MikeBreezy92 said:
Where? Because most of the time it's just a mob of complaints about things that don't hold up to scrutiny or some weird culture war bs.
Helldivers 2, which had been released in February 2024 and generally had high user reviews, was review bombed on Steam after Sony opted to require all players on Steam to link to a PlayStation Network account by the end of May 2024; Sony stated that this was necessary to assure the "safety and security" of the game's community and implement banning of grieving players, and that they had not implemented this at release due to technical issues.[96] Further, access to the PlayStation Network was not available to many regions where Steam is supported. While the developer Arrowhead Game Studios stated that players in these countries should not be affected by this requirement,[97] Sony began to delist the game from these regions just prior to the mandatory date for account linking.[98] As a result, over 200k negative reviews were left for the game within 48 hours of Sony's announcement, a combination of the unavailability of a solution for those affected regions, and concerns related to the security of the PlayStation Network.[99][100] Within a few days, Sony announced that from the negative feedback that they would currently not be going forward with the account linking plans, and work with Arrowhead to find alternate solutions for player protection.[101] Following this decision, a community-driven effort was made to reverse the review bombing by having users remove their negative reviews.[102]
In January 2024, the PC version of Resident Evil Revelations, originally released in 2013, was review bombed on Steam following a new update from Capcom that added a new DRM package called Enigma Protector to the game, and the discovery that it had already been added to multiple other Capcom games in the months prior, with the company seemingly planning to eventually add it to their entire back catalog as part of a new hardline stance against video game modding.[92] In addition to serving as standard DRM, Enigma also prevents the use of mods and results in reduced performance for games that have it. In response to the review bombing, Capcom removed Enigma from Resident Evil Revelations and their other games that had it, but stated that this was only temporary and the software would be added again once the performance issues were resolved.[93]
In October 2023, Stormworks: Build and Rescue was review bombed after adding the Space DLC, The expansion came a rework of the video game's physics, which inadvertently broke a significant portion of the game's user-based workshop content and sparked major outrage amongst its player base on its related social media sites. There were issues such as steam-based and other related builds not working correctly, aerial vehicles not flying due to lack of power from engines or from lack of aerodynamic lift, and many user created boats being unable to float at all. These issues were fixed days later with a series of bugfixes.[89]
War Thunder was review bombed in May 2023 in response to recent controversial economic changes within the game.[76] The game developers quickly reverted the economic change, announced a revision of the economy for mid-summer 2023[76] and issued an apology.[77]
VRChat was review bombed on Steam in July 2022 following an update that implemented Easy Anti-Cheat to counter "malicious" mods from players. Despite modding of the game being technically disallowed, players criticized the decision as mods have been used to improve the game's accessibility, user safety, and performance.[72][73] (This decision was not rolled back, but the developers did pen a blog post in response that gave explicit detail meant to ameliorate concerns that people had expressed up to that point)
Gran Turismo 7 was review bombed on Metacritic in March 2022, following updates made to the game; it received the lowest Metacritic user-score for a game published by Sony.[61][62] Users expressed criticism towards its focus on microtransactions, including the real-world cost of certain items,[63][64][65] and grinding. Further negative reactions targeted reductions to the amount of in-game rewards,[66][67] as well as an outage that lasted 30 hours which barred the use of most of the game's modes.[68][69] The same month, developer Polyphony announced they would implement future updates to make progression fairer, and compensated players with free in-game currency.[70][71]
Tabletop Simulator was review bombed in January 2022 after it was discovered that the automatic moderation of the game's global chat, aimed to prevent hom*ophobic and transphobic insults, also triggered on positive statements related to LGBT, specifically blocking a user that admitted their sexuality. The game's developers Berserk Games disabled the global chat and said they would assess the moderation system before bringing the chat back.[60]
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, a remastered compilation of three games from the Grand Theft Auto series, was review bombed on Metacritic, due to players being displeased with numerous graphical and technical issues with the game. In addition, the personal computer version had been pulled from sale a day after its November 11, 2021, launch and made unplayable due to the removal from the Rockstar game launcher, resulting in some players demanding refunds. Rockstar stated that the game was pulled to "remove files unintentionally included" in the distribution,[55][56] and restored it for sale by November 14, 2021, stating "We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and are working to improve and update overall performance as we move forward."[57]
it's kinda weird how these recent and hard-to-find examples of non-culture-war review bombing incidents that I just pulled from Wikipedia all resulted in the exact positive action desired on the part of the people leaving reviews, considering that there are clearly better avenues for criticism that are more communicative and will definitely result in change, like you said
