Fast forward to 2024, and the discussions I see about the releases of games have very much changed. There is an expectation of perfect launches now. If the latest released game has less than 60 frames per second on older computers, there is a huge outcry, and the game will be review bombed. If the game developers or publishers announce any sort of further monetization, be it DLCs or micro-transactions, the game will be review bombed. If the game isn't perfectly balanced and polished, it will be review bombed.

The modern media culture of the internet and social media, where outrage means clicks, which means ad revenue, is in part to blame for that. And the result is a lot of fake news. If you followed the gaming news, you'll be aware that Capcom's latest release, Dragon's Dogma 2, was review bombed for various heinous crimes, from performance issues, to microtransactions, to bad game design decisions. But if you scratched beyond the surface, you found that some of the outrage-creating headlines were simply not factual. And the Steam reviews follow a now increasingly common trajectory: Mostly negative at launch, when all the outraged people review bomb the game, and then the review score constantly increases over time, when people who actually played the game give their opinion. Dragon's Dogma 2 had 228,585 players concurrently at launch, and the numbers aren't declining particularly fast. That is not a bad launch. For most players the performance of the game isn't game-breaking, the micro-transactions turned out to be completely unnecessary to play the game, and the weirdest bad game design decisions have been fixed in the first major patch.

The danger here is that between the outrage media reporting and the review bombs it becomes very hard to distinguish truly unplayable game from games that are actually rather good, but have a few flaws. It seems as if the whole world has become increasingly unable of differentiate between shades of grey, everything needs to be either black or white.