A review bomb is a malicious

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

phenomenon in which a large number of people or a few people with multiple accounts post negative

user review A user review is a review conducted by any person who has access to the internet and publishes their experience to a review site or social media platform following product testing or the evaluation of a service. User reviews are commonly provided ...

s online in an attempt to harm the sales or popularity of a product, a service, or a business. While a large number of negative reviews may simply be the result of a large number of customers independently criticizing something for poor quality, a review bomb may also be driven by a desire to draw attention to perceived cultural or political issues, perhaps especially if the vendor seems unresponsive or inaccessible to direct feedback. Review bombing also typically takes place over a short period of time and meant to disrupt established ratings that a product already has at review sites, sometimes backed by campaigns organized through online message boards. It may be used as a mass-movement-driven

coercion Coercion involves compelling a party to act in an involuntary manner through the use of threats, including threats to use force against that party. It involves a set of forceful actions which violate the free will of an individual in order to i ...

tactic, as a form of protest, or may simply be a form of

trolling In slang, a troll is a person who posts deliberately offensive or provocative messages online (such as in social media, a newsgroup, a internet forum, forum, a chat room, an Multiplayer video game, online video game) or who performs similar be ...

. Review bombing is a similar practice to

vote brigading Vote brigading is massively coordinated online voting. It refers to the practice of affecting reviews or scores on websites that feature crowdvoting, such as online stores or review websites, by calling on large numbers of people to submit review ...

. The practice is most commonly aimed at online media

review aggregator A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews and ratings of products and services, such as films, books, video games, music, software, hardware, or cars. This system then stores the reviews to be used for supporting a website where user ...

s, such as

Steam Steam is water vapor, often mixed with air or an aerosol of liquid water droplets. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporization. Saturated or superheated steam is inv ...

Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...

IMDb IMDb, historically known as the Internet Movie Database, is an online database of information related to films, television series, podcasts, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and biograp ...

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review aggregator, review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee ...

, or app stores. It may be motivated by unpopular changes to an established franchise, political or cultural controversies related to the product or service, or to the actions of its developers, vendors, or owners. Some owners of aggregate systems have devised means to detect or prevent review bombing, such as only allowing reviews from official sources such as web sites and/or magazines and, in the case of

, only allowing people who legitimately own the game to leave a review on it.

Origin

One of the first appearances of the term "review bomb" was in a 2008 ''

Ars Technica ''Ars Technica'' is a website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, sci ...

'' article by Ben Kuchera describing the effect in regards to ''

Spore In biology, a spore is a unit of sexual reproduction, sexual (in fungi) or asexual reproduction that may be adapted for biological dispersal, dispersal and for survival, often for extended periods of time, in unfavourable conditions. Spores fo ...

'', in which users left negative reviews on

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

citing the game's perceived lackluster gameplay and digital rights management system. Kuchera wrote "Review-bombing Amazon is a particularly nasty way of getting the point across as well; casual gamers who aren't aware of this campaign may not bother to read the content of the reviews and only assume the game isn't very good."

History

Video games

The increasing prevalence of review bombing was precipitated by the increase in influence of online user reviews in the main storefronts where games are sold, combined with little to no oversight of the content of these reviews. This is particularly true in the case of Steam, the predominant seller of

PC game A personal computer game, or abbreviated PC game, also known as a computer game, is a video game played on a personal computer (PC). The term ''PC game'' has been popularly used since the 1990s referring specifically to games on "Wintel" (Micr ...

s, where user reviews are often the only way for

indie game An indie video game or indie game (short for independent video game) is a video game created by individuals or smaller development teams without the financial and technical support of a large game publisher, in contrast to most "AAA" (triple-A ...

s to gain attraction on the service. According to Steam Spy, review bombing generally has little effect on a game's sales, and may in fact even increase them due to the resulting wave of

publicity In marketing, publicity is the public visibility or awareness for any product, service, person or organization. It may also refer to the movement of information from its source to the general public, often (but not always) via the media. The sub ...

. However, it may be a symptom of decreased customer goodwill, which can have a more long-lasting effect on the publisher, developers or game series being criticized. Depending on how such situations are resolved, the effects of a review bomb may be reversed by the removal of negative reviews as in the case of '' Titan Souls'', ''

Death Stranding ''Death Stranding'' is a 2019 action-adventure game developed by Kojima Productions and originally published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It is the first game from director Hideo Kojima and Kojima Productions after their split from Konam ...

'', and '' Helldivers 2''.

Film and television

Theatrical films and television series have also been subject to review bombing, typically due to perceived social issues related to the cast and crew and not due to any aspect of the film or series itself. This extends not only to user review scores on sites like Rotten Tomatoes but to the film's promotional trailers on YouTube.

Amazon Prime Video Amazon Prime Video, known simply as Prime Video, is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming television service owned by Amazon. The service primarily distributes films and television series produced or co-produced by ...

series '' The Boys'' second season was review bombed due to its release schedule, and fourth season due to its politics.

YouTube

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

's voting system has also been used for review bombing, where dissatisfaction over a creator or a video's content may attract campaigns to "dislike" a video on mass scale, with a goal to be among the most-disliked videos on the service. In December 2018,

YouTube Rewind 2018 ''YouTube Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind'' (also known as ''YouTube Rewind 2018'') is a video that was uploaded to the official channel of the video-sharing website YouTube on December 6, 2018, as the ninth installment of the '' YouTub ...

overtook

Justin Bieber Justin Drew Bieber ( ; born March 1, 1994) is a Canadian singer. Regarded as a pop icon, he is recognized for his multi-genre musical performances. He was discovered by record executive Scooter Braun in 2008 and subsequently brought to the U ...

's "

Baby In common terminology, a baby is the very young offspring of adult human beings, while infant (from the Latin word ''infans'', meaning 'baby' or 'child') is a formal or specialised synonym. The terms may also be used to refer to Juvenile (orga ...

" music video as the most disliked video; it was universally panned and faced criticism for its exclusion of various top personalities on the service, as well as other factors relating to controversies affecting video authors and criticism of YouTube itself. In November 2021, YouTube announced that it will remove the public dislike counts from all videos across the platform. Although the dislike button is still in place, this change effectively rendered the "dislike" bombing pointless.

Businesses

Websites offering user reviews of businesses and other establishments, such as

TripAdvisor Tripadvisor is an American company that operates online travel agency, travel agencies, comparison shopping websites, and mobile apps with user-generated content. Its namesake brand, Tripadvisor.com, operates in 40 countries and 20 languages, and ...

and

Yelp Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publishes crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in S ...

, can also be subject to review bombing in relation to controversies surrounding their proprietors. A notable example included an

Elizabeth, New Jersey Elizabeth is a City (New Jersey), city in and the county seat of Union County, New Jersey, Union County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey.2016 New York and New Jersey bombings suspect (with many reviews jokingly referring to its chicken as being " the bomb"). Yelp intervened by removing reviews not based on first-hand experience with the restaurant. During the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, some restaurants have faced review bombs from the anti-vaccination community for enforcing vaccine passport rules.

Authors

One-star reviews for Gabrielle Zevin's '' Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,'' stated “Zionist author” and "It’s not something trendy to be a Zionist; you should know better as someone supposed to be educated to have the right to publish a book.” Some of the reviews appeared before the book had been released. Other examples include Lisa Barr's ''Woman on Fire,'' Talia Carner's ''The Boy With the Star Tattoo,'' and a romance novel by Jean Meltzer. Barr commented, “I know that I’m on a list with other Jewish authors on TikTok”''.''

Effects

In some cases, storefronts and aggregates have intervened to stop review bombs and delete the negative reviews. In February 2019, Rotten Tomatoes announced that it would no longer accept user reviews for a film until after its official release. In 2017,

Valve A valve is a device or natural object that regulates, directs or controls the flow of a fluid (gases, liquids, fluidized solids, or Slurry, slurries) by opening, closing, or partially obstructing various passageways. Valves are technically Pip ...

added review

histogram A histogram is a visual representation of the frequency distribution, distribution of quantitative data. To construct a histogram, the first step is to Data binning, "bin" (or "bucket") the range of values— divide the entire range of values in ...

s to

user review scores to show how these change over time; according to Valve's Alden Kroll, this can help a potential purchaser of a game recognize a short term review bomb that is not indicative of the game itself, compared to a game that has a long tail of bad reviews. Kroll said they did not want to silence the ability of users to leave reviews but recognized they needed to highlight phenomena like review bombs to aid customers. In March 2019, Valve stated that it would employ a new system to detect spikes of negative "off-topic" reviews on games: if it is determined that they were the result of a review bomb campaign, the time period will be flagged, and all reviews made during that period (whether negative or positive) will be excluded from the user rating displayed for a game. This system was first publicly triggered upon the ''

Borderlands 3 ''Borderlands 3'' is a 2019 action role-playing first-person shooter video game developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K. It is a sequel to 2012's '' Borderlands 2'', and the fourth entry in the main ''Borderlands'' series. ''Borderla ...

'' review bombing in April 2019. Similarly, Valve stepped in to stop negative reviews of ''

Rocket League ''Rocket League'' is a 2015 vehicular Association football, soccer video game developed and published by Psyonix for various home consoles and computers. A sequel to 2008's ''Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars'', ''Rocket League ...

'', following the May 2019 announcement that its developer

Psyonix Psyonix LLC is an American video game developer based in San Diego. It was founded in 2000 by Dave Hagewood with the team of his Internet-focused company WebSite Machines. After canceling its first two projects, Psyonix created ''VehicleMOD'', ...

had been acquired by Epic Games (leading to uncertainty over whether it would eventually become exclusive to the Epic Games Store). Valve said that they had to intervene 44 times in 2019 to stop review bombing on Steam. In 2018,

attempted to broaden and diversify its list of approved critics, who were largely white and male, in an attempt to improve its rating experience. By March 2019, the site no longer accepted audience reviews of a film until after its premiere, as part of an effort to counter pre-release review bombing. Further, it would only accept reviews from persons that have been confirmed to have seen the movie, as verified through theater chains like

Regal Cinemas Regal Cinemas (also Regal Entertainment Group) is an American movie theater chain that operates the second-largest theater circuit in the United States, with 5,720 screens in 420 theaters as of December 31, 2024. Founded on August 10, 1989, it ...

, Cinemark, and

AMC Theatres AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. (doing business as AMC Theatres, originally an abbreviation for American Multi-Cinema; often referred to simply as AMC) is an American movie theater chain founded in Kansas City, Missouri, and now headquartered ...

, or through online ticket sales though

Fandango Fandango is a lively partner dance originating in Portugal and Spain, usually in triple metre, triple meter, traditionally accompanied by guitars, castanets, tambourine or hand-clapping. Fandango can both be sung and danced. Sung fandango is u ...

. In February 2020, ''

Kunai A is a Japanese multipurpose tool and weapon thought to be originally derived from the masonry trowel. Design A ''kunai'' normally had a leaf-shaped wrought blade in lengths ranging from and a handle with a ring on the pommel for attach ...

'' by TurtleBlaze was review bombed on Metacritic, decreasing its user rating from 8.1 to 1.7 within a day. The studio, having no idea what they had done to trigger this, found that the review bomb was initiated by a single user, using numerous freshly created email addresses to register accounts at Metacritic as to bring down the user rating, all to demonstrate that a single person could have this effect. As Metacritic had no policy to handle or identify review bombing, this scoring impacted the game. Following the review bombing of '' The Last of Us Part II'' in July 2020, Metacritic added a 36-hour delay for user reviews to be added for a newly released game, with users given the message "Please spend some time playing the game" during this period. This was intended to prevent users from adding reviews without having completed a game and minimize the number of reviews that may be added as a result of a review bomb.

Reverse review bomb

Infrequently, a review bomb may be used to praise the game, developers or publishers for other actions that players see as beneficial. One such case was for ''

Assassin's Creed Unity ''Assassin's Creed Unity'' is a 2014 action-adventure game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released in November 2014 for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One, and in December 2020 for Stadia. It is the eighth majo ...

'', in the week following the Notre-Dame de Paris fire in April 2019. Ubisoft had made ''Unity'' free via its storefront UPlay, as the game included a recreation of the Notre Dame Cathedral. Steam users left numerous positive reviews for the game in the days that followed, with many thanking the developers for the free game and others expressing appreciation for the cathedral's recreation. ''Unity,'' which was released in 2014, had received mixed reviews prior to this event due to bugs and technical problems with the game's launch. While such an event had triggered Valve's safeguards against review bombs, they opted to not enforce it since the effect was meant to be positive. A reverse review bomb may also be initiated by users to try to counter generally negative reviews from critics. ''

Balan Wonderworld is a 2021 platformer, platform game developed by Arzest and Balan Company and published by Square Enix. Assuming the role of two children guided by a magical being called Balan, the player explores twelve worlds themed after the hearts of trou ...

'' was panned upon its launch with a sub-50% Metacritic aggregate score as well as negative user reviews early after its release, but after a few days, a suspect reverse review bomb began with users submitting perfect reviews with similar commentary to reverse the user trend's scores towards a more positive value. Like negative forms of review bombs, positive review bombs have also occurred as form of protest, such as in the case of anime series '' Interspecies Reviewers'', where it was subject of a positive review bomb campaign targeting the series'

MyAnimeList MyAnimeList, often abbreviated as MAL, is an anime and manga social networking and social cataloging application website run by volunteers. The site provides its users with a list-like system to organize and score anime and manga. It facilitate ...

page. The campaign was initiated by anime

r Nux Taku in response to

Funimation Funimation was an American Video on demand#Subscription models, subscription video on-demand Over-the-top media service, over-the-top Streaming media, streaming service. Launched in 2016, the service was one of the leading distributors of anime ...

removing the series from its online streaming platform. In wake of the closure of

Tango Gameworks Tango Gameworks Inc. is a Japanese video game developer based in Tokyo. Founded in March 2010 by Shinji Mikami, previously of Capcom, the company was acquired by ZeniMax Media in October that year after suffering financial issues. Tango develo ...

Microsoft Gaming Microsoft Gaming is an American multinational video game and digital entertainment division of Microsoft based in Redmond, Washington, established in 2022. Its five development and publishing labels consist of: Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda Soft ...

in May 2024, players used positive review bombing of its games like ''

The Evil Within ''The Evil Within'' is a 2014 survival horror, survival horror game developed by Tango Gameworks and published by Bethesda Softworks. It was directed by ''Resident Evil'' series creator Shinji Mikami. The game centers on protagonist Sebastian Ca ...

'' and '' Hi-Fi Rush'' on Steam to protest the studio's closure. A negative review bomb can also backfire and incite a positive review bomb of the same target. For example, '' AI: The Somnium Files'' was review bombed on Metacritic in February 2020 by a single person through the use of numerous

sock puppet account A sock puppet, sock puppet account, or simply sock is a false online identity used for deceptive purposes. The term originally referred to a sock puppet, hand puppet made from a sock. Sock puppets include online identities created to praise, ...

s. The individual initially claimed that this was meant to highlight the flaws of Metacritic's user review system, but later admitted it was actually because they were upset with how a character in the game was written. Before the cause of the review bomb was known, the game's director

Kotaro Uchikoshi is a Japanese video game director and writer. He is known for his work on visual novel games, including the ''Infinity'' and '' Zero Escape'' series. His writing style often incorporates elements of science fiction with various scientific and p ...

used social media to ask for help from fans, who responded by posting positive reviews of the game in an effort to cancel out the negative review bomb. When Metacritic became aware of the review bombing, the negative reviews were removed from the game's page but the positive reviews that were posted in response remained, inflating the game's user score and causing it to temporarily be the website's top-rated Nintendo Switch game of all time while drawing further attention to the game as a result of the failed review bomb attempt. ''

Fallout 76 ''Fallout 76'' is a 2018 action role-playing game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It is an installment in the ''Fallout'' series and a prequel to previous entries. Initially set in the year 2102, players ...

'' had been originally released to negative reviews by both critics and players on its initial release, but its developers

Bethesda Softworks Bethesda Softworks LLC is an American video game publisher based in Rockville, Maryland. The company was founded by Christopher Weaver in 1986 as a Division (business), division of Media Technology Limited. In 1999, it became a subsidiary of Z ...

put effort into improving the game over the following year. By the time the game released to Steam in April 2020, many considered the game to have been reinvented for the better in a manner similar to '' Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn'' and ''

No Man's Sky ''No Man's Sky'' is an Action-adventure game, action-adventure survival game developed and published by Hello Games. It was released worldwide for the PlayStation 4 and Windows in August 2016, for Xbox One in July 2018, for the PlayStation 5 an ...

''. However, players still upset over several faults with the game's launch attempted to review bomb the game on Steam at this point. The game's community worked to counter this review bomb by posting positive experiences and reviews of the game at Steam and at other community sites to prove the game had been much improved upon the initial release.