How does review bombing work?
Vocal groups online keep flooding sites like Rotten Tomatoes to bomb the reviews of TV shows that have "gone woke"
I’ve seen so many things get review bombed over the years from video games (Spore, Death Stranding, Helldivers II) to movies to TV shows (The Boys twice) to even books. I never paused to consider how this phenomenon actually works.
“Review bombing” involves a coordinated campaign to flood review websites with negative low-rated reviews in response to things like political messaging, production issues, quality, or controversies surrounding a piece of media. These bombings can take place on websites like Rotten Tomatoes or the star ratings of an Amazon page.
These reviews can be posted by a group of people in concert or by bots flooding the service with 1-star reviews with no actual “review” attached.
Recently two TV shows have both been review bombed for their politics, The Boys and Star Wars: The Acolyte. There’s no nice way to put this, but, a bunch of incels got mad about there being lesbians in a show about space wizards and decided to take it out on Rotten Tomatoes. The Acolyte currently sits at a 14% audience score (higher scores are good, lower scores are bad), versus an 85% average critics rating. Meanwhile, The Boys season 4 is being review bombed because viewers just now realized that Homelander is a M.A.G.A. stand-in and the show’s villain. *Gasp*
The Boys was review bombed back in season 2 because fans didn’t like the release schedule for the show and decided to voice their dissatisfaction in 1-star reviews on Amazon Prime Video.
Typically you can spot a review bomb on Rotten Tomatoes by looking at the discrepancy between critic and audience scores. While critics and audiences don’t always agree, they usually aren’t off by magnitudes either.
Valve, the operators of the Steam PC gaming storefront, have been dealing with review bombing for years. Back in 2017, it introduced histograms to show trends in reviews to spot potential review bombs and eventually implemented a tool to flag both positive and negative review campaigns and exclude those reviews from the overall score. You can look at any Steam page now and see a user score based on recent reviews, which helps to eliminate periods of temporary bias.
Steam also shows the number of reviews being counted in the recent and all time categories, giving users a good picture of how these ratings are being aggregated. I think more online retailers should adopt the guardrails that Valve has implemented here.
Reverse review bombing is also possible. When Ubisoft made Assassin’s Creed Unity free following the fire at the Notre Dame cathedral, users flooded the Steam reviews to praise Ubisoft and the game’s recreation of the cathedral for accuracy.
Does review bombing have an effect on the bottom line? It’s actually hard to say. Anecdotally, a review bomb of PayDay 2 didn’t seem to negatively impact sales and in fact the game did better during that time period than in other months. It’s possible that the negative attention actually just acts as publicity for the product and attract more people to it.
I know I only watched the series finale of Game of Thrones because I was told how bad it was and I had to see it for myself. And I wasn’t in a hurry to watch The Acolyte until I saw that it was being review bombed (I’m currently loving the series, four episodes in).
On the other hand, how many people are actually checking the score of something on Rotten Tomatoes before watching it? I can’t think of a single time I’ve bothered to look that information up before researching this article.