Perhaps, they are right from marketing point. But again it's little shitty to delete even dumb comments.
Like you are transparent or you are another bland sterile corpo stand for consoomers.

Yeah unfortunately a lot of web sites do this. Some are upfront about it, others hide it somewhere in the fine print of their Terms of Service. It really defeats the point of reviews in the first place. I've generally stopped depending on reviews when considering a purchase, and if I have to rely on them, I go to a third-party site that is less likely to feel pressured to remove reviews/do funny things with the average rating.

Sorry, can you explain more clearly?

You say GOG are deleting unflattering reviews? Of games? Or GOG itself? And which reviews exactly?

Do you mean any particular ones? Like the pretty openly neonazi ones under games like Through the darkest of times or Svoboda 1945? Or that one under Knights of the old republic that's complaining how that game from 2003 game is "woke"? Or maybe one of those elaborate reviews like "The game crashed 1*" ?

Knowing exactly what the review said would help to understand why. Lots of people seem to think talking about a developer's personal life, politics, or whatever else is okay but don't actually review the game.

I've also seem some pretty stupid reviews that gave a game a low raring because it was released a few minutes late.

Reviews should contain information about what games have or don't have. What's good about the game? What's bad about it? Did it run well? Did it crash a lot? Is there something the company could have done to make the game better?

We don't need to know if someone thinks a game is bad because a developer got caught urinating onto a salad while screaming racial slurs. Things like that have nothing to do with the game's quality.

I think it's perfectly fine to delete reviews that are not about the game or a lazy one liner. I don't want to wade through heaps of garbage to find one helpful review.

It's unfortunate, but it does happen here. Games are curated, user reviews and forum posts are moderated. Just 1 out of 4 of my reviews was deleted so far by gog staffers. However, some deletions are justified. Like the Blade runner enhanced edition user reviews. That was a really strong purge! Somebody jumped the gun that day and went full damage-control mode.

About lazy reviews: absolutely not.

Lazy reviews are what you want, you want everyone to review their games even without a comment. Verified owners should be weighted much much more than they are now compared to reviews from people who don't own the game on GOG.

If you have clearly fraudulent reviews, as in the reviews submitted for the Whale Rock Games shovelware that we have here, then yeah it's fine to delete those.

Sorry, I should've been clearer. I only want the review gone, the given score can stay, even if at times I'd understand getting rid of those as well.

Ok that's more reasonable but I would argue we have the "most helpful reviews" feature for that.

But again, that system should rank the votes of people who own lots of games on GOG over people who own only freebies.

The one account one vote system works for Steam for major games due to the volume of customers, but GOG is more vulnerable to fraudulent reviews/accounts due to the lower number of legitimate accounts to balance it out.

I don't know, Rick, on some games I see some reviews so pointless I kind of wish they deleted them, yet they don't. Maybe they only do it for newly launched titles, when publishers press them? I'm not entirely sure.

There's too many 1 star reviews to support this theory.

They comments get deleted when the writer gets personal and insulting.

You can give a negative review if you stay polite and don't spread lies. The latter is not always detected.

Op: GOG bad!
Readers: Can we have more details please?
Op: ...

They do the same thing with forum posts. What a "surprise"!