Players still have a few weeks to wait until they can get their hands on Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield, but that hasn’t stopped some disgruntled gamers from planning a review bombing campaign against the sci-fi RPG. The Starfield review bomb plans come as excitement about the long-awaited PC and Xbox open-world title has begun to reach a fever pitch ahead of its September 6 release.
Upset by its PC and Xbox exclusivity, disgruntled gamers are planning a Starfield review bomb campaign
With a massive open galaxy and gameplay that’s been described as more grounded than previous Bethesda games, Starfield has had gamers excited ever since its 2018 reveal. But even as some players ponder what sort of character they’ll create when it’s released, disgruntled gamers are already planning a Starfield review bomb campaign. The plan to drive down Starfield’s Metacritic score was brought to light in a new post on Twitter, which tried to bring the scheme to the attention of the popular rating site.
Seemingly driven by frustration over Starfield’s PC and Xbox exclusivity, some disgruntled gamers are planning to tank the game’s Metacritic score upon release. A Twitter post by a user named XbotTears360 claimed that they had created the first of 1000 planned fake accounts to review bomb Starfield. A reply to the post claimed it was “payback time” for negative reviews about PlayStation exclusive titles before adding that they’d created 100 fake accounts to artificially drive down Starfield’s review score.
Another poster claimed in early August that they’d spoken to “a ton of ps gamers” who planned to similarly review bomb Starfield using fake accounts. Review bombing campaigns have, unfortunately, become increasingly common on Metacritic. While some titles are targeted simply for being exclusive to a particular console others end up in the crosshairs over culture war issues, as happened with The Last of Us Part II following its inclusion of LGBTQIA+ characters. With bonuses often being tied to a game’s Metacritic rating, these sorts of review bombing campaigns can lead to designers and developers losing out on a potentially sizable amount of money.
