Random: What Happened To User Reviews On The Xbox Store?

Yea not sure why this was removed. But look at how badly they screwed up the Xbox app for......reasons? This kind of stuff makes no sense.

I actually used to enjoy the funny and often crude comments on there. I have genuinely laughed out loud at some of them.

If I wear a boring hat for a moment, well they were not moderated well and often totally inappropriate, and sometimes absolutely irrelevant. But still, I found them entertaining.

Why can't all stores just have reviews like they do on Amazon? Or Steam?

For a time, it was nice that the store had actual user reviews when PSN did not. You could rate games on there, but that was useless really when you couldn't read what people thought. I'm assuming maybe people were abusing it now (like the Metacritic fiasco with The Last of Us Part II and such) and that's why they took it away? Otherwise it makes no sense.

It was removed by my guess to suppress opinions. Eventually a game will release that is divisive. It will draw people to review bomb it. I have no problem with review bombing. Its a penalty to developers that do stupid things. They could change and learn but no, instead they will lobby stores to remove review's.

Sony removed reviews long ago. Nintendo tried to allow them for like 48 hours then disabled it quickly and never mentioned it again. I'm sure MS is both just following what everyone else does and learning why everyone else did what they did. And the publishers are almost certainly pushing to suppress user reviews given most are dumpster fires.

Plus, since MS's whole shtick right now is getting people to try tons of games on Game Pass, reviews probably worked against that, with people choosing to try it or not based on what everybody else thinks and a numeric score rather than just trying games that you don't know if you'll like them or not, which is the entire business model of Game Pass - to get you to try games you otherwise might not have (and then buy them.)

Which is where the Sony fandom always gets it wrong about Game Pass. The endless refrain of "but it loses money, it's not sustainable" is right, on the surface, of course it "loses money" giving tons of access to games for a low monthly fee. But the point of GP isn't to sell GP subs alone, it's to get you to buy games you try and like for a low fee to rent. Phil's said many times GP subscribers buy more, not less games. Mediocre reviews means people are less likely to try that game that looks cool but they never heard of. And thus they're less likely to buy said game.

The funniest use of the reviews though was when NHL...18...19? Was the Gold game of the month. The torrent of 1 star reviews complaining they got it with gold and paid too much, such a rip-off was comedy gold!

It goes without saying that people should do their homework before spending their money on a game, but reviews do give you a quick “at-a-glance” average rating of what others think of a title. This just sounds like a poor attempt on Microsoft’s part to deter people giving negative feedback, which would obviously reduce sales for the affected titles...negative feedback = less sales = less money for Microsoft, who obviously get a cut from each sale.

Reviews should stay but add restrictions like must have logged over an hour of playtime

@Kefka2589 They should add Taco Bell. The OFFICIAL junk food of Xbox!

This just means we'll have to do a bit more research before we buy

Microsoft offer no quality control whatsoever (so much so that 'Kung Fu Arcade' is now showing as unavailable because it's completely broken) so it's important that user reviews - as well as the ability to use the official club to view user screenshots and clips- should be there.

But there again i'm an active reviewer (I review EVERYTHING I purchase) with an abject disliking to Microsoft's new found supression of freedom of expression so I guess my opinion is slightly biased

(ps) I do like the above mentioned idea of time restricted reviews though. That makes sense