Correct. It'll remain supported for all current owners. And anyone who buys the game in the future, given that it doesn't look like it's getting pulled anytime soon.
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[PC Gamer] Rocket League is getting review bombed because Epic bought Psyonix; Shows Steam Anti-review Bomb system is working (see staff post)
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Correct. It'll remain supported for all current owners. And anyone who buys the game in the future, given that it doesn't look like it's getting pulled anytime soon.
The reviews are full of hysterical nonsense. "Epic will ruin the game", "Everything I've bought will be useless", "They won't support steam users anymore" etc.
I mean, do you really want me to spell it out for you? Likening this phenomena to anti-vaxers who have very real world consequences of outbreaks occuring and causing deaths? I'm not being disingenuous for calling you out on it. It's a silly comparison.
I'm not comparing scale. I'm comparing methodology. Look. Anti-vaxxers have no nobility in what they're doing, no matter how they try to spin it, so they have to rely on underhanded tactics. There's no legitimate high road available to them.
But if you don't like Epic? There's all sorts of honest protests that you can make. Review bombing just isn't one of them. I don't think so, Epic doesn't think so, Psyonix doesn't think so, and even Valve doesn't think so. So who do you think you're getting through to?
Yeah. If people genuinely believe that Epic needs to be protested for this then I have no problem with that. But to presume that ends will justify literally any means is preposterous. Yes, I'm gatekeeping, because not all protests are created equal.
Is it hysterical? Shouldn't potential buyers be warned of the uncertainty of what they're getting into? How long will RL be supported on Steam? Unless Epic commits to a date, doesn't it make sense to assume the worst?
In particular for non-Windows platforms, buying Rocket League on steam in the remaining months it's available feels like paying full price for a short term rental.
I'm no longer buying THQ games despite them potentially being good and good people working on them. I'm not buying stuff on the EGS because I can't stand Epics war against a platform that was free and open since the beginning of time, even if this means giving up on good games. I'm also fine with review bombing when a company starts making anti consumer decisions.
You can not separate art and artist. Certain important things are tainted for me because of the wrong doings of their creators even when their work is objectively good. The same goes for products and the companies making them. You f* up, we as consumers have a right to criticize you in any peaceful way. Giving your products a thumbs down is a legit way of protesting imo.
You can not separate art and artist. Certain important things are tainted for me because of the wrong doings of their creators even when their work is objectively good. The same goes for products and the companies making them. You f* up, we as consumers have a right to criticize you in any peaceful way. Giving your products a thumbs down is a legit way of protesting imo.
I also just reject that it's a form of protest. It's just another form of social media trolling. Read the content of these fake reviews and they are, in the vast majority of cases, just as toxic as your typical social media troll comment on a Facebook or Twitter feed. Being "pro-consumer" is a nice pretense. But like I said, real protesting, like, for instance, going to Epic's offices to picket outside on behalf of better working conditions, requires moral courage and actual effort, unlike social media trolling and leaving fake reviews. That just takes a few keystrokes and a button click.
But yeah. It's perfectly OK to delineate between acceptable and unacceptable forms of protest, whatever your politics. People do it all the time. Protesting outside a railway station that is mistreating its staff is a perfectly good form of protest. Blowing up the railway station is not. Not to compare review bombing to that form of destruction, of course. They aren't comparable at all, but only to say that of course it's normal to draw distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable forms of protest.
At least you're being honest.
I fully believe in the right to protest and with respect, putting restrictions on that is the preferred route of authoritarianism.
It doesn't preclude criticism of the content of protest, and I post with without prejudice to the content of said protest. There has been review bombs for disgusting reasons such as misogyny and hate, and those are wrong. But by the same token many routes of protest have been used by unsavoury people but you don't close the route to protest because of it.
I take issue with anyone categorising my arguments as trolling, or not in good faith because it flies in the face of others views. I'm sorry I disagree but I mean what I say.
Review bombing is a failing of design - you can't control where and how people protest. There is a need for prolific protest and in terms of digital global content, there are few places to do it. And these avenues are almost equally available to all walks of life, good and bad. I do think anti-vaxers go much further though, since they're creating active groups, creating websites to appear legitimate and so on. They go far further and have far more reaching and damaging consequences. Btw, I think that this backlash is premature, but given Epics history, it wouldn't be unfair to assume the worst.
It doesn't surprise me one bit to see PC Gamer being disingenuous with their titles.
You don't really need to be particularly perceptive to notice their recent bias. Just gather their headlines in the last 6-8 months, maybe even read a couple of lines out of each article, and it's impossible to miss what they have been doing for a while.
There's a reason people are constantly calling them out in their own comment sections.
You don't really need to be particularly perceptive to notice their recent bias. Just gather their headlines in the last 6-8 months, maybe even read a couple of lines out of each article, and it's impossible to miss what they have been doing for a while.
There's a reason people are constantly calling them out in their own comment sections.
It is absolutely trolling to say "you're a socialist, but you don't believe in fake reviews?"
That is just trolling. It is not engaging with an issue, it is just trolling someone's political views on a completely unrelated issue.
I also don't accept that you believe all forms of protest are acceptable. Is violent protest against Epic acceptable? Would cyberattacks on Epic employees computers be acceptable? Review bombing of course isn't comparable to killing people, of course, but you're saying no form of protest is beyond the pale and that no distinction can be made between forms of protest. By that logic, violence and cyber attacks are acceptable protests, and to complain about them is just gatekeeping and authoritarian.
If that someone is a company using anti-consumer practices and forcing its employees through endless crunch, I'd say it seems like you might be misinterpreting things.
That is a straight-up lie. You are 100% lying about this.
You don't get to decide what form of protest is legitimate. As long as people stay away from personal harassment and abuse, any form of protest that gets the point across is a legitimate one.
I absolutely do get to decide my opinion on what forms of "protest" are acceptable, thanks. Just like you've done in your second sentence, by deciding that abuse is an unacceptable form of protest. You're gatekeeping what forms of protest are acceptable, and you've deemed that abuse isn't legitimate. In your own words, "you don't get to decide what form of protest is legitimate." But, naturally, it's different when you do it.
The route is already closed, though. Figuratively speaking. Review bombing is seen as childish and hateful than it is protestant of actions from a developer or publisher, and review bombing has a longer history with being repugnant than it has been useful. There are reasons Valve even has this anti-review bombing system in the first place.
We still don't know that, and the statements so far do not inspire confidence. "No announced plans" to pull the game from Steam, in corporate-talk basically all but says "we have such plans, just haven't announced them yet".
Genuine question here:
What other effective avenues are there for protesting something for the regular user (so not an influencer or someone with a significant social media following behind)? I've never done a Steam or Opencritic/Metacritic review protest. Or any kind of protest besides some posts in this forum or neogaf before that.
It would be nice to know some if I ever feel like it, or to send other people there.
What other effective avenues are there for protesting something for the regular user (so not an influencer or someone with a significant social media following behind)? I've never done a Steam or Opencritic/Metacritic review protest. Or any kind of protest besides some posts in this forum or neogaf before that.
It would be nice to know some if I ever feel like it, or to send other people there.
You can decide your opinion but that doesn't make it anything other than your opinion which can be wrong and so far all I'm seeing is you basically trolling. Review bombing is a legit type of protest and has been for as long as it existed.
It's all down to the context.
What do you think a legitimate protest in Venezuela should be? Entirely peaceful despite oppression?
That's rhetorical because that's an open question and not one I can answer for many reasons.
I'm saying that collective consumer action is legitimate, even if you don't like it. You don't see it as legitimate, I do. Simple as that.
It's actually not different at all. That is the point. The only thing that's different is our understanding of what the word 'legitimate' means.
Hmm. That feels like semantics to me. What you're describing as "real" protests I would just call conventional protest. I think review bombing is a form of protest. Just an unhelpful, unproductive one.
You can't just call something authoritarian because you don't like it. That's the behavior of a child. Society collectively decides when and where behavior is conducive or harmful to its body. I'm not the authority on protesting, Epic isn't the authority on protesting, Valve isn't the authority on protesting, and neither are you for that matter. So nobody here is being authoritarian. I guess maybe Valve is because they have the means to silence review bombers, but then take up issue with them.
I'm not taking issue with review bombing just because misogynists and other bigots have used it. I'm taking issue because it's deliberately underhanded and categorically misleading.
You've just listed several other places you could be protesting instead. Create user groups on social media, build websites around awareness, generate media content with your message. Those are all great places to protest. Especially because you're more likely to reach a broader audience (including the devs you're targeting) on social media, and you don't have to inherently lie.
Method and methodology, different things.
Reviews can be a route to protest. Harassment via this route is wrong and removes said legitimacy.
We disagree that tangential protest on developer practices is legitimate or not. However I do not think a route to protest should be closed because of that level of disagreement.
Steam users will be supported for as long as the game is in development. They are not going to develop a separate epic version that will segregate the audience.
Great. Glad you've accepted that my point that some forms of protest are unacceptable was the correct one, and that your point that it's wrong to "gatekeep" by saying some protests aren't acceptable was the wrong one. We have a disagreement on whether review bombing is a legitimate form of protest.
I'm making a deeper point than the semantic one, I think. I don't think people are review bombing because they want to make a statement about Epic's store. I don't think it is a protest motivated by ideology. I think people enjoy trolling on social media and that this issue offers them an excuse to troll under the pretext of caring about the Psyonix acquisition. Most people doing this couldn't care less: they just think it's fun to leave spam comments on Steam. That's what I mean when I say I don't actually think it's a protest.
They originally announced they were going to take it off steam and knowing how epic is, I don't have any faith in them not removing it from steam eventually
Sure, but people want prolific - a subreddit or fb group is easily ignored. It's ironic, because sites like PCGamer reinforce this behavior by only reporting on this sort of action. Everytime we hear about a review bomb on all these gaming media sites, its clear that this is the most effective and wide reaching form of protest.
Exactly which is why anyone saying it's not a protest doesn't have a leg to stand on. It's an extremely effective means for customers to protest.
I believe that glueing yourself to a train, disrupting passengers and costing taxpayers money to deal with is underhanded and doesn't deal with climate change directly. (This happened with the Extinction Rebellion protests), I found it hilarious but others didn't see the funny side.
It's also a legitimate form of protest!
I'm afraid most "nice" protests get ignored. In a just world, that wouldn't be the case.
Oh. Okay. I can see that. There's just no way to know for sure though, even if it is the case in some or several instances.
I wouldn't conflate people knowing about a protest with effectiveness of a protest. Especially not in a case where the headlines paint the protesters in a negative light.
Sure, there's no way to know for sure. But when I read the review bombs and they largely consist of copy-pasted spam and vulgar insults, I don't really get the impression these are people motivated by a sense of injustice. It reads like garden-variety social media trolling.
every company ever prioritizes profits and shareholders over all else dude lol
Props to Valve for their recognition of this problem and their effective means of countering it.
Rocket League is great and every single person (well maybe with the exception of 1/2 because hey opinions) submitting a negative review this week knows this very well so I'm glad that the 'off-topic issue' or whatever phrase Valve coined is useful in this instance.
Rocket League is great and every single person (well maybe with the exception of 1/2 because hey opinions) submitting a negative review this week knows this very well so I'm glad that the 'off-topic issue' or whatever phrase Valve coined is useful in this instance.
I agree. In several instances it'll be more obvious like that. But at the least there are multiple people in this thread who consider it a form of protest, and have used it as such, so I wanted to meet them on that level.
from my personal experience, getting people to pay attention is half the battle. if every news station is reporting on you, you've done great
While reviewbombing can be seen as a protest from gamers, do you think it's appropriate in this case when the game is still on Steam and this only affects the developer's future games and not the current Rocket League customers? Correct me if I'm wrong but these reviewbombers don't seem to be bringing up Epic's labour practices.
I'll raise you one, Epic haven't even put their own games on their own store!
I'm saying that it's not down to you, or me to decide what's acceptable protest and use our personal view as definitive. Society can judge for themselves.
Anyway I feel you do a great disservice to those who *do* care about this issue and to dismiss those who do by conflating those with idiots who make drama for the sake of trolling (And yes, we all know it happens) is unfair.
Perhaps you should look better. People are fine with EGS existing. But they don't want any store "competing" by paying 3rd party devs and publishers to keep their games away from competing storefronts. It's that simple.
Who said my opinion was definitive? I'm expressing a view
I never did that. There's nothing wrong with caring about this issue, speaking out against it, and protesting against it. As I said, go protest and picket Epic's offices if you want, that's perfectly legitimate. Don't conflate the minority who leave fake reviews with all of the people who care about the broader issue. I wasn't criticizing people for caring about the issue. I was criticizing the act of review bombing.
Far be it from me to counter your anecdotes with my anecdotes. It's not every news station though. It's not on IGN, Kotaku, Polygon, Waypoint, nor most of the big gaming news sites. You know what protest did get broad coverage? The Riot employees protesting by walking out.
It wasn't a headline the first time because Borderlands deserved to be review bombed. It was a headline because Valve's system was proven to work.
Writing words in all caps is also cheap and could make the reader think that the post was written by an eternal teen. Still, you decided to use this questionable technique, probably because it is easy to do and still draws a lot of attention. Same as review bombing.
They are (or were) customers of the developer. A developer who maintains a GaaS game. They should be taken seriously.
Walk outs are great and effective, but its not something available to digital customers. We're talking about a global audience - how do you centralize those efforts and get the media talking? It's much harder than it looks.
That's the kind of definitive guarantee that Epic seems to have no interest in making. I wonder why?
Fair enough.
I think we can both acknowledge that we can agree to disagree on the issue.
And I'm sorry for going too personal. Tired and grumpy after being woken at 5am on a Saturday (yey parenting) and going in too hard.
If you're unable to wrangle a boycott without vandalizing a review page then that's not my problem.
The post is clearly discussing the techniques of protesting themselves and not equating the comparative seriousness of the issues involved. I don't know why people have trouble comprehending this obvious distinction.
I'm assuming that is what you're mocking; your post is very unclear and unhelpful.
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