Do People Value Reviews? An Answer in Numbers

Video gaming, like any industry, has its bad apples. In some cases, these are great, worm-infested balls of mushed pulp but, mercifully, the most that consumers have to deal with on a day-to-day basis are a few misshapen fruits. To put that in more relevant terms, bugs, delays, and expensive micro transactions have become something of a problem that gamers need to anticipate and avoid.

Pre-release Reviews

Due to the above, the review industry has carved out a special place for itself as a bridge between consumers and games publishers. However, this development hasn’t gone over well with some developers. As 94% of people will avoid purchasing something due to bad reviews, Bethesda, for example, stopped handing out pre-release copies to journalists in 2016. To quote Ars Technica, this forced shoppers to go in blind.

More recently, the entire concept of pre-release reviews entered strange and murky waters with Cyberpunk 2077. All the insights produced before launch day were out of date the moment the game hit shelves due to a 43GB patch that completely changed players’ experience. This hotfix served to dupe customers, as the game had already received several glowing reviews, which cannot possibly have been genuine.

In cases such as this, a mixed approach to reviews becomes valuable. The website time2play offers visitors a choice of either expert or civilian opinions, with the latter forming its original Playscore. The site collects and reviews the online bonuses offered by casinos, assigning them an Expert Rating of between 0-100. Finding the best online casino bonuses can be a difficult task, as there are so many of them out there. Sites like this help guide players to find the best bonuses, as well as provide supporting information.

Personal Recommendations

According to the Qualtrics blog, online reviews can be as useful as personal recommendations for 91% of 18-34 year-olds. As a similar percentage of people (93%) base their purchasing decisions on what other people are saying, this creates a peculiar image of shoppers as some kind of vast cooperative entity, slithering around the internet and passing judgment on everything it comes across.

It also suggests that customers don’t have time for opinions at all. Marketing company Review Trackers discovered that the overall length of online reviews is 65% shorter than in 2010. To use TripAdvisor as an example, customer comments have fallen from a maximum character length of 1,125 (c.560 words) to 600 (c. 300). That’s just over half the length of this article.

It’ll be no surprise to anybody that our attention spans are getting shorter but this dip in review length and quality is arguably the fault of Google and Facebook, which favor a shorter format for reviews on their respective websites. The concept of the review as a valuable commodity has been democratized, which means that professionals now have to compete with an untrained mob for relevance.

In the latter case, it’s not easy to know if quality beats quantity in the reviewing space, as our metaphorical judgment slug will still manage to pick up the facts due to the vast number of customer reviews out there. It’s debatable whether a single professional voice speaks louder than that of a fellow shopper.

Overall, reviews are essential to online commerce but the industry is definitely changing shape.