The Phenomenon Called ‘Review Bombing’

A few days back, the team at Gearbox, makers of the co-operative shooter ‘Borderlands’ series, had launched the trailer for their much anticipated entry into the series ‘Borderlands 3’, coming on the heels of ‘Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel’, while also announcing that the previous games in the series, as is the norm these days, will be receiving upgraded HD editions. All of these updates were met enthusiastically by the fans, and then the studio dropped a bombshell. The game would be exclusive to the newly launched Epic Games store, and won’t be available on Steam, which has for long been the home of game distribution. This news was not met so enthusiastically by the fans, and as a result the Steam page of Borderlands 1 and 2 became unwitting victims of a torrent of negative reviews, and as a result, the games which would have had highly positive user reviews up until now, instead saw their ratings fall.

Review bombing is a phenomenon which occurs on every user platform for any form of media. Mostly, it is just useless and a concerted effort which causes the ‘hurt party’ to vent its anger on a product or service, so that people are dissuaded from using them. This, if successful, may leave the product or service at a disadvantage in terms of sales or views. An example of this review bombing closer home can be considered to be the movie ‘Gunday’, which was perceived by the people of Bangladesh as carrying derogatory content with regards to their people. As a result, they review bombed this movie and it caused a drastic change in its IMDB score. Still another example can be considered to be of the recently released Marvel movie ‘Venom’, starring Tom Hardy, which was inundated with negative reviews on different websites even before release, the masterminds being Lady Gaga fans, who thought that doing so would divert moviegoers to her upcoming movie ‘A Star is Born’ (of course this didn’t help much as both the movies grossed huge amounts worldwide).

Review bombing can be harmful for any media form in the short term, as people might be persuaded from their friends to not watch that movie, or play that game, or listen to that album, because of these supposedly poor reviews. However, a flaw in this system is that most of these review bombs are present for a short period, and usually are concentrated over that period. This can provide review aggregating websites with the tools to upgrade algorithms so that they can determine such periods and work on removing such content. Also, as these reviews are mentioned due to prejudices, there is a strong chance that people review bombing may not know the contents and as such write reviews off-topic. The websites can filter such reviews so that the aggregate scores are not tampered with. Steam implemented such measures and the result was 4000 such reviews got identified. Surely, that’s a start.