***Sometimes it doesn't take much and even otherwise very devoted players take out their rage against the developers of their favorite games. In the past they have been heavily using Steam reviews for so called "review bombing". Steam now introduced a change to their review system that should prevent users from being able to do this.***

![1.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmbzv8LRVvpR2UUb79Q6gzGjpmtuBaQjV5t4o48WWbVp4p/1.jpg)

### Review Bombing

Some of you may know of the recent incident where the Steam page of the game DOTA 2 was suddenly getting hundreds of negative reviews from angry players. But the reason wasn't the fact that the game was bad. Somebody just came up with the idea that the success of DOTA 2 is the reasons why Valve is yet to come out with Half-Life 3 and many other gamers latched on to that idea.

This sort of behavior doesn't really show potential players whether the game is good or bad and for such an big title as DOTA is, the few hundred negative reviews are essentially completely unimpactful. It more reflects on the ability of the developer / publisher to communicate with the public or whether they are potentially doing something wrong.

The last victim of this tactic has been Campo Santa - developers of the surprise indie hit of 2016 Firewatch. As Sean Vanaman (a developer in Campo Santa) reacted to the recent incident of PewDiePie that said the word "Nigger" while streaming by having all videos that had any footage of Firewatch DMCAed and thus removed from Youtube.
He also tweeted out the following tweet:

![retweet.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmdMDKuNKC72FmDzB7PytNMiSaYjbAnUmuzrKpxbRvXwSy/retweet.png)

**Here I want to point out that I don't agree with Vanaman's actions, because I believe that Free Speech is a right and thus everybody should be able to say anything they want.**
This made many fans of PewDiePie and many proponents of Free Speech go and post a negative review of Firewatch. This made the total score of Firewatch drop significantly as it is a much smaller game the DOTA 2 is.


### Steam's solution

Steam as the most popular on-line game distribution platform decided to face this potential issue and created an interesting solution. They surely could have just banned people from reviewing Firewatch until nobody cares anymore, but that would set a dangerous precedent for situations where review bombing might actually serve the consumer. For example: Pinball FX 2 a very good pinball game changed the EULA at one point and if you wanted to play that game you had to agree to allow for your data to be used by the company without any restriction. 

So now we have a graph with a time-line clearly showing what kinds of reviews have been given out at a point in time. This allows consumers to see that something might have changed in the game and make them seek out more information before buying. And it's them totally up to them to decide whether they want to buy the game or not.


I gotta personally say, I'm quite impressed with Steam quick solution. It allows game that are being unfairly review bombed because of some non-issue to still get sales from the vast majority of consumers and at the same time it allows consumers to make an impact with their reviews if the developers change something in the game in a very consumer unfriendly way.
And at the same time it doesn't take away the consumer's agency, it actually enhances it because it gives a better view of how the game is being review over time. It just sad that we had to wait for this controversy to happen before we got this feature.