Over the past couple of months, I've noticed a lot of games getting flooded by substance-less, couple words reviews, all in a short timespan of each other. What's up with that?

Take a look at Dishonored 1 for example. Starting August, there are 7 pages of reviews in the same vein. A couple words saying basically nothing. Seen it with many other games too recently.

Is it a result of the recent Galaxy addition, where it gives you a pop up to review the game? Most games seem to suffer from this in variying degrees, most likely based on popularity. The reviews seem to have started appearing around August this year, up till now, which does seem to coincide with the Galaxy "feature". It is honestly pretty annoying having to sift through multiple most recent pages of dummy reviews to arrive at an actual one. Anyone have any idea what's up with that? I doubt it's bots, so my bet is on the mentioned Galaxy feature and people just typing in whatever to get rid of it. Any other ideas?

Perhaps in the case of Dishonored it might have to do with Prime Gaming's weekly give-aways?

At least the most-most recent ones might be due to that?

Nah, I agree with you that the Galaxy addition is to blame for this.
Curiously there have been several posts bemoaning that Galaxy ''keeps nagging me to leave a review'', but yours is the first thread to call out the elephant in the room.

I'm pretty sure it is yet another way Galaxy has "enhanced" this place, where an increasing number of people are so p*ssed off with Galaxy review nag screens they now just write gibberish. To be honest, I don't even read GOG reviews here anymore. Even ignoring the "I don't want to write a review but Galaxy is forcing me too so I'll just write 'xyxyyyxx' as my review", you then have the 1* by non-owners, the 5* also by non-owners (many of which involve written by "0 games owned" accounts all 'coincidentally' created on the same day with the same alpha-numerical username pattern when some games launch...) Then there's the endless "I remember playing this. That is all", which, sure we all have our happy memories of the classics, but at the end of the day these are all discussion forum comments far more than they are "reviews". Then the decade old "doesn't work" reviews that may have been technically accurate when written but are long outdated but the reviewers can't edit them and sane people don't want to have to manually file a support ticket per review, per game they want changed.

Quite honestly the whole review system here needs a huge makeover, going back to "quality over quantity" as the new trend of flooding it with one word "Average", "gud", "yess", "SI", "Lurker", I like", "sick", "mGHMM", "a", "ass", "nice", "lame", "kt", "si", "hi", "ss", "k", "top", etc (all recent reviews just for Dishonored games inc Dishonored 2 that wasn't an Amazon Prime giveaway), all with the same "late 2024" timestamps), render the whole review system a joke.

I've noticed it too under different games. DIshonored giveaway started very recently so it cannot be that. At first I thought it has something to do with the spammers that flooded the forums just a few months ago. It was a major issue. But most of these reviewers had games next to their names so they did look mostly legit(as users). I've totaly forgot about the pop up from Galaxy though. Could be that - seems very likely!

Yup. Exactly it. The current one-word (sometimes even one-letter) reviews is the poster child of why you don't aggressively try and force a new generation of "casual gamers" to write reviews they are obviously incapable of / don't want to write for the sake of "showcasing" how 'social' our client is...

GOG need to start introducing some review quality control as many of them are literal spam that would get people banned if they flooded the forum with the same "awdada, fghfghfgh, -, ., SSS, LAD, b, etc", that happily gets posted to the review section with GOG's blessing.

GOG still hasn't fixed that?

I guess they really need to unionize against the marketing team.

One other thing I would suggest is for people to regularly click the 'report' button on the low-quality reviews (i.e. the ones that just say 'q' or 'xvfxvf'). I mean, these are literally spam reviews that are in violation of the guidelines, and if the GOG support mailbox starts to get flooded with reports of spam reviews, it might encourage them to do something about it.

So, you would prefer, if they give low ratings?

Or if more (only?) people rate games, who don't play them? o.O

You don't see how it is going to skew the ratings, if people that are actively playing them are having pop-ups pushed in their faces?

Note that I said 'actively playing' - I chose my words very specifically. Those that are actively playing a game are more likely to rate it highly, because if they didn't enjoy it, they would be less likely to be actively playing it. Negative reviews are more likely to come from players that tried it, didn't like it for whatever reason, and stopped/uninstalled. Or possibly from those that tried it elsewhere (e.g. Steam). Those people aren't going to be pestered by the same client pop-ups (hence the skewing factor).

As for what I would prefer: I would prefer that players weren't being pestered by pop-ups so much that so many of them are leaving low-quality reviews.

Sure.
Not gonna lie: if I was pestered by constant pop-ups, that ask me to review the game I'm just playing, I would probably rate it negatively...simply because I definitely would be pissed at the constant pop-ups.

So, I guess, GOG and the devs can count themselves happy, that I don't use Galaxy and am therefore not pestered by these pop-ups.

I never thought anything about it untill you said something. I'm so use to seeing these type on reviews on every stie. I always ignore that asking to review button.

GOG wants reviews from paying customers. They're getting more than enough from people who have never played the damn game.

But what do you get for writing a thoughtful review? People are downvoting you into oblivion because their opinion on a game that they likely never played is so much more important than yours. So GOG applies a little force.

And what are they getting in return?

Let's take a look at the Walking Dead Season 1, the game that both made and eventually broke Telltale games.

FOUR STARS
full review: "wish telltale work continue there work"

FIVE STARS
full review: "I cry every time I play this."

ONE STAR
full review: "stuck at the wrecked car"

FIVE STARS
full review: "wwwwwwww"

FIVE STARS
full review: "weeee"

Very helpful, Mr. GOG, oh so very helpful.

Hey, at least those people have actually played the game, right? :|

My favourite has to be the review on Dishonored 1 reading simply "...". Without saying a word it speaks volumes.