In a classic example of why you shouldn’t ever have faith in humans not to abuse an easily abusable system, several (unsurprisingly) positive user reviews for Rock Band 4 were found to have come from Harmonix staff themselves.
Clicking on the reviewer’s Amazon wish list allowed curious reddit users to uncover their names and make the connections to specific Harmonix employees. These included Project Manager Matthew Nordhaus, Senior Designer Chris Foster and several others.
After reaching out to Harmonix, Destructoid received a confirmation that these were in fact employee reviews, with the following statement:
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.
As a number of redditors started to post joke reviews to jokingly highlight what was going on, several reviews have since been removed or updated, with Nordhaus’ now reading:
I added this review half in jest (as you might be able to tell from the tone of the original). In hindsight, it’s probably important that I note that I worked on the game and work for Harmonix. That being said, I’m confident that if I didn’t I would still give the game five stars. It’s a beautiful, peaceful, cooperative game, rare enough already in today’s landscape, that I can play with my wife and kids. Music discovery, playing with your family and friends, and cooperation make Rock Band my favorite.
This comes at a time where Amazon’s user reviews are known to be unreliable and easily manipulated, with the company bringing a lawsuit in the last few days against 1,114 reviewers who were selling positive reviews for $5 each, and having several websites that sold such faked reviews shut down earlier this year.
It might sound trivial, but let’s not forget that the overwhelming majority of people do very little research into a product before buying, and can potentially be swayed by a particular brand name and positive user reviews such as these.
Source: Reddit, via Destructoid, Ars Technica
bunimomike
“While we believe the reviews posted by a few employees were sincere and without ill intentions”.
Hahahaha. Utter bollocks. This was underhanded manipulation and you all knew exactly what you were doing. The bullshit is strong with this one.
Starman
They can’t have much faith in their own game if they felt the need to put fake reviews out there. Unless amazon user reviews are anything like the fanboy wars that metacritic’s are.
Forrest_01
Shenanigans!
JR.
Amazon’s review system is awful anyway. They seem to think there is no difference between dvd/bluray/vhs so it’s useless.
They probably bundle all the reviews for every Rockband game ever made together just because it has Rockband in the title.
Moonpie
totally agree about the Amazon review system, i reviewed something a few years ago and it just got shoved into another format (obviously to boost the rating).