5punk

Okay, forgive me the spammy title. It popped into my mind and I had to get it out. The point of it is that I just skimmed (nobody reads anything on the internet any more, right?) an article by Cliff Harris on the release of Gratuitous Space Battles 2 and among a number of interesting points* he talks about how getting people to leave Steam reviews is like pulling teeth. Unless it's a bad review, and then they're straight in there.

That hit a few notes with me. I like to leave reviews on Steam, mainly for the benefit of my friends, who probably value my advice more than professional reviewers (assumed because I value 5punky opinions more than pro reviewers), and also to give a good game some good feedback. The problem is that I don't want to review a game until I feel I've got a good feel of it. Inevitably I get distracted by another game before that happens. Or I don't like the game and so don't play it for more than a few minutes, which again doesn't put me in a very good position to review it.

So. Do you people leave Steam reviews? What's your reasoning? What's a reasonable time to have played a game before leaving a bad review, because too little and people will assume you've not given it chance, and too much will convince people that you do actually like it but you have an axe to grind.



*The others being that he faces a lot of criticism for pricing his game at £25, it's hard to get media attention because of the sheer volume of games released these days, advertising is much more expensive, and people tend to just add games to their Steam wishlist and wait for a sale.

I don't review games because I don't read reviews.

They generally fall into 4 categories.

1) I SPENT £62 ON THIS GAME AND SO I'LL OVERLOOK ANY DOWNSIDES SO I DON'T GET BUYER'S REMORSE.
2) I SPENT £62 ON THIS GAME AND ONE MINOR FEATURE DOSEN'T WORK SO IT'S THE WORST THING EVER AND I HOPE YOU GET AIDS.
3) I GOT HEAD TO REVIEW THIS GAME, IT'S REALLY GOOD. (the head, not the game)
4) You'll like this game it you like this sort of game, it has positive and negative features compared to similar games.


None of this is really useful information to me.

I think the problem with user based reviews (other than the fact that most of the people writing them are hugely unqualified to do so, as Berk points out) is the difference in motivation and time take to get to a good review as opposed to a bad review.

Generally speaking, when I play a truly terrible game I know it is truly terrible within minutes of starting it up. I could therefore confidently write a review saying so within minutes of starting the game.
If its just OK, neither terrible nor particularly good, I don't feel any motivation to review it, because who on earth would want to read a review that says "its OK I guess"?
If its good, I feel I should give it time before having a critical opinion on it just in case it is a slow burner that will go from good to great the more I get into it. Dragon Age Inquisition is a good recent example of this: I started off liking it, I ended up thinking its one of the best modern RPGs I have played.
If its really great, I might know that within the first few minutes of playing, but games that great are super rare.

Which means that shit games only need a few minutes of attention for me to feel I can review them, whereas good games mostly require longer for me to form a proper opinion. Once I get to that point, usually several weeks/months have gone by since the game came out and honestly most of the people who are likely to enjoy the game have probably made their minds up already, so it feels kind of pointless reviewing them.

In terms of the general populace, the other problem is the same thing you get with any user based review system: People who like the game tend to enjoy it and move on. People who don't enjoy the game want to vent. Therefore, the ratio of good to bad reviews is waaaay out of whack, because the angry minority are the only ones writing anything.

I occasionally do a review. The only problem I find with Steam is that it's either thumbs up or down. Sometimes, a game is really only deserving of a sideways thumb.

I'm not very good at making a long review sound coherent, after a few lines I turn it into word spaghetti. Short reviews I can do but I always have to leave things out because I fear long paragraphs. Mostly though, I don't write reviews because I simply forget.

Reviews themselves are always a bit toxic I found, when someone says a negative thing about a game I will tend to single that out and pay extra attention to it where perhaps otherwise I would never have noticed it and this can really bring my enjoyment of a game down.

I do enjoy reading reviews from 5punkers since I know most of you and can see why you would like or dislike a thing, whereas with randoms they might just hate a certain aspect of a game because they hate the company that makes it or something.