Over 6,000negative Death Stranding reviews have been removed from Metacritic, seemingly as a remedy to a Death Stranding review bomb.
If you haven’t been keeping up with the latest game from Hideo Kojima, Death Stranding has been doing pretty well by pretty much every measurable metric. While it isn’t a hit on par with Grand Theft Auto V — not yet, anyway — it’s sold quite a few copies and got more than its fair share of praise. Of course, all of that positive attention also happens to brings trolls along with it.
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Now, thousands of negative Death Stranding reviews (or more specifically, the user rating portion of the reviews) have been removed, balancing out the score to something a little more reflective of the real world.
Here are the changes to the numbers for Death Stranding on Metacritic as noted in this submission to the /r/Games subreddit:
- Total: 18,225 -> 11,878 (-6,347)
- Positive: 8,368 -> 8,446 (+78)
- Mixed: 522 -> 526 (+4)
- Negative: 9,335 -> 2,906 (-6,429)
According to the submitter /u/argandg, he observed that roughly 200 positive reviews would be added to the game’s Metacritic page every day. Unfortunately, 250 negative reviews were added every day, causing the game’s score to gradually slide downhill.
Although opinions on Death Stranding can occasionally be divisive, I think that we can agree that it probably isn’t accurate to have more than one-third of its reviews be negative. There were surely enough people who disliked the game and took the time to rate it down, but my gut tells me that such a high percentage of the people voting negatively is a little too suspicious to be mere coincidence.
It should also be noted that out of 9,335 previous negative Death Stranding reviews, 6,429 of them were removed, possibly for being illegitimate in some fashion. That leaves 2,906 negative reviews remaining that Metacritic feels are legitimate. We can’t say for sure what really happened here, but at least it seems that Metacritic noticed a problem and took the time to clean it up.
