You might not even be aware of it, but Xbox utilises a user review system for most games on the Microsoft Store, and you can find these reviews by searching for a game on Xbox and then scrolling down the game page until you find the 'Ratings and Reviews' section. The problem? It's a real unmoderated mess.
Take Space Jam: A New Legacy - The Game, for example, which launched for free on Xbox last month. The reviews section has become a farce, almost entirely filled with highly inappropriate reviews that have nothing to do with the game whatsoever, and have remained (as far as we can see) mostly unactioned.
Here's just a sample of what you'll find on the reviews page for Space Jam:
In other cases, the reviews might not be so inappropriate, but misinformed. You'll find loads of one-star Microsoft Flight Simulator reviews criticising the lack of an Xbox One version, for example, and Splitgate reviews calling the game "a joke" because the servers are currently overloaded (despite the fact it's still in a Beta phase).
Criticisms like these are at least easier to understand, but they're also swimming amongst a sea of one-star reviews with one-word descriptions like "boring" or "trash", with no explanations provided. That's before you even get to the inappropriate comments, which you can report, but we're never quite sure if any action is taken.
At the very least, it would be nice to see Microsoft making a bigger effort to moderate these user reviews and changing the requirements for giving a review, such as playing a certain amount of a game before being able to comment, and being required to leave a detailed description beyond just one or two words. Just our two cents!
What are your thoughts on user reviews on Xbox? Let us know down in the comments below.
Comments 17
I never bothered reading a review on xbox or ps for that matter because they're almost always like this. Thing is though if they delete these 'reviews' there'll hardly be any left.
The review system in itself is perfectly fine, just as you say needs moderating. Perhaps a system like Steam’s review system as it’s fantastic.
Yeah i browse reviews on games I know nothing about and 3/4's of them are pretty useless to me. If one thing doesn't work at launch everyone 1 stars it I think mostly for a return. But the review system most places are pretty awful.
Reviews, for games, should come down to a simple formula:
But I understand a "person's opinion" isn't gospel and subjective. Man, I wish shareware was back, at least demos for all, if not most, games.
They should get rid of user reviews altogether. There's just too much toxicity in the gaming community to take them seriously. Suffice to look at the reaction to The Last of Us: Part 2 for example: " Too many LGBT characters: 1/10"
It’s not really much better on Steam. You can rate people’s reviews on Steam with a thumbs up/down. It doesn’t really help though. All it means is that the jokey meme reviews rise to the top while the actually informative ones get buried by low effort one liners.
Instead of using any classicifation system, I think Xbox should copy Netflix and just recommend games to you based on the data they have about what kind of games and themes you enjoy.
They could keep the 5-star classification or a thumbs up/thumbs down, not to display reviews publicly, but rather to use them as an input for their recommendation algorithms.
Most of the reviews are a farce.
Is that second screenshot a farce though? It reed liek nethung i expect sea on interweb.
@SplooshDmg oh neat didn't know that. But for sure review bombers will always win.
I have actually had quite a laugh at the reviews for years now (like the Blood Waves reviewer who would rather take a dick in his mouth than play the game again, I spat my brew out as I read that one) but have also been totally perplexed as to how the heck MS have left them unmoderated all this time!
If they aren't going to moderate they should probably remove the review part and just keep the star system instead, but like I say, it's been YEARS! Haha
I don't read those reviews anymore. I live in Belgium, where we have 3 national languages, but most is Dutch and French.
I'm Dutch speaking, my console is in English, but all "reviews" are about how game X and game Y don't support the French language. In French, with the obligatory 1 star rating ofcourse. Nevermind talking about gameplay. In the Store you can even see what languages are supported. Unbelievable.
I agree they’re a mess. Only people who want to go out of their way to complain use it and there never seems to be that many reviews. If
They’d send us an email with a link after we’ve accessed a game for a while to an online form we can enter on our phone not with a controller they’d have more joy.
I never used it but I take a look at it for new games
Lol Nintendo doesn't do thos because they don't wanna have the problem of moderating a forum. But the Big M definitely has the AI capability to moderate thos content at scale, not sure why they don't
I seriously feel like a lot of butthurt gamers out there realize you can take advantage of this review system and ruin ratings quite easily for any game. There are some really great games on the Xbox but somehow they don't get very good reviews. I don't think I've ever seen a game get great ratings on this review system, and if you take a look, there are lots of bogus reviews on just about every game. It's a problem. They need a system like Steam has.
For real. I went to a Paw Patrol game’s reviews because I was curious to see if anyone mentioned that Ryder’s character model looked weird. (I play for the easy achievements) I have never seen such vile comments on a game about a show for little kids. I’ve never really read the Xbox reviews before this and kinda wish I hadn’t. It’s full of nothing but trolls and is very disturbing considering kids could be reading them.
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