Imagine a cute little game where the player designs a comfy cat café. Now imagine that same game getting review-bombed with tons of slurs and harassment. That’s what happened to the LGBTQ+ friendly game Calico when it was recently made available on Xbox Games with Gold.
Calico has been on the Steam platform for a while but when it was made available on Xbox, some people made use of it to deliver lots of hateful reviews. In a recently deleted tweet, the Calico dev team had this to say:
“We’re getting review bombed on Xbox pretty hard by some pretty hateful bigoted people. They also told players not to check out those reviews as they felt like no one needed to waste time seeing bigotry. They also added this:
“We have no problem with negative reviews, we always have things to improve! But anyone who saw the state of them yesterday will agree the ones including hate speech and slurs were very much not okay… Reviews are so valuable to both devs and players. We’re a small team working on our skills, and reviews help us figure out what issues we should focus on! We have valuable feedback to gather from there, and it makes it much easier when we don’t have to wade through fake reviews.”
The hateful reviews have since been removed by Xbox and the Calico development team deleted their tweet regarding the situation in order to avoid confusion.
What comes out of this situation is the fact that there is a problem with the review system in Xbox, and that there should be ways to prevent similar situations in the future. Proper moderation and regulation of reviews should be in order.
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