I just noticed this.

As others have mentioned the stars have been largely useless in the last little while so to be honest I’m not sure this has any impact. Even sites that try and give a rating based on fake reviews are not helpful because so many reviews are faked. The only helpful part is to try and read negative reviews.

I imagine this star fiasco is something that’s easy for browser plugins to reverse.

I would love to see AI and Machine Learning used to filter out fake reviews. This would actually be useful.

As a scientist I briefly read the Twitter chain by the company with some description of their methodology.

Honestly I didn’t really follow it and it’s hard to critique based on buzzwords and Tweets. The person who was posting it sounds like a businessman, throwing jargon and words rather than something coherent.

Ultimately I think that people are surprised by figures like “50% of gamers are female”. It might be 30%, or it might be something else. Maybe asking the questions a certain way biases the responses a certain way.

It’s hard to glean anything based on what I’ve seen. I don’t have any skin in this game, and I don’t care either way, but all I’ll say is that it’s hard to figure out the truth based on the information available.

Women also make up 50% of PC video game players and 54 percent of mobile game players.

I find a lot of these figures really hard to believe, to be honest.

Looking at the link, there is little I can find about their methodology.

That’s true. I understand.

I’m also not a fan of the DLC and change to video game design based on such payouts.

But even then, even with fake reviews, young gamers are completely spoiled with information compared to the black hole that existed in the 80s and 90s. I’m not sure how people argue otherwise.

The fact that I can go on my phone, jump on YouTube, and watch a play through is incredible. When I was young, I had to make decisions based on what the box art looked like ffs.

Eh.

On the flip side, back in the day, a lot of people bought a lot of crappy games based on nothing more than what the cover art on the box showed. The only source of info was video game magazines, and that applied only to new releases and only certain games.

Now upon release you can look up dozens of detailed reviews, even video reviews. You can watch full play through a on YouTube. You can ask for opinions in social media.

The amount of information you have to figure out if this game is for you is insane compared to before.

Back when I looked into this, which was more than half a decade ago, it was a nightmare to figure out what worked and what didn’t. The XDA community is also hard to distangle.

Maybe it’s changed since then but I didn’t have the time to look into what worked and what didn’t.

I used to root my Android phones. Then I stopped because all banking apps were disallowing launch if your phone was detected as having root.