[cowthulhu]

Strategy gamers are incredibly whiny and entitled in my opinion. I struggle to remember a strategy game or DLC released by a major studio recently that wasn’t review-bombed on release. And yet studios aren’t going out of business, indicating that people are getting value out of these products and repeatedly buying and enjoying them.

This really frustrates me because it makes it very difficult to actually determine what games or DLCs are worth buying. If every release is reviewed "mostly negative" on steam, then the reviews don't help inform you about the quality of a game.

If you look at steam reviews, it’s even more frustrating - you’ll get negative reviews with 20, 40, even 80 hours of playtime.

[LightHugger]

80 hours is a good number to review a game at though, you even saying this means you don't understand the basis for why people review games. If someone puts 80 hours into something and regrets it, it's useful information to know.

The opinion of someone who only put in an hour and got bored will be shallow. At best they can complain about new user experience, but that's it. an hour isn't long enough to understand the game systems of a sufficiently deep strategy game

[cowthulhu]

I might have a lack of perspective here, but the line "If someone puts 80 hours into something and regrets it, it's useful information to know" just doesn't map for me. I can't imagine a game that someone is enjoying enough to play for 80 hours, but then they end up regretting it. That just doesn't seem possible. It might just be that I'm out of touch and experience games differently than others though.

To disagree a bit further - 80 hours is a really long time! If it takes you 80 hours of game time to notice an issue, it's probably not a major issue and rather you've gotten bored of the game and are now hyper-sensitive to every little bit of jank or questionable design. It's like the people who will leave a negative review on a survival game with thousands of hours played - the problem isn't the game, it's that they got bored! If after two weeks of enjoying playing the game full time you don't feel like you've gotten your money's worth, you might need to lower your expectations.

Oh - I'll throw a quick exception for games that are predatory. If after 20/40/80 hours the game changes such that you need to start dropping a bunch of cash to keep progressing, that's deserving of a bad review to warn others to stay away lest they end up paying much more for the game than the sticker price indicated. Addiction machines designed to absorb as much of your income as possible like some sort of drug-dealing mosquito suck and deserve to be called out.