Review bombing– when a big group of users goes to a digital shop or evaluation aggregator to leave bad ratings on an item– is done to retaliate versus a company or a public figure for perceived slights. Because of its story and addition of LGBTQ+ characters, the Last of United States Part II was targeted on Metacritic following its release in June in part.
Metacritic wants individuals to really play a game prior to reviewing it, so the website now requires users to wait 36 hours from when a brand-new video game is launched prior to leaving a score. The intent is to prevent review-bombing projects, where people leave negative scores on a title often as a method to punish the designer. Heading to a review page for a recently launched title on Metacritic will now show the message “Please spend a long time playing the video game,” with a particular date and time when a user can release a review for that video game on the website.
Metacritic is not the only platform tackling a review bomb issue. Last year, Valve said it would investigate Steam games being review bombed and hide off-topic evaluations.
The new policy change has actually locked user evaluations for two huge video games that came out today: Ghosts of Tsushima and Paper Mario: The Origami King. Users need to wait until July 18th at 12PM PT to evaluate them. The brand-new policy was first found by PlayStation Universe last week, but Forbes accentuated it today.
