Pro Tip: If Your Game Gets Trashed In Reviews For Sucking, Don’t Blame It On ‘Woke Reviewers’

Say That Again

from the woke-or-broke? dept

There are lots of shitty ways game developers and publishers can handle their games getting crappy reviews. The best bet would obviously be to read the reviews from customers, learn something from them, and make a better product. Far too often, however, developers and publishers instead try to disappear bad reviews, fake reviews, or otherwise juice their review scores.

But then there’s the writer and director for Days Gone, John Garvin. Garvin stared at a wide swath of negative reviews for the game, most of which largely panned the game for being unoriginal, having a poor gameplay experience, and otherwise being all kinds of “meh.” Garvin then distilled this into an explanation for why the game was reviewed so poorly into the following list:

Three reasons:

1. it had tech issues like bugs, streaming and frame rate;
2. it had reviewers who couldn’t be bothered to actually play the game
3. And three, it had woke reviewers who couldn’t handle a gruff white biker looking at his date’s ass

Garvin wrote that in a now-deleted tweet. You will immediately notice that the list consists of two-thirds of blaming reviewers for the negative reviews. On the one hand, there is a certain amount of this that is understandable. After all, being a creative and having people you don’t know call your baby ugly is never a fun thing.

But that’s also something you sign up for when you release a creative work to the public. There’s no evidence presented by Garvin that reviewers hadn’t “bothered to actually play the game.” That statement is just made as though it’s expected to be taken as gospel. And the “woke reviewers” thing appears to be largely nonsense. There is a scene in the game that went semi-viral that consists of the player character following a female character. She bends over while asking if what she was looking at is what the player is looking for. He looks at her backside and basically says yes. It’s fairly dumb and a bit gross, but certainly nothing that the gaming public is going to lose its mind over. Were that the case, every GTA game would be completely panned by reviewers as well.

But because a certain segment of the population now seems to think you can shout “teh woke!” at any problem to make it not your fault, well, here we are. It’s a crappy way to run a game studio, frankly. If your customers are telling you what’s wrong with your product, that should be useful information to internalize and use for the future.

Or I guess you just blame the “woke,” and suddenly your product that is reviewed poorly and hasn’t sold particularly well is no longer your problem.

Filed Under: days gone, john garvin, reviewers, reviews, video games
Companies: bend studio