48 ms·
This was bound to happen eventually. Marketplace that makes money on people buying any stuff not just good stuff and selling sales to publishers needs stuff to
by Spivak 4y ago
This was bound to happen eventually. Marketplace that makes money on people buying any stuff not just good stuff and selling sales to publishers needs stuff to have good reviews regardless of its goodness to drive the sales it's justifying its cut of the revenue for.
It's a risky play because a platform where the reviews are high signal drives sales based on that alone. You can only nudge so much before expectations adjust and would-be buyers have to turn to 3rd party reviews which adds friction.
I imagine it's incredibly tempting to heavily moderate reviews instead of letting gamers do what they do and meme like it's a Reddit thread but that kind of thing is actually fairly high signal albeit low seriousness. Silly comments about having 1k hours in the game but not recommending actually does tell you something real about the game.
- globalreset 4y agoI doubt it makes a difference to Valve/Steam. If I have $20 to spend on games, and I don't buy a game because of bad review... then I'm going to buy something else. My guess would be that some automation somewhere went wrong and that's all about it.
- db48x 4y agoPublishers care though. Publisher reports it, moderator rubber-stamped it, automation punishes the review author and anyone who up-voted it. Seems like Valve should acknowledge their mistaken decision to punish up-voters.
- Hamcha 4y agoValve is probably one of the few companies that can allow itself to not cater to publishers. They have tried to cut Valve in multiple occasions but the community never accepted alternative stores like Origin or Uplay no matter how much it was shoved down their throat. Even the Epic store hate is still fresh in most of my friend circle.
- db48x 4y agoYea, they have room to put their foot down if publishers make Valve look bad. They do still have to at least pretend to be on the publisher’s side though.