That's a change of policy, and they 100% deserve the negative reviews.
That said, it sold extremely well, so the negative reviews don't appear to have hurt the success of the game.
the last of us
The original was review-bombed because it was a crappy PC port.
TLOU2 is closer to what you're talking about, where people unhappy with the LGBT themes gave it a negative rating. But it was also a "hard-to-play" game due to being "emotionally raw" (dev's words in quotes from this article), so I don't think the "right-wing review-bombing" tells the whole story, I just think the game was not what fans of the original were expecting.
Regardless, TLOU series has sold extremely well, including TLOU2.
I don’t need to provide evidence
You absolutely do. I provided evidence for two of the games you mentioned (the first two), detailing how the "review bombing" wasn't nearly the issue people (you included) claimed it to be. If you only follow things posted to gaming-enthusiast communities, you'll get a very slanted view of how things actually work.
Yes, there are idiots everywhere, but the burden of proof is to show that those idiots actually meaningfully cause problems. Looking at sales figures and longer-term review stats, it seems they quickly get drowned out by the quiet majority.
You're ignoring sales changes in favor of appearing to be right, and you asked for any evidence and found it yourself. In fact, you seem more concerned about being right than being correct - so I'm going to ignore you completely!
No, I'm more concerned about providing evidence so others can make their own opinion. I may absolutely be missing something, and I'm here to learn what I'm missing.
I don't accept vague statements, I accept facts. I provided the ones I found, and they seem to show that these "review bombs" are overblown and didn't significantly impact the actual sales of the games in question. In other words, they're sensationalist clickbait to sell ads on game review sites.
I agree with you about negative reviews driven by racism and idiots in general but I don't think that they have enough numbers to be a "review bombing".
Normally the company/game does some weird shit and got review bombed and these idiots shows up and increase the number of negative reviews. I believe they are always the minority.
Well it hasn't come out yet, but have you seen how angry some people are about Assassin's Creed Shadows already?
The Last of Us 2 had a pretty infamous review bombing campaign against it based on...I'm not even really clear, to be honest. I know some people were angry that it had a trans woman in it, except that the character they were complaining about was not portrayed as trans.
Or in other media, check the reviews for Star Wars: The Acolyte. Personally I think it's quite a mid show. It's not actually very interesting. I'd rate it maybe 5 or 6/10. But because of the lead characters being an Asian man and a black woman, or maybe because a trans woman has a minor role in a couple of episodes, over 50% of the reviews on IMDB are 1 star, and it's scored 16% on Rotten Tomatoes' audience score.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Well yeah, I totally understand that. Ubisoft picked pretty much the only historical non-Japanese samurai for their main character. So yeah, I'm sure it feels like a slap in the face to fans of Japanese culture to not pick an actual Japanese character as their lead. I don't think the frustration here comes from racism, I think it's just frustration at design choices.
Whether that actually matters depends on how well the game turns out.
I personally probably won't play it because I think AC has become a stupid, pretty money grab. I like stories that end, and they've deliberately moved away from that to continue printing money. So maybe there's some of that baked into that frustration as well (i.e. if you're just going to do a cool historical game, at least make it feel representative to the region and time).
Last of Us 2
Yes, that was the drama at the time with a bunch of people in the first day or so of launch jumping on it. But the game sold really well and there were plenty of other critical reviews that were from actual players who didn't like how the story went, so it was far from the only negative press. I went into more detail here, complete with links if you feel inclined to give it a read.
Star Wars: The Acolyte
It's just a bad show. It's not because of the race of the lead characters, it's because the show is uninspired and boring. That's it. The show kinda sucks, and since it's a popular IP, it gets even harsher treatment due to higher expectations.
It's a dull show. It's not a 1/10 show. Not even close. That's the clear proof that this is about review bombing, not honest feedback.
As for AC: I haven't played it since Revelations, for the same reasons you provide. It went from being an awesome narrative building up to a big climax, to becoming a vehicle for annual releases, like a historical equivalent to FIFA or COD games.
That said...the game has two leads, one of which is Japanese. And she's the one that's actually more "assassin"-like of the two, with Yasuke being more of a direct fighter. Actual Japanese people, when interviewed on the street by one of the haters (in an obvious attempt to get evidence to use for their hate campaign) mostly said "yeah cool, I guess". If Japanese people being prompted by a hater don't even hate it, I fail to see why I should. Or why I should trust that the criticism is actually being made in good faith, rather than as a thin veil for "anti-woke" racism.
It’s a dull show. It’s not a 1/10 show
Sure, but surely you can see how people overreact when high expectations aren't met. These review numbers are from regular people, the same people who only give 1 or 5 stars on Amazon or whatever. When you see terrible reviews for something from a big name studio, it's because expectations weren't met, not because the content actually sucks.
If Japanese people being prompted by a hater don’t even hate it,
But you're not the audience, westerners are. And there are a lot of westerners who have very strong opinions about Japanese culture. That's the push-back you're seeing, vocal westerners want an immersive experience in Japanese culture, and I think people are thinking that pulling one of the few non-Japanese characters from Japanese history robs that experience.
But as you said, it's not out yet, so opinions here can certainly change significantly once it's actually out.
I think both are examples of legitimate issues fans have with how a franchise is handled. That may not be relevant to you (esp. if you're an outsider to the franchise), but that also doesn't make it "review bombing." I see "review bombing" as a concerted effort to tank a product due to issues unrelated to the product, such as a scandal involving the higher-ups at a dev studio or something.
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