I've written several dozen reviews at GamersGate, and they have an estimated character limit of 7600. And I find _that_ pretty restricting already, I constantly have to shorten reviews.

But at least GOG tells you when a review is too long. On GG, the text simply gets cut, and you have no way to edit or delete the review either.

^ This!


Really, GoG, don't prevent people from describing in detail why a game is great (and what might not be). Long, detailed reviews are often more helpful than short ones. Because they allow the reader to form an own opinion. And if some of these reviews turn out to be long-winded rants (yes, that will happen) no one is forcing anyone to read them. The point is: if you allow long reviews, I have the choice to read them or not. If you don't allow them, you are taking this choice away from us and we are stuck with short, uninformative reviews.

Really, who needs a dozen reviews that just say some version of "this game is the bestest evah!" ? So please, turn that ridiculous limitation 180° around and set a lower limit on review length, not an upper limit. (...or if you HAVE to set an upper limit, please make it at least 10 times as big. 1500 characters is way too short for a detailed review).

It's "teh bestest evah", mind the spelling. Otherwise, I agree completely. Every game has fans; many "teh bestest" reviews mean only that the game was popular when it was first released; it's no indication how good it is now.

If any review was to persuade somebody to buy a game on GOG, is the long one. Detailed points why the game is good for the reviewer, so I can relate myself to that and my own preference.

I bought quite a few games thanks to long reviews.

I bought none thanks to "this game is super, thanks gog!" Those short spam comments are only making it more difficult to find a helpful review.

Great find. Voted, ofc.

This is incredibly frustrating because you only find this out after having written a lengthy review already. There is no way to know before trying to submit a review that is rejected. So what this means is that people spend a lot of time writing extensive reviews, only to find out that they wasted their time because they can't submit them.

1500 characters is the length of an extensive summary, not a review that actually tells you why something ends up being a good or a bad thing. There is no room to elaborate. And that, I think, is exactly what a review should be about. Anyone can give a rating, but that usually doesn't meany anything to anybody else. What a review must do is be descriptive, so that people can decide whether that suits their tastes or not.

I don't think this helps quality at all. None of the poor two-line reviews get rejected. The long reviews, into which people usually put a lot of thought, are the ones that are being kept out. We already have a voting system for quality control. If a long review is just a pointless rant, it will get voted down, fall farther and farther back in pages, and be out of sight. The good reviews, long or short, get upvoted and appear up front. I don't see why any other measure would be needed.

And for crying out loud, you can set a hard limit on the content length of an HTML text box, or even add a JavaScript character countdown, so that people who are in the process of writing an in-depth review at least know that they won't be able to finish it. YouTube's comment limit is 500 characters, and even they have the courtesy to tell you when you're running out. The current situation is really as unsatisfactory as can be.

The above text, not including this note, has 1692 characters. I agree with all of the above points. Make it happen!

This is months later, but I just had this EXACT scenario. I chopped my well-written review down to bits and pieces of what i really wanted to convey, all on Miasmata (glad someone else sees the beauty as well), before I realized one guys massive 10-page review that was already there. What the hell is that all about?

I hear you. I just spent an hour working on a review for FTL. No warning it was getting too long. I was actually trying to keep it as short as I could, and then all of a sudden, the site tells me it's too long. Really sucky way to do it GOG.

Edit:
I just looked at my review. It's about 3/4 page typed and it's just over 2,600 characters with spaces. So, what GOG is saying is that a ONE PAGE review is too long. If this is the case, what's the point of even reviewing. I agree with other posters. You can't get a good idea of whether you want to play a game or not with nothing but super short comments. I can't really call them reviews with such a short character limit. With the average small thumb drive being 4GB, there's no excuse for this limit.

What really galls me, is the most helpful review for FTL is 3,430 characters long. That's more than double the current limit.

The 1500 character limit really makes it difficult to justify your opinion about a game, good or bad. The restriction only serves to make the already laughable review section even more useless. On the other hand, I suppose too many well-argued reviews with less than 5 stars would hurt the sales.

maybe they should have a minimum number of characters per review to avoid getting those crappy 'reviews' like " game is too expensive" .things like that are less than informative and serve no point to buyers looking.

This is unbelievable. I'm convinced it's some sort of mistake and have written to the GOG staff in the hope that they'll quickly correct it.

It seems to be deliberate, but don't let that stop you criticising it.

Eleven tweet review length insufficient. Need more space now to post twenty tweet size The Raven review.

The worst part is that these restrictions only hurt the best games, and help the worst. The worst games are already going to get star down-voted as a warning, so limiting the length of the hundred negatives reviews isn't really going to trick anybody into buying the game. Really, all I need is "diablo-like" to stay away from a game, and my fellow GOGers are great at putting that in the subject line :D

The best games though... they get shafted. The best way to describe a game is through comparison. Being able to reference different games to explain an interface, or a graphical style takes space - especially if you want it to still have any meaning for someone who doesn't get the references. If I read a review that says "great story, good writing", that has almost no impact. If they can explain the depth of the story with comparisons, tell me if the humor is dry like Primordia or more overt like Bard's Tale, and differentiate "great hand-painted graphics" between the Broken Sword style and the Daedalic style: then I feel like I know what I'm getting in to. And the comparisons to games I've loved, makes me want to buy a game all the more. It seems to make no sense to try and stifle this.

Maybe the worst is how unsatisfied I feel in writing the reviews. Primordia absolutely floored me, and I wanted to explain to people who loved Beneath a Steel Sky exactly why playing Primordia is mandatory. I wanted to detail how I felt it improved on almost every aspect of the adventure game genre. Certainly not everybody would agree with me, but at least they'd know my reasoning, and if they agreed, they would absolutely buy the game. Everybody wins.