I've said this before in previous outrage/scandals threads; Changing reviews in large numbers is an incredible interesting way for people to voice their opinion. Steam reviews matter in ways that are more significant than we had 5-10 years ago, when usually what would make news was if 4chan had flooded metacritic Dragon Age 2 reviews.





I don't think you see this sort of mobility in riling up so many community users so fast in other entertainment industries. You don't see this pattern on tv.com, imdb, metacritic, rottoentomatos. This is a uniquely Steam thing, and it's really weird to absorb.



It also seems to be effective some of the time. The Skyrim paid-mod debacle is one, and we will have to see if the GTA5 controversy will have any effect.



I'd like to see some hard data on and if there are correlation between publishers and developers sales hurting from bad user reviews from political outlet.



Hitman and Evolve are games that come to mind where many users adviced everyone to stay the fuck away. The former redeemed itself, while the latter was just too far gone, even when they tried to re-release it.



But sometimes I also get the impression that bad user reviews don't effect publisher behavior. SEGAs DLC strategy for the Total War games strike me as an obvious example. No matter how many negative reviews many of the total war DLCs have, it seems like they won't change their behavior.



And you have to wonder, if user review political outrage like this is always a nice thing, when Paradox didn't do this out of monetary greed.

It doesn't seem unfair to say that the steam community don't jump the gun too quickly some of the time.



On the other hand, I do find it empowering that there is this sort of mobility. We're now seeing thousands of reviews being updated less than 24 hours after the fact. It has to mean that a significant amount of users are really engaging with the community, regular updates and policies for games they play.

It gives more ethos to the idea that once the game is released, gamers have a say in how the game is updated, or they will try to fuck shit up, like with the pre-release of Xbox One or games like Evolved, Archeage and others with bad business practices.



This also proves useful and worthwhile when you have DOA games like FFXIV and ESO that come back from the dead, and the community gives them a second chance and update negative reviews into positive.

So we know it's a two way street that also turns sour reviews into positive ones.