[npinsker]

A lot of people do this, no? It doesn't seem more offensive than any of the other handful of self-submissions per day; certainly it's less so to me than all those tech blog posts by companies. Also Blue Prince is a puzzly, escape-roomy game that's one of the highest-profile indie releases this year, so probably more in tune with HN's taste than most games.

I like that a link aggregator serves to surface things that people don't necessarily have investment in. I thought the article was well-written and I'm more interested now in what he has to say in future. (I guess the advertising worked...)

[jncfhnb]

Do a lot of people do this? I don’t actually feel like this happens much here.

Idk. I feel it has a bad smell to be doing this at a game’s release with a review copy.

Again I’m willing to believe in good faith that there aren’t behind the scenes incentives here. But it would feel a lot more genuine to drop this at least a few months later imo. It _feels_ like advertising.

And frankly the juxtaposition of the glowing tone and then negative comments here has really thrown me about the whole thing. Whereas before I would just say it’s a difference of opinion, now there’s a question of intent to deceive. Meh.

[npinsker]

That makes sense. The juxtaposition isn't just OP, though: Blue Prince is an extremely highly-rated game by critics (https://www.metacritic.com/game/blue-prince/critic-reviews/), and will likely be one of the three highest-rated games this year, but has 80% positive reviews on Steam at time of writing, which is very low. On Steam it isn't even in the top 3 on its single day of release.

I'm not exactly sure what leads to such a dramatic disconnect. Maybe game reviewers just value different things than the general population.

[chongli]

Game reviewers don't spend as long with a game as regular players. They play enough hours until they feel like they have a good enough handle on the game to write the review.

A game which maintains a high level of engagement during that review period but which drops off not long after that could show this kind of discrepancy between customers and reviewers. I don't want to suggest that Blue Prince is this sort of game (never mind that it might be deliberate) but I think it's possible for some games to have been designed for game reviewers rather than for long-term players. The top HN comment on this story (as I write this) would seem to indicate that the game has an issue with running out of steam after a few hours.

This sort of thing is not unheard of in other media as well. In the film industry this strategy is called Oscar-bait. Of course for a film it's not based on duration but subject matter. Certain themes and filmmaking techniques have been accused of being targeted at the narrower interests of the Academy rather than a broad audience.

[klausa]

Many of the people reviewing the game highly (at well-regarded publications) have spoken about playing the game for tens of hours, some mentioning 100h+.

This is conspiratorial nonsense.

[drilbo]

it seems like it might be mostly attributable to the RNG element of the game