Online Reviews, Amazon
Over the weekend I read a NYTimes article linked to from digg about the quality and quantity of online reviews. (If that link doesn’t work, here’s the link on digg, although be warned that the comments section is full of oh-so-funny kitchen/women jokes..)
Personally, I enjoy reading some reviews before buying a product. I usually look for the most negative reviews, and then some positive reviews, and decide whether or not I can accept the product’s limitations. (It’s kind of funny: buying something you want always seems to involve some compromise. It’s not as though I can order an item to my exact specifications.) But there are cases where the reviews are entirely worthless.
Case in point: the Spore reviews on Amazon. It looks like some people decided to have an anti-DRM party and focused on Spore. It’s probably seen as an easy target, because it’s been so anticipated. You won’t find reviews from honest people who actually purchased the game; instead you’ll see dozens of people complaining about a game that’s not even out yet.
Yeah, I get it. DRM is bad. I dislike DRM, too. I vehemently dislike DRM that requires me to keep the CD in the drive while I play the game. (As I understand it, Spore won’t require this. I haven’t received it yet, so I can’t confirm this personally.) But I doubt that flooding sites with anti-DRM reviews is really going to do anything. Here’s my bet: people who have heard of the game and go to Amazon to buy it will look at the low star rating and wonder: how could this be? They’ll go to the reviews and see how they’re all about DRM rather than game play, and then chances are most of them will ignore that (what’s a DRM?) and buy it anyway.
The way I see it: Don’t like DRM? Don’t buy or play the game. It’s that simple. Vote with your dollars and move on with your life. Find another game to play that doesn’t have DRM, and support the companies that make them.
Speaking of Amazon: why do they let people post reviews on games that aren’t even released?