Japanese game dev shares frustration about harmful “ironic” negative reviews on Steam 

A zero-star review accompanied by a “funny” one-liner that reveals that the reviewer actually enjoyed the game – we’ve all seen at least a couple of them while trying to inform ourselves about a game, but it seems this phenomenon is unfortunately prevalent in the Japanese community as well. A Japanese game developer recently spoke out about the issue on social media, and the topic has received attention from users. 

Japanese indie game developer @ONIMUSHI_HYOGO posted on their X/Twitter account about the fake negative reviews they see people making “as jokes,” citing the example of users rating games poorly only to demonstrate stale humor such as “I got so hooked to this game my gf dumped me so I’m giving you a score of 0.” This definitely feels like a familiar sight. 

They go on to add that erotic games seem to fall victim to this phenomenon more often than other genres. 

@ONIMUSHI_HYOGO mentions how the meme reviews had once been a thing one could see predominantly with major titles, while it now seems to plague small creators as well. And this is an important distinction to make, as the impact of negative reviews is felt much more strongly by smaller titles. Not only does their overall score get more severely affected due to a lower total number of reviews, but, as opposed to big developers who have brand power and other means of promotion to fall back onto, small developers often have only their Steam page to go off. Meaning that, if their reputation dips down once, they may find it extremely hard to recover. 

On Steam, reviews very much translate into sales, so for small creators looking to make a living from making games, such meme reviews may very well be, as @ONIMUSHI_HYOGO mentions, a matter of life and death to them. 

Many users responded to the topic, but reactions were, as one would expect, quite unanimous – the act is unfunny and harmful. Many questioned what it is that’s stopping people from posting their little jokes while giving a positive rating, and indeed it is a mystery. For the most part, it’s likely more of a lack of awareness than ill-intentions. 

On the other hand, under such reviews, one can also often find a bunch of people “finding the review helpful,” which is a problem of its own as it makes the review far more prominent, and, less importantly, feeds the jokester’s ego. 

Earlier this year, marketing professional Ryan T. Brown also spoke of this issue, emphasizing that negative reviews have a far greater impact on the visibility and sales of games than the average person may think. 

While Steam’s algorithms can also be added to the conversation and criticized for the dramatic blows they deal to game’ visibility, the issue of simply being respectful to creators comes much before that. Especially in the case of smaller-scale, indie-developers, where leaving a review is a much more direct, human-to-human interaction.