Game Dev Streisands Negative Reviews After Asking For One To Be Deleted

from the oops dept

In the online world, we certainly have seen some companies make very poor decisions when it comes to dealing with negative reviews of their products or services. While it can be very frustrating to see this sort of online negativity pop up, the response to a negative review can be as telling as the review itself. So, when companies go on the attack, often times with threats of fees for leaving bad reviews, or even lawsuits, it’s never a good look. Tough as it might be, resorting to threats over this sort of thing rarely works out in the favor of the company.

This is not the story of a company threatening anyone. In fact, game developer Square Glade Games, maker of recent indie game Outbound, were downright pleasant when they responded to one negative review for their beleaguered game. Unfortunately, with all of their politeness, they also had one itty bitty request that came along with the response.

That familiar launch reception would have put Outbound in the company of thousands of other Steam games if not for what the developers at Square Glade Games did next. As shared in a screenshot on the Steam subreddit, the studio at one point responded to one of the negative reviews with an offer to refund the player’s purchase and a request that they delete their negative review from the game’s Steam page.

“Sorry to hear that Outbound is not your cup of tea,” the response read. “But that is of course totally understandable. No hard feelings. Feel free to send a support request to the Steam support to get a full refund on your purchase. If you do so, we would appreciate if you would update or remove your negative review. Thanks a lot.”

You simply cannot do this sort of thing. The backlash among the Steam community was ferocious and immediate. And, frankly, deservedly so. The request to disappear a negative review, even while encouraging the use of Steam’s refund system, is plainly antithetical to the very point of a community review system to begin with, as one subsequent reviewer pointed out.

“Negative reviews exist for a reason. It’s not a good look when developers ask players to change or remove criticism instead of addressing the actual issues being raised,” one read. “Reviews help consumers decide what they’re spending their money on, and trying to silence criticism only damages trust. It’s also frustrating to see the developer mainly respond to negative reviews while largely ignoring the people leaving positive ones. If you want a strong community, show appreciation to everyone supporting the game, not just the people you want to convince to change their opinion.”

And so the result has primarily been to both engender additional negative reviews from the backlash to the developer’s request and to put the original negative review in a spotlight as the online gaming news media did its thing. That puts us squarely in Streisand Effect territory, even as the developer clearly made an effort not to be jerks over the negative review.

Square Glade Games is now operating in damage control mode. They’ve apologized for ever having made the request to begin with. They’ve opened up about the chaos and pressure that has come along with the launch of this game in the first place. They’ve promised never to ask anyone to delete a review in the future.

But the damage is largely already done. These folks don’t seem like horrible people, but asking for negative reviews to be changed or removed is simply one of those third-rail things in the gaming industry that you just can’t touch, or you’re going to get hurt.

Filed Under: outbound, reviews

Companies: square glade games