Review bombing is an increasingly popular phenomena by which large scores of Steam users downvote a game for the purposes of protest, be it against the developer or against an idea that the developer supports/does not support. It is similar to metabombing, a similar tactic used to lower the Metacritic score of a piece of media, and is seen by some as an effective mob tactic.
While the actual effectiveness of review bombing has been held in serious debate, Valve has finally taken notice of it as a prevalent issue on Steam. On the official website, Valve talks about the numerous solutions that they debated implementing to stop said practice, including removing review scores, adding temporary locks on reviews, and changing the way that review scores are calculated.
Instead, reviews will now be shown on a graph, so that players can easily see if a title is suddenly hit with a lot of negative reviews.
"In the end, we decided not to change the ways that players can review games, and instead focused on how potential purchasers can explore the review data. Starting today, each game page now contains a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game, and by clicking on any part of the histogram you’re able to read a sample of the reviews from that time period. As a potential purchaser, it’s easy to spot temporary distortions in the reviews, to investigate why that distortion occurred, and decide for yourself whether it’s something you care about. This approach has the advantage of never preventing anyone from submitting a review, but does require slightly more effort on the part of potential purchasers."
As previously stated, the actual effect of review bombing on sales is in question, but Valve owns the store and believes that it is having a detrimental effect on the Steam storefront.
MMO Fallout 