Rock Band 4 is receiving positive user reviews on Amazon, but a Reddit user discovered that some of the reviewers matched developers employed by Harmonix. Destructoid reached out to Harmonix and the company acknowledged that their developers were giving high scores to their own game.
The company said, “Harmonix has clarified its internal policy about posting reviews of our own products on retail sites, and we’ve asked that existing reviews be edited to identify Harmonix employees or be removed entirely. While we believe the reviews posted by a few employees were sincere and without ill intentions, as a studio we don’t believe these are appropriate actions. We appreciate the feedback from the community, and take our relationship with our fans seriously.”
Some of the reviews have been edited to say that the developer worked on the game. However, this highlights an important issue in the gaming industry. Many gaming journalists, developers, and publishers are behind fake reviews. This practice is actively exposed when it comes to films. Why can’t the same accountability be present when it comes to games?
Source: Polygon
The opinions expressed belong to the writer and do not necessarily reflect that of ICXM as an organization.
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.