The phenomenon known as review bombing, described as a tool created by the industry when treating the player as a mere number, gained prominence with the release of Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls. This title, developed by Arc System Works and distributed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, was released on Steam on August 6, 2026, and quickly accumulated 60% negative reviews, causing its overall score to drop to 'Mixed'. However, the dissatisfaction was not due to aspects like balancing or characters, but rather to a specific requirement imposed on PC users.
Most negative reviews pointed to performance issues, such as Sony SDK processes running in the background, overloading the processor even when the GPU was operating below capacity, in addition to instability on powerful machines that could not maintain 60 frames per second. The settings menu was also criticized for its poor implementation, and the netcode presented synchronization failures in online matches. However, the most critical point was the mandatory linking of the PC version to a PSN account, a practice that has already caused trouble in recent Sony releases, preventing the game from being accessible in 132 countries without PSN support. Up until the publication of the first news reports, neither Arc System Works nor Sony had issued official statements.
In response to the performance issues, Arc System Works responded more promptly, stating that it was aware of the performance difficulties faced by some PC players and that its team was conducting investigations. This incident echoes past situations, such as the imposition of PSN in Helldivers 2, which Sony reversed in less than three days, and the case of The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, where the account link was made optional, offering rewards instead of imposing the restriction.
The concept of review bombing did not originate with Marvel Tōkon or Helldivers 2. Valve had been dealing with this problem since at least 2017, when it introduced a histogram to segment reviews by period, allowing visualization of negative score peaks without removing them from the overall calculation. Two years later, in March 2019, Valve implemented a near real-time anomalous activity detection system. This occurred after Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light were targets of coordinated attacks, motivated by Deep Silver's decision to make Metro Exodus exclusive to the Epic Games Store, causing frustrated players with the distribution policy to vent their anger on previous titles in the franchise.
This pattern was reinforced a month later when over 4,000 negative reviews were filtered from Borderlands 1 and 2, posted by players dissatisfied with the announcement that Borderlands 3 would be exclusive to the Epic Games Store. In both examples, the true focus of the dissatisfaction was not the game itself, but a business decision made by the publisher, and the overall score became the only channel to express this discontent.
A more evident example of how review bombing can influence corporate decisions occurred in May 2024. On Friday, the 3rd, Sony announced that Helldivers 2 PC players would have to link a PSN account to continue playing, a measure that would restrict the game's access in 177 countries without platform support. In just 48 hours, over 200,000 negative reviews caused the game's score to drop from 'Extremely Positive' to 'Mixed'.
This was not a trivial complaint, as it involved the possibility of losing access to an already purchased game. In approximately three days, Sony yielded and canceled the account requirement. The CEO of Arrowhead publicly acknowledged the power of this mobilization, admitting that the community achieved in a weekend what months of forum discussions would hardly achieve.
This episode became a milestone. When the target is a reversible decision made by a company that depends on public satisfaction, review bombing establishes itself as the most effective way to resolve the impasse. This succession of events, from Metro to Marvel Tōkon, led Valve to change its approach. Instead of merely flagging waves of negative reviews and waiting for the natural recovery of the score, the company began nullifying the weight of these reviews in the overall score calculation whenever they are classified as off-topic, such as DRM changes, exclusivity contract alterations, or terms of use changes.
Reviews remain visible for those who wish to read the full account, but they are marked as excluded from the score calculation. Users can reactivate the view that includes these attack periods through an option in the store settings. Valve justifies this methodology by claiming that the average Steam user does not consider such matters relevant enough to impact the final rating of a game. It is a middle ground: it preserves the protest without allowing it to unilaterally determine the value of a title.
Not all review bombing stems from a clear decision by the publisher, such as account requirements or platform exclusivity. In 2024, Take-Two began formally listing review bombing as a business risk for investors, after two cases in its own catalog suffered such an attack: NBA 2K24 and GTA Trilogy. NBA 2K24 received a 'Very Negative' rating with almost 3,000 reviews in four days, motivated by a microtransaction system that turned MyTeam into pay-to-win and by a PC version with graphics and animations inferior to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, in addition to bugs inherited from the previous game. Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy, the remastering of classic titles, was released with flaws such as distorted character models, missing textures, and crashes, resulting in user scores between 0.4 and 0.9 on Metacritic, depending on the platform. Rockstar had removed the original classic games (GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas) from sale upon the remaster's launch. Due to the strong negative reaction, the company apologized, returned the classics to stores, and offered them for free to those who had purchased the remastered version.
In these two cases, the dissatisfaction did not come from a decision external to the game, but from the product itself: price, quality, or unfulfilled promise. When the bombing arises from an inherent problem with the game, it returns to the original function of the Steam rating. The community is the engine that defines the product, being who uses and evaluates it. The problem lies in the fact that many companies show disinterest in the community, mistakenly believing that it lacks influence. As long as companies continue to make decisions focused solely on profit, the community will continue to find ways to pressure them.
Although there are situations where review bombing was unnecessary, these do not represent the majority of cases. After all, the community is made up of human beings, and in any group, there will always be a more extreme and less tolerant segment. Companies need to invest more in research, carefully read comments on their social networks, and analyze sincere reviews before attacks occur. As long as they ignore this feedback, the community will continue to take the lead, using review bombing as a tool to seek solutions.