It doesn’t make any sense.
Seven percent of the 570 user reviews on Superhot VR from the last four days have been positive, digging the game deep into an overwhelmingly negative territory for the last week. But for most people who view the store page, Superhot’s reviews will show as a 91% mostly positive. That’s because Valve have stripped the score of this last weekend’s reviews and labeled them off-topic.
That’s nonsense.
A few years ago Valve introduced the concept of off-topic reviews to combat review bombing, people in massive quantities giving a game a negative or positive review for a reason that has nothing to do with the game itself. The last game I talked about this happening to was Factorio, which was positively review bombed because of off-Steam comments by a developer on Reddit. Previously an infamous example was Total War: Three Kingdoms which was review bombed after the developers announced they’d be finishing development on content and moving on.
I’ve pretty heartily defended Valve’s practice of flagging reviews as off-topic for two reasons; they’re generally justified and the reviews themselves are still there with no actual punishment to the account. Valve is transparent about the off-topic label, and considering review bombs happen alongside controversies, there are plenty of places one can look to understand the context.
So I supported Valve flagging the Factorio reviews as off-topic because they had nothing to do with the game itself, even if they were positive. Six hundred reviews saying “based dev” doesn’t reflect the quality of the game.
But Superhot VR received an off-topic flag of its own, and Valve’s justification doesn’t hold up as well here. Developer Superhot Team recently launched an update four years after Superhot VR’s release that removed two areas of the game. Specifically it removes two points of the game where the player is expressly required to kill themselves in order to progress.
Previously this content was toggled and those who didn’t want to see it didn’t have to. It should be noted that the developer by their own words didn’t do this out of any outside pressure. They did it because the developer is a bit, well, pretentious. Deeply pretentious. A wannabe Phil Fish if you catch my drift.
But Valve’s response of flagging reviews as off-topic is ridiculous because there’s nothing more on-topic than writing a review because of the content of a game. We’re not talking about the developer’s politics, or something that happened on Reddit. It’s directly related to content in the game, or at least content that was in the game.
Content that wasn’t removed because someone got angry about it, ala Ion Fury, but content that the developer removed simply because they felt like it. That is as on-topic as you can get outside of straight up reviewing the game.
MMO Fallout 