Review bombing is an increasingly common practice in the video game industry. Basically, it consists of writing negative reviews and giving extremely low scores to a title. While there are often honest motivations behind these actions, sometimes the criticism is unwarranted.
That seems to be the case with Chained Echoes, an acclaimed JRPG that originally debuted last year. Right now has "very positive" ratings on Steam and an average score of 87-91 from critics on Metacritic; it even has the Must Play badge on the review site.
CHAINED ECHOES IS THE NEW VICTIM OF REVIEW BOMBING
For this reason, it was striking that in recent days the versions for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch began to receive dozens of unfavorable ratings from users on Metacritic. The interesting thing is that not even the developers know why that happened.
This situation did not go unnoticed by the publisher of Chained Echoes. In a post on Twitter, Michael Hoss, Deck13's product manager, highlighted the wave of negative reviews and reaffirmed that neither he nor the developers understand what's going on. Given this, he asked the website to take action in this regard.
Now it happened to us. @ChainedEchoes has been review bombed on Metacritic. Just plain ratings, no reviews. No reasons. We don't know why, it just happened.
— D13's Michael (@CrashOberbreit) May 9, 2023
Didn't @metacritic want to stop this nonsense? Guess only for AAA games. #indiedev #metacritic #gamedev pic.twitter.com/Qit6pusT5F
While it is impossible to know the motivation behind the users, it seems that the reason is hidden behind a recent statement from the study. In a question and answer session, Deck13 explained that it is impossible to translate the JRPG into all languages. Did players upset by the response start posting negative reviews? Nobody knows for sure.
The scores for all versions of Chained Echoes have leveled off, suggesting that Metacritic has stepped in. However, this situation reveals an inherent problem with review bombing.
THE PROBLEM WITH REVIEW BOMBING
Players resort to this practice to express their disgust at performance issues, unfair monetization models, and other controversial practices, but they also use it to lash out at products that deviate from their preferences or ideologies. In other cases, these actions appear to have no real motivation or solid justification.
Speaking to GamesRadar +, Michael Hoss stated that he is not concerned that unfavorable ratings affect the game's performance in the long term.
“It is more an annoying situation as we can't really do anything about it. Especially with the review bombing for LGBTQI+ content, that can seriously damage smaller indie games in terms of sales. And while The Last of Us: Part II can deal with that, a smaller indie can really suffer there”, said Michael Hoss.
Tell us, what do you think of this situation? Let us read you in the comments below.
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