Steam reviews being posted on their discord

[StormCircuit]

In case people are not aware, the devs post reviews on their discord with a link directly to the review. People then basically rally around negative reviews (which, as the dev specified below is wedged between the majority positive reviews)* and comment on the review basically mocking the user. I feel like this raises ethical concerns, some of them really seem to be rude and a bit outspoken. I even got a comment on an old review before I deleted it.

Does anyone else feel like this is unethical?

[ALLONIT]

to be honest yea i agree, they shouldnt do that but its also the communitys fault for being so childish

[JeanDeaux]

Freedom of speech, what a double edged sword.

[God, owner of the Universe]

My experience is that the way this is portrayed here is unrealistic. There are various flavors of comments, most of which are measured and often even constructive, trying to motivate the reviewer to give it another try in Easy or Creative mode and to first do this and that because blablabla. That's good stuff. Of course, there's also less savory reactions, but those are rare enough.

I see nothing unethical here. It's no different from a retweet, or any kind of link as we have known them for over 30 years now. The reviewer can delete comments, can disable commenting altogether, or can plain simply ignore them.

What's MOST IMPORTANT is that the customers, for whom these reviews - and the comments on them - actually exist, benefit. And they do.

So, you're free to have this opinion of yours, but I find it mildly childish.

[Shurenai]

My main question would be, Are they posting ALL reviews and players are just choosing to talk about the negative ones? Or are they posting ONLY the negative ones? As in, Do the devs expressly encourage it, Or are the devs just posting the reviews on the discord for people to discuss? Two very different things.

'Cause the former isn't a good look, while the latter is just people expressing their freedom of speech- They could easily do the same thing even without the direct link or the review ever being put in discord, and there are groups that do exactly that. And it's a bit of an echo chamber- If you don't like the game you probably aren't in the discord, So, The group as a whole, all in favor of Stationeers awesomeness, Is liable to just discuss the things in negative reviews that fly in the face of their own experience, as opposed to talking about the positive ones much at all.

All in all I don't think it's much of an ethical issue unless the devs are sitting there posting nothing but negative reviews and going in some paraphrased manner "hehe, go bully em!"

Edit: And I thought about it after I hit send, but the commenter above slipped in as I was typing; You're presenting a very onesided view that could be INCREDIBLY biased/painted in a negative light when the actuality may not necessarily be. In this case, being vague hurts your case; You should be citing examples(even then you could be cherry picking, but at least you would've tried.)

[Rocket]

A discord bot posts every review to a channel in the discord.

This is so people coming into the discord and asking "I am thinking of buying the game, what do you think?" can instead see a live thread that is all the latest reviews of the game.

We do this for all our games, so that customers can easily see what other customers think. This also provides a way for us to aggregate reviews from other potential stores in one place, which is not possible on steam.

[StormCircuit]

Originally posted by Rocket:

A discord bot posts every review to a channel in the discord.

This is so people coming into the discord and asking "I am thinking of buying the game, what do you think?" can instead see a live thread that is all the latest reviews of the game.

We do this for all our games, so that customers can easily see what other customers think. This also provides a way for us to aggregate reviews from other potential stores in one place, which is not possible on steam.

I suppose it's a matter of perspective, but I have seen some very childish acting people. If I had any feedback, it would be to remove the link and username from the review.

It's a great game but people seem to see reviews and take it too far.

[StormCircuit]

Originally posted by God, owner of the Universe:

My experience is that the way this is portrayed here is unrealistic. There are various flavors of comments, most of which are measured and often even constructive, trying to motivate the reviewer to give it another try in Easy or Creative mode and to first do this and that because blablabla. That's good stuff. Of course, there's also less savory reactions, but those are rare enough.

I see nothing unethical here. It's no different from a retweet, or any kind of link as we have known them for over 30 years now. The reviewer can delete comments, can disable commenting altogether, or can plain simply ignore them.

What's MOST IMPORTANT is that the customers, for whom these reviews - and the comments on them - actually exist, benefit. And they do.

So, you're free to have this opinion of yours, but I find it mildly childish.

That's a bit rude. I think it's worth talking about. I respect their intent in trying to inform customers, I just think that enabling toxic people is unethical. In my comment above I replied to the dev that if there was no way to track the reviews back to the source it wouldn't be as big an issue in my opinion.

[StormCircuit]

I do think it's a matter of perspective. Toxic, dedicated, people can find a review by hunting through the storefront. It's a matter of how easy it is I feel.

[JeanDeaux]

And for every feeling you have about something, someone else with have the opposite, or the same, or be indifferent. You can't please everybody and nobody is certainly specifically trying to please or displease you.

[Rocket]

Just to note: from a legal perspective calling someone unethical is could be considered a statement of fact, compared to something like calling someone lazy, which would be considered an opinion

If you cannot prove that a statement of fact are true, you could have defamation exposure.

I would like to say, categorically - that referring to our company or our staff as unethical is totally inappropriate if you can't back that up.

I've given this thread a bit of leeway, to give you the benefit of the doubt. But regardless of you how you "feel" - making a statement of fact about conduct with no proof beyond you "feel" that way, is not acceptable in our forum. This is because that doesn't represent a genuine communication.

Think of the forums here as "front of house" in a restaurant. if you walked into a restaurant and shouted that you think the place is unethical, you would be asked to leave.

So if you want to continue to state that, you'll either need to back that up beyond what you feel - or take those kinds of statements to other locations. If you are unable to do that, the outcome may be forced.

[Your weakness is your own]

He's allowed to have his opinions, especially after being subject to the results, but since you're confused about the reasoning, I'll provide the rationale.

Discord will, a reasonable person can presume, be populated with people who are 1. more likely to be paying customers than people here, and 2. be subject to the same or higher level of hostility towards negative opinions than what has been shown here on the public forums, since it is a more private venue, further from the point of sale, and, one would expect, less frequented by non-customers, presenting less risk of monetary loss from more heavy-handed moderation. The result of that is the population will be curated towards positive viewpoints by means of moderation, social pressure, or perhaps even childish legal threats. We can use what's going on here to get an idea of what that probably looks like.

Therefore, any attention to steam reviews from discord will be more positively biased than from the natural steam population. Steam reviews are already publicly available, so publishing a feed to a biased population doesn't make new information available, but does increase the chance that a member of the group will see something they're motivated to interact with. We all know which way those motivations lean when it comes to random internet comments. That can lead to a chilling effect if people notice that negative opinions are more likely to result in negative attention. Given how important reviews are to a store page, there's a monetary incentive to quiet negative opinions.

There you go. There's your reasons someone would have the opinion that re-publishing reviews to a more privately-run venue would feel like scummy, gross, morally bankrupt behavior. You don't have to worry about such opinions being unfounded any more.

But we all know how this ends, don't we? Tyrants loathe people they can't conveniently bully. There's no faster path to rage than to respond with their demands with "NO."

What will the claimed damages, be, I wonder? Post the lawsuit when you get it, OP.

[StormCircuit]

This is escalating beyond a discussion, I was curious as to what others thought. I see the analogy to walking into a restaurant, personally the review posting just made me uncomfortable. I wish the devs best of luck with their game, which I personally enjoy, and will exit the discussion myself. And no, I didn't intend for this to be some legal battle nor do I ever intend for it to be.

[SpacesuitSPF9000]

100% no issue here streaming reviews to discord for visibility. If anything, it's helpful. I also disagree with the op about this practice being unethical, or thinking that a developer can outright control how discord users react to certain reviews.

That being said, someone making a statement of perceived ethicality is not defamation or a "statement of fact". The op explicitly said "Does anyone else feel like this is unethical?" FEEL. That's clearly them stating their opinion. I do however feel that it is unethical and a bit weird to implicitly threaten op with a lawsuit because you don't like their opinion.

Stationeers is pretty great though.

[Puma]

I see absolutely nothing unethical about 1) collecting links to publicly available reviews and 2) publishing said links to any audience. On the grounds of those reviews already being publicly available.

However I do see a massive ethical issue with implied legal threats and scare tactics to silence opinions that you personally find unappealing.
I don't know anything about the law in NZ, but I find it highly implausible that anything OP said could be legally actionable.

Originally posted by Rocket:

Think of the forums here as "front of house" in a restaurant. if you walked into a restaurant and shouted that you think the place is unethical, you would be asked to leave.

Let's not think of these forums like that. The front of house at a restaurant exists for the purpose of dining, For our analogy the game itself would be that dining space, and playing the game would be the equivalent eating at said dining space. The physical world analog for the forums here would be a conference hall, located 1km away from the restaurant, at a town hall building owned by Valve. And the purpose of that conference hall is to have discussions about the restaurant, the food they serve, the service they give, ingredients they use, doneness of their steaks, amount of salt in their fries, and any ethical questions anyone might want to raise about the operation of said restaurant.

Nobody gets to these forums by accident. You don't need to walk through the forums to get to the game. The operation and function of the game isn't going to be effected by discussions happening on the forum. There are valid reasons why you would want to physically prevent loud and passionate discussions from taking place at front of house at a restaurant. However same does not hold true for a space especially dedicated for purpose of having discussions.

[God, owner of the Universe]

While I also find the idea and thus insinuation of potential legal consequences for such a harmless statement, which was directed at company decisions and not at individuals, very extreme - and hostile to one of the highest values we should have, namely free speech - I have heard

MANY TIMES

on Discord from Rocket himself that in New Zealand, he is legally being held to (in my opinion unreasonably) high standards when it comes to protecting his employees from any and all harm

caused by direct or, via company-adjacent channels like their official Discord or even the Steam forums (See https://steamcommunity.com/app/544550/discussions/0/6026443283693921827/ ), indirect communication that could affect them. That's what I suppose is also going on here: He may not be waving the lawyer hammer himself, but due to the position he's in, that may be what he's confronted with and thus has to also represent.