Review Bombing

Submission 15,185

About

Review Bombing is the practice of leaving negative reviews on various websites en masse by groups attempting to harm the sales or popularity of various productions, most often targeting video games and films.

Origin

On September 8th, 2008, the tech news Ars Technica published an article titled "Gamers fight back against lackluster Spore gameplay," which referred to a wave of negative Amazon review for the game Spore as "review-bombing."

Spread

On September 23rd, 2011, the video game news site The Escapist^[8] reported that the review aggregator Metacritic was banning users who gave "unreasonable zero point scores." In 2012, the game Mass Effect 3 saw an influx of bad reviews due to the poor reception of the game's controversial ending.

On August 30th, 2017, the video game news site EuroGamer^[5] reported that Steam users were review bombing Sonic Mania due to the game's use of Denuvo digital rights management. On September 19th, Valve published a blog post^[7] explaining how they would be addressing review bombing on their Steam platform by displaying graphs of a video game's score over time (shown below).

On September 21st, The Know YouTube channel posted a video discussing Valve's respond to review bombing on Steam (shown below, left). On October 4th, YouTuber Rags uploaded a video discussing the ethics of review bombing (shown below, right).

On December 21st, Polygon published an article reporting that Star Wars: The Last Jedi was being review bombed, which was subsequently submitted to /r/GameGhazi^[6] in a post titled "The alt right is using bots to review bomb The Last Jedi."

Subnautica

On February 5th, Subnautica sound designer Simon Chylinski tweeted that he had been fired from the Subnautica team (shown below, left).^[2] The announcement came just two days after he received criticism over tweets posted in the past, which seemed to mock identity politics and social justice activism. The following day, Chylinski posted a tweet asking his followers to "plz stop targeting subnautica devs."^[3] On February 7th, the video game news blog GameRevolution^[1] reported that the Steam page for Subnautica was being "review bombed" by supporters of Chylinski, which included a graph illustrating the surge in bad reviews (shown below, right).