There was a time, not long ago, that people relied on word of mouth when making (purchasing) decisions. If you needed some product, you’d ask if anybody else had experience or recommendations. You knew the tastes and biases of your friends/family and could steer around that. You also knew that if multiple people in your community actually used that product, it had to be at least somewhat good.
Then, advertising exploded. Suddenly you were bombarded with ads telling you how amazing a product was and that you needed it now. This worked for a short time, until people realized the ads were lying and manipulating them, and stopped believing them outright. This may seem silly, but it’s true. If you’ve never seen an ad before in your life, how would you know it’s lying? If your only shopping experience has been to visit the local shop, point at the thing you want, and get it … how can you assume that others aren’t as honest about it?
Not long after, the internet and online shopping exploded too. Now people were incredibly skeptical of basically everything. There are stories of really great companies making really great products, but people just couldn’t find them online or didn’t trust them. Why? Because, increasingly, people relied on reviews. They knew that a company’s claims couldn’t be trusted. They knew advertisements lied. And so they tried to return to the old method: asking other humans what they thought of this product or experience.
The issue, of course, is that it’s not the same at all. Online reviews aggregate the opinions of a huge number of people. And they are people you don’t know, so you don’t know their personality, their biases, their reason for even using the product.
Even worse, once companies realized everyone put 100% faith in reviews, they started abusing that too. On most platforms it’s a death sentence to let your reviews/rating drop below a 4 or even 4.5 (out of 5 stars). Everyone is fighting to artificially raise their scores to be an almost perfect 5 out of 5 stars, and customers automatically ignore anything that doesn’t fit the mold. To their own detriment, while others are laughing and raking in the profit.
Reviews are so incredibly powerful and important, that it’s the rule on certain platforms—rather than the exception—to cheat the system. It’s standard fare on the Play Store/App Store to buy thousands of positive reviews when your app/game launches. And for a good reason! Those games end up at the top and become popular/profitable. Very well-crafted games that simply don’t buy fake reviews … struggle to even get noticed. There are absolutely beautiful, fun, engaging mobile games that nobody ever played purely because they didn’t buy fake reviews by the thousands.
And now we reached a moment in time where reviews are everything.
New movie came out? And you were excited to see it for 3 months? Well, the early reviews say it’s only a 6/10. So we’re not even going to see it anymore, what a disappointment.
New game came out? You loved the first one and waited for the sequel for 2 years? Well, some reviewers say the game is too hard/boring/crashes a lot for them. So you’re going to tell everyone the game is bad and not even try it.
New iPhone released? And your old phone is absolutely fine and you promised yourself not to get a new one? Well, many reviewers are calling this great value for your money, and it has even MORE cameras than before, so obviously we have to buy it now!
Everyone around me looks at reviews first and last. They let random strangers decide if something is good or bad, and then only go for the “good” things. And for what? People are shooting themselves in the foot. They’re missing out on the things they’d actually like. They’re missing out on new experiences and being open-minded. They’re missing out on actual good deals or products they really needed, while those cheating the reviews are laughing their asses off.
And because it’s so abundant I am always tempted to fall into the same trap. I have been interested in a movie/game/book before, but completely dropped it upon seeing some bad reviews. And I hate that. I have to consciously tell myself not to do it. To give something a chance even if the rating is a “6/10”. To buy a product I think will be perfect, based on its specifications/brand/use cases, despite some people giving it a 1/10 and seemingly being incredibly angry at those who made it for some reason.
Because experience showed, time and time again, that this rating was useless to me. Books that many people hated became my favorites upon reading them. Films everyone said were not worth your time were a pretty good time if you asked me. Games that “flopped” still inspired me in many ways by trying to play it. The fact that some stranger, in a completely different situation, with completely different preferences, did or did not like something … is pretty irrelevant, isn’t it?
And so my message is pretty self-explanatory: stop checking (online) reviews and letting them (almost) completely decide your behavior.
No, they’re not the same as organic word of mouth. No, they’re not actually valuable or meaningful in any way, most of the time. No, they’re usually not even from actual humans relating actual experiences.
By doing this, you’re missing the things you actually like or want. You’re neglecting to support people creating actually valuable things and not (perhaps illegally) gaming the system. It’s not doing you nor the creators any favors!
It just breaks my heart a little. And so I wanted to give specific examples of this that I came across in just the past few weeks. To show how incredibly silly it is to rely (solely) on reviews and how abundant the problems are.
A Board Game Example
Example 1: A board game came out last year that looked very interesting to me. It’s rare to see a cooperative board game ( = you work together against the game, instead of against each other) with very simple rules that my family would easily understand and play with me. (In fact, only yesterday it won the prestigious “Game of the Year” award!)
This game uses “missions”. The very first mission is so simple that you can start playing in 1 minute. The next mission adds a new rule and is slightly harder, and so forth, until the final mission is this big final test with all the rules enabled.
I love this system. It’s the best way to make any board game very quick and simple to teach and just start playing. You grow into the complexity and more complicated rules over time. A 15-minute explainer turns into a 1-minute explainer and a fun first play without real stakes. Then, as you get hooked on the game, you play the next mission, and the next, and before you know it everyone completely understands a more complicated and strategical version of the game without effort or pausing to teach anything.
Great system in theory and practice. Always use it with my own games if I can.
Almost like a reflex, however, I quickly checked the reviews for this game before buying.
The first string of reviews gave the game a 4, 5 or 6 out of 10. It took a while to reach one that actually provided an explanation! Here’s a summary of their review:
Solid and interesting game, but I hate the “teach the game with dumbed-down missions” structure. We’re not stupid! We want to play the full game from the start!
See that? They actually liked the game itself. But they gave it a low score because they hated that mission structure. You know, the one that I (as a game designer) love and use all the time, and would always recommend.
Their reason for giving the game a 5/10 instead of 9/10 is the exact reason why I would give the ratings the other way around. It’s irrelevant to me. Their review means nothing to me as the thing they hate is the thing I actually like. Most people, though, don’t even give that explanation, making their review entirely useless however you look at it.
Okay, let’s move on to another review. This one gave the game only a 4/10. Their reason?
Yeah we had it on good authority that the early missions were too easy and that we should just start somewhere in the middle. So we did. We didn’t understand the game at all and found it too abstract/difficult. Not a great experience, not trying it again.
Did you catch that? They completely ignored the rules and setup and just started with a random mission in the middle. Which is bonkers. You’ve missed all the basic rules of the game, and now, without experience, jump into a “moderately hard” mission? Of course you’re going to be out of your depth! Of course you’re going to have no clue what you’re doing!
Their reason for disliking the game is because they tried to play without learning how to play. In other words, they’re idiots :p That review is irrelevant.
Okay, okay, let’s see if we can find something better. The next review that included written text was a 1/10. (People are more likely to write these big rants explaining why something is bad than to explain why they thought something was good. Anyway.) Their reason, summarized?
This OTHER GAME does this theme and game mechanics better. We already have the other game, so returning this one.
Notice something? They own some other game that I don’t have. They couldn’t stop comparing it to that game, and decided the other one was better.
Their reason for hating the game is because they already own a similar game they think is better. In other words, this is useless to me. I don’t own the other game. I had actually heard of that game, but didn’t play/pursue it because it didn’t stand out to me as a good game. Most likely, my preferences would be the inverse of this person, if I owned both games and really wanted to compare them.
In short, it took 5 pages of reviews before finding someone who actually gave some arguments and background as to why they liked/disliked certain parts of the game.
All these reviews are just irrelevant. They’re people with different expectations, different playgroups, different preferences. They’re people who just happened to be in a bad/good mood, people with more/less money than I have, people in another part of the world where the game might have some bad translations or whatever. Some are just idiots. They play the game while refusing to learn the rules first, or while insisting on playing the rules wrong.
If I had blindly checked the reviews and trusted them, I would not have picked the game as a special purchase. (I only have the money, and time/energy frankly, to get a new game once every year or so.)
And that would have been a shame. Because it’s a really really good game that I could teach in 1 minute and we all enjoyed playing during the holidays.
A Tech Product Example
Okay, let’s move away from art. That’s subjective, right? Let’s move to something more objective: buying a physical product as a tool.
In my case, I wanted a left-handed vertical mouse. For my posture (and chronic back injury) it’s good to use a vertical mouse in general, but also to alternate between using the left hand and the right hand. I already have a right-handed vertical mouse—now I was looking for a left-handed to match.
Wherever I looked, the reviews contained a lot of 1/5 stars. Suspiciously many. On every brand and variation I checked.
So I dove into the matter. At first, I didn’t understand the complaints. All of them said some variation of the following.
The mouse works fine, but the buttons are the WRONG WAY AROUND.
How? Why? How can this be a problem with ALL left-handed computer mice?
Some even went so far as to open up the mouse and rewire it themselves. Or explain within the review how to install software/change settings to flip the buttons on your computer.
Clearly, people cared about the product and spend considerable time with it. These were clearly human non-fake reviews, to say the least :p
But … maybe you already discovered the problem here …
A mouse has three buttons: left, middle, right. The left one is for your index finger. That’s the most natural position, the best finger to do it, it’s pretty much the requirement.
Your left hand … is a mirror image … of your right hand.
So a left-handed mouse will have the buttons “flipped” (right-middle-left), so that your index finger is again on that “left button”. You literally just have to place your left hand on it and try to use it, and you will see that it works exactly how it should and exactly like you’re used to. Mirrored because your hands are mirrored.
If they didn’t do this … you would be incredibly confused … as your left hand would be oriented exactly the wrong way to use the mouse well!
After many minutes of complete confusion and doubt, this realization dawned on me. I shrugged and bought the cheapest of these mice. As expected, I found the buttons to be exactly as they should. It’s just a right-handed mouse, but, like, mirrored for the left hand. This is probably the case for all of them. No issues at all. That 10 euro mouse still works great.
But a large percentage of people—say, 20%—were giving it 1 star reviews and endlessly complaining about “the buttons being the wrong way around”.
I’m not afraid to say it again: people are idiots :p Many people come at a product (or art) with a set of silly assumptions, and biases, and emotion/mood, and a specific budget and their emotions about that.
They will refuse to read a product description, then complain that the product works in a way they didn’t expect. They will have wild assumptions (such as the stubborn idea that mouse buttons should always be in some exact order, regardless of hand used) and refuse to waver, going as far as rewiring that 10 euro mouse to conform to their beliefs. They will buy an Apple computer and complain it doesn’t have Windows installed. They will buy a Wi-Fi dongle and complain it doesn’t receive Bluetooth. They will buy a screen without checking its dimensions and complain it’s too big for their workspace.
And most people … never explain this. At best you get a single line that mysteriously hints at their assumptions and problems with it. Most of the time, no (meaningful) text is provided at all. All you get is a large bunch of numbers, many of them very negative or very positive for reasons irrelevant to you.
And so I write this article to say you should stop putting stock into that.
Then what should we do instead?
For the most part, go back to the old way. Trust word of mouth or recommendations from people close to you that you know very well. Because something must be really good or really bad for people to start talking about it in real life. And when they do, you know that person well enough to know their biases, and background, and whether their criticism applies to you or not.
When this doesn’t work, just trust yourself. Read the specifications of what you’re going to buy. Or watch the trailer of that new movie. Ignore the reviews—if it interests you, go see it. If a product has what you need, and doesn’t have something you don’t need, then it’s probably safe to buy it.
And if that is impossible, actually go and visit a physical store. Have the product in your hands, test it in the store, and when you’re sure it’s the right thing take that one home. Not sure if a board game is your thing? Most stores offer to demo the game, or at least host some sort of game night or small convention where you can literally test the game before buying it.
We know how to do all this! We know to check and demo products in real life. We, somehow, unlearned this in favor of checking reviews that are irrelevant to us.
I want to say that reviews can be checked and can be a good indicator. But really … they’re not. That would open the door too much to allow people to continue this behavior. As stated, there are things with a very bad average rating that are my favorite, and there are things with a great average rating that were awful to me.
If you have to check online reviews, check in-depth written articles. Quick videos or social media posts are just that—clickbait, no arguments provided, just saying what gets you the most sponsors/clicks/engagement. (YouTube review channels are basically split between HATING on everything that is related to some specific topic, and by default LOVING everything related to some other topic.) Just a bunch of aggregated numbers without explanations are just that: random numbers from strangers.
Find a reviewer that aligns with your situation and your personal preferences. Then check their arguments for buying a product/playing a game/liking a movie, and if they seem solid to you, trust that.
It’s the only way to actually find what you want to find. To stop shooting yourself in the foot, and open yourself up to new art, new ideas, new tools that will stay part of your workflow for twenty years. And to stop giving liars and people buying fake reviews any power (and money) for free.
Those were my thoughts,
Tiamo