About stupid Steam reviews

I would like to talk a bit about Steam reviews and how I find them often irritating.

It’s bit of a pet peeve and honestly something I should just wave my hand about. Still, maybe someone reading this will think twice before writing a stupid review and that would be worth both of ours time.

So let me start by explaining what I mean by stupid review. It’s true for all platforms, but I encounter it mostly on Steam, so let’s talk about these as Stupid Steam Reviews, SSR syndrome.

Here are examples of SSR:

“Boring” Thumb down (Played 30 hours)

“I don’t like this” Thumb down (Played 10k hours)

“Last patch broke game and now I hate developers”

“How do I jump”

I can see how these can be funny sometimes, but at this point I find them a lot more annoying than entertaining.
I mean sure, if reviewer wants to post it on AAA studio’s latest game, it’s still stupid, but at least they are not targeting individual developers directly.

If you type nonsense like this on smaller Indie game tho, you can almost guarantee that everyone from the development team will see it.

Now imagine you have spend few years of your life working on this small game, sure the game may not be good, but you still finished it and are pretty proud of it. Then 1 of 5 reviews you get says:

“Its sooooo bad bro, like wtf. So bad. Why can’t I kill the guard, this game sucks.”

Yep, doesn’t feel great.

To be clear, I am not saying anyone should be giving pity points, if the game is bad, then give it thumbs down, that’s fine and right.

I would just ask to think a little bit about how will the developer feel when he reads the review.

Bad review always hurts, but if it has constructive feedback and you can tell the reviewer tried to tell their honest opinion. It’s a lot easier to digest and appreciate than “this sucks bro”