How does steam combat reviewbombing ?

[Deathraven13]

Or do they ?

I'd like to know if for exemple people buy a game, play less than 2 hours, leave a negative review and refund the game then what happen in the end:

- Do the team that sell the game get the money or they must pay for the refund ?

- Does steam (or the maker/s of the game) remove reviewbombers that have less than 2 hours of gameplay ?

[Zarineth]

Having less than 2 hours of play is not making someone review bomber. You can drop the game at any point if you don't like it and leave a negative review. That being said, there is a system in place to fight actual review bombs. It will set period of suspicious activity as off-topic and hide it from default search. Those reviews can still be accessed if someone turns off the filter.

[Alcoholic]

If something is getting review bombed it is most likely being done so for a good reason, like devs doing something fans don't want them to do

[RasaNova]

Originally posted by Deathraven13:

Or do they ?

I'd like to know if for exemple people buy a game, play less than 2 hours, leave a negative review and refund the game then what happen in the end:

- Do the team that sell the game get the money or they must pay for the refund ?

- Does steam (or the maker/s of the game) remove reviewbombers that have less than 2 hours of gameplay ?

Steam does not combat review bombing. What they do instead is, if what they consider off-topic reviews passes a certain threshold, they filter those and keep them from displaying on your store page unless you disable that feature.

If you refund a game within the given window, nobody is paying for it, the payment simply does not go through to the publisher. It's as if the sale never happened in the first place, except I believe there IS a fee that Valve must pay to process the refund with whatever financial institution is involved. And because of that, if they think you're refunding too often or abusing the system they will respond, starting with a warning and ending with revoking your refund ability.

[Deathraven13]

Originally posted by Zorlagger:

If something is getting review bombed it is most likely being done so for a good reason, like devs doing something fans don't want them to do

That's incorrect, some games in the past like the Metro series have been reviewbombed because IIRC the next game was an EGS exclusive, yet the games of the series are good so reviewbombing them served no purpose if the games are good.

Reviewbombing is always a negative thing because if a game really sucked and got a mostly/very negative review then it's because it deserved it, reviewbombing mean that it doesn't deserve it and it happen because it's something outside of the game that happened.

Another exemple would be Hogwarts Legacy, people tried to boycott it and reviewbomb it (massive fail) because it's in the universe of JKR and she earn money, a minority of people don't like her thus trying to reviewbomb a good game made by people who put efforts in making a good game, it's not the best game ever for sure but at least it's playable and doesn't sell DLCs for 60$ or battlepasses and such.

Originally posted by Zarineth:

Having less than 2 hours of play is not making someone review bomber. You can drop the game at any point if you don't like it and leave a negative review. That being said, there is a system in place to fight actual review bombs. It will set period of suspicious activity as off-topic and hide it from default search. Those reviews can still be accessed if someone turns off the filter.

Yes some of them are valid but here I'm talking when it comes to people who reviewbomb a game not just people who leave a negative review because the game doesn't launch, like South park FBW who don't run on Window7 because you need to launch the game via something that don't run on windows 7, so if someone reviewbomb a game (and will ask for a refund obviously thus have less than 2 hours of gameplay) who will pay for the refund: Steam or devs ?

[Deathraven13]

Originally posted by RasaNova:

Steam does not combat review bombing. What they do instead is, if what they consider off-topic reviews passes a certain threshold, they filter those and keep them from displaying on your store page unless you disable that feature.

If you refund a game within the given window, nobody is paying for it, the payment simply does not go through to the publisher. It's as if the sale never happened in the first place, except I believe there IS a fee that Valve must pay to process the refund with whatever financial institution is involved. And because of that, if they think you're refunding too often or abusing the system they will respond, starting with a warning and ending with revoking your refund ability.

I see, thank you very much for the answer.

That's pretty bad since people could make multiple accounts, pay and refund games after reviewbombing and then gift themself a game via the refunded money or just use the refunded money until the account is blocked.

That's pretty bad if someone used that mathod against small indie devs, like imagine a game with only 40 reviews and someone is really mad at them and make/got 20 accounts to reviewbomb the game....... that's not great and as I'm writting this I have thinked about 2 ways to try and prevent this a bit but I don't know how it really work so maybe steam already have somethings like this that they can't say.