- Every new release gets review bombed immediately by non-verified users, unless it's a re-release of an old game.
- The review average that shows up on the store page is always skewed towards non-verified users
- There is no way to delete or edit reviews without contacting the support team. This discourages me from leaving reviews in the first place.
- Many early reviews contain blatantly false information about the game. The only way to clear it up is by writing a counter review, but by then the damage is already done.

My proposed solutions:
- Only show the verified owner rating on the store page
- Give users the ability to delete and edit their reviews without contacting support
- Allow developers to respond to reviews in case they need to clear something up

I am interested in hearing what the rest of you think about the review system. Any other problems I didn't list?

I tried to times two leave a review of games i bought and tried and both times they ended not being posted. I kind of gave up even trying to leave a review after that.

Sure is. Here's three of them:

1. GOG wrecked the site for the 10th Anniversary, and replaced the '& 'symbol in all reviews (even ones that were published before that date) with strange characters that the user never actually wrote. And it also does the same thing to newly-published reviews as well. More than 2 years later, this problem remains unfixed.

2. There used to be a way by which hackers would cheat the character limit in reviews, and thus publish reviews that broke the rules by being vastly larger than GOG's rules allow them to be. This gives those authors a hugely unfair leg up on honest authors who didn't hack the system like they did. GOG should therefore delete any & all such hacked reviews, period. Yet thus far, GOG has allowed them to stay intact.

3. Most "reviews" on GOG, lately especially from "verified owners," are not actually reviews, but rather pointless, time-wasting spam messages, like: "This is a great game, I'm so glad it finally came to GOG!" And two or three sentences like that usually comprise the entirety of the so-called 'review.' GOG should forbid such spam fake 'reviews' from being allowed to be published.

As for your ideas listed in the OP: yes, users should be able to edit and/or delete their own reviews whenever they feel like it and as often as they feel like. It's inexcusable that there is no option to do these things.

As for giving devs an option to reply to reviews: that's only a good idea if the author of the review can, in turn, reply to the devs' rebuttals to the review. Otherwise, if the author can't reply, then the reviews will be compromised by PR-speak propaganda replies from the devs, that many consumers will be deceived by, because of how the author would be unable to debunk the propaganda for their readers via publishing a reply to it.

I don't agree with the premise that only showing Verified Owners rating is a good idea. That just skews things too far in the other direction, by creating a biased sample. And as I've pointed out, sometimes "Verified Owners" make the most irresponsible & reckless reviews/ratings of all. So being a "Verified Owner" is no guarantee that the person who writes something about the game is making a worthwhile rating and/or review.

I like GoG's scoring system. No need to change it.

Considering the way they "solved" things in the past was removing the problematic featute althogether, I'm a bit afraid of what they'd do to reviews. But there's a lot that can be done. Or at least have it as the default view. If they did this, I would start writing my own reviews. This is common in many sites. The replies range from defensive statement to corporate empty message, but it could be useful for dmaller devs.


It would also be good to mark reviews that correspond to older, outdated versions (for example, mentioning a game-breaking bug, missing content or DRM that have been fixed). I think the current system only marks reviews that were published while the game was in development. Of course, they would either automatize the process and all reviews would be marked as obsolete as soon as there was an internal installer update, or they would have to allocate resources and staff to manually flag reviews refering to outdared issues.

Besides going to the website itself, I have no idea how to review.

On Galaxy, all I can do is mark how many stars, but cannot write a review.

There's a couple review types that I've encountered that are particularly bad.
* Negative content free reviews that might say the game is bad because "it includes X type of character", where X is some type the review author is prejudiced against. These reviews ought to be deleted from the site. (Note that there can be good negative reviews; the review just needs to talk about the game and explain *why* it's bad.)
* Obsolete reviews. For example, Vaporum: Lockdown has a review that complains about there being no Linux version, when said version was just added (after the review was written). (By the way, I noticed that, just today, the review went from being 2/2 helpful to 3/10.) These reviews should be marked as being for an older version.

This is what bugs me the most. I check reviews to see whats peoples experiences with the game and looking for pro and cons etc. Many reviews are just simple one liners or comments which arent really relevant to review of the game "its too expensive" or " I dont like the deve" etc...
They really need to make a template like game review mags used to have and force u to actually make more than one or two sentence comments...

So if a game glorifies a transphobic murderer you don't think it's relevant? A game that is pro--white supremacy shouldn't be mentioned? Heck, there are games that have pro-rape issues. Politics goes both ways, we have enough division without trying to make it sound one sided.

Of course, if you had done this earlier in the day, Vaporum: Lockdown's "no Linux version" review, which 100% of people (2 out of 2) had found useful, would have gone to the top, and that review is now obsolete.

Sorry it's 2 am here so i am a little slow


Are you saying the review system has improved or otherwise?

It's more along the lines of a review that consists of something like "this game has a transgender character, and is therefore bad" (and not, say, going into whether it's a good or bad depiction of a transgender character).

(Also, if a review mentions rape, it may need a trigger warning. Furthermore, I'd argue that if a review needs a trigger warning, and the game does not, then the review is bad. Reviews that need trigger warnings, on the other hand, are fine for games that need them.)

In the case of that review, I checked later and some users marked it as not being helpful, causing the review to not appear to be as helpful as it was before.

Sp that's a good thing as it shows the system works?

Another few review type you forgot to mention:

*People who couldn't operate a blanket; users too dumb to live; people complaining about easily fixed minor technical issues; scaling or "big pixels".

*But it isn't impossible to run version; bellyaching about not having the Windows 95 or Amiga version of a game.

* Reviews based on vague memories when last played 30 years ago.

As for the suggestions:

Dev Reply: Dangerous. There are several games on this site whose developers I wouldn't want to associate with, especially in polite company. Such as Mr. "I spent 20 years developing a game and Grimoire : Heralds of the Winged Exemplar is the end result."

I feel that being able to update, edit, and delete reviews should be doable; at the very least on the matter of after a major update, the option should be offered. The character limit should be upped to a word limit, say 5000, IF GOG INSISTS? I've had a couple of verbose reviews lost to the review system because apparently people don't like it when you link your longer review as a forum post.

Honestly, I'd axe the star rating system. I'd prefer the Steam Rule of Thumbs, except with a "middling" thumb for so-so or average games. There are many games which I feel do not deserve a positive or negative acclaim, but rather a, "I need to explain my complicated feelings about this game."

Oh, one more thing. Much like wishlist entries, I have no idea which games I've rated and reviewed. Some way to track that would be fantastic.