What is review bombing and what purpose does it serve?
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Review bombing is when there ends up some kind of coordinated effort to leave many bad reviews (usually of dubious quality) for a business or product, thereby hurting it’s reputation or discouraging others from choosing it.
For instance, the new Starfield game is getting almost exclusively good to great reviews from official outlets. However there was a contingent of people who were upset the game was not going to be released on PS5 who all gave the game bad reviews having never even played it (some before it was even released).
It can also happen with political charged media like movies as well as controversial businesses or business owners.
generally, review bombing is a co-ordinated attempt to tarnish the reputation of a media work by getting lots of people to give it bad reviews on review sites. Generally this is held to be A Bad Thing, because these reviews are normally in response to some specific problem (or “problem”, depending on your stance), and not a fair reflection of the work as a whole.
the idea is that people with a no opinion or a neutral opinion will go looking for reviews of the media work, find loads of bad reviews, and be put off paying for the work, thus costing the production company sales. It often doesn’t work like that, especially for review bombing attempts over a marginal or strongly political issue.
to use the example u/Cyberhwk cited, of review bombing Starfield because its not available on the PS5, a potential PC or Xbox customer who was looking at that game’s reviews would see all these negative reviews for a problem that doesn’t affect them, and promptly discount those negative reviews.
A product is created and put on sale.. people buy the product and leave reviews..
So let’s say a New computer game comes out.. over the months the game gets great reviews..
Now for the review bomb….
The company pisses off the public in some way.. maybe they added gambling like systems into the game, or 1 person connected to the company has gone public with their political views…everyone gets pissed and to show their anger they all go and change their reviews to very bad..
Within days the games reviews have gone from excellent to VERY BAD… this may have nothing to do with the product.. the game is great but the company pissed off the public so they all changed their reviews or even purchased the game simply to leave a bad review…
Like everything else there are warranted review bombs and totally stupid review bombs..
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