SoulEvans: Thats a fair opinion and a fairer review. So if your goal is to inform buyers, then ideally you would want to tell them that this game took an entire year to be updated. Not "it wasn't out of date as of the time I wrote this" and not customers have no idea whether its still out of date, how long out of date it was (I didn't know this myself) or other relevant information.
This is a topical review. But just leaving the reviews as is, fails to accomplish the goal you have as a review. Fails to accomplish your intent as you just wrote it.
No, no it doesn't. At the time the review was written the game was around half a year out of date, the dev had not written anything new in regards to the update on these forums in a few months, and the product that was being sold here was a different product then the one sold on Steam at the same price. And that's without taking into account the DLC.
At the time of writing that I couldn't have known it would take another half a year for the game to be updated, nor did I know it would take that long for the DLC to become available on here. I wrote a review that at the time was valid. The review did in fact stop being valid the moment the game updated, but here's the catch: I'm here because I was one of the people still hoping for the DLC and waiting for it to come here. Other people might have already moved on. I know for a fact that because of how some devs treat GoG some people have already stopped buying games on here.
Your idea suffers from one single problem, namely that you think people keep on monitoring the games they reviewed, let alone have an interest in rereviewing the game when a new update comes out. That only happens for the few games we individually care about. There is at least one game I reviewed on steam that I ended up refunding. Needles to say it was a bad review. Does that mean that review will be valid till the end of time? No. The review might have already been made obsolete by another patch.
But that's not my problem, it's the developer's. We review the game at a point in time. We have no obligation to the dev to rereview their games because they fixed the problems we had with their game. If they don't want bad reviews then they shouldn't launch their games in the kind of state that requires repeated patches. But we're around two decades beyond when devs would actually launch complete games. What you're doing with your comment is putting the onerous on us, reviewers who bought the game, as opposed to putting it on the dev for releasing a broken product they had to fix with subsequent patches. We reviewed the product we got, and what we got wasn't what other people bought on other platforms,
for the same price, under the same name, from the same game developer. Writing "this game is out of date" and writing " at the time of writing this game is out of date" are equal from your perspective. Neither tells the new user if the game is still out of date at whatever point in the future they might be reading the review. And as I said, most people don't care enough about a game they've already reviewed, let alone one they reviewed negatively to check if the review is still valid. The problem isn't theirs, it's the devs who'd presumably still be trying to sell new units.
I didn't write the review because I wanted to hurt the dev, no more then I write positive reviews to help a dev. I write reviews for the same reason most people write reviews, because a game really clicked with us, or because we were really disappointed in the game. Just go to the West of Loathing store page and look at the number of games the
reviewers own compared to the number of reviews they left. Most games we own are never going to get a review. Not because we didn't play them, because we don't think they're worth the effort to review. Neither good enough, nor bad enough - or sometimes we just have nothing to say. Your whole point puts the onerous on me, and why? because I tried helping other people? how about you look at how the devs behaved with their clients on GoG.com.
I did my duty as it were. I informed potential clients the game was out of date on GoG. If that hurts the developers then maybe they shouldn't have held the last updates and the DLC from being released on here for a full year. But to dare say I have some sort of responsibility. I'm the fucking client mate, not the developer. I reviewed the game as a service to other potential customers, not because the dev or gog payed me. I payed money for that game, not the other way around. The only "responsibility" I had was to make sure the original review was honest and, at the time, accurate, not to keep my review topica; not when the developers keep shifting the goalpoast via updates.
I'm sorry mate but you're putting this responsibility on the wrong people. The moment the devs embraced update culture, and stopped releasing their games when they were done and good is the moment they accepted inaccurate reviews. The moment they started releasing their games on more then one platform and started staggering their updates on some of those platforms is the moment they made comparing the same game on multiple platforms ok. The developer is the one responsible for those negative reviews, not the people that left them. They should have to live with the consequences of their actions.
PS. Sorry for the long rant, but this happens so often on here. GoG is full of games that are out of date compared to Steam, but which are sold at the same price they are on Steam. Some games are literally years out of date or never got even one patch. We as buyers and reviewers shouldn't be responsible for negative reviews that might hurt product sales when the behavior of the devs is the one causing said negative reviews.
