To be clear, “Metacritic Death Stranding Review Bomb Campaign” is not to imply the top brass at Metacritic had anything to do with this. Death Stranding’s weird score fluctuation was apparently due to bots. Many “users” would appear as having only reviewed Death Stranding and generated the very same comments, grammar mistakes and all.
We’re all more than aware that Death Stranding was a very divisive game. It made many of us reassess exactly what it is we look for in a video game. Although some people got very, very worked up about it. Whoever was out there behind these bot reviews was clearly taking their dislike for Kojima’s latest work to another level. Reddit user “argandg” kept an eye on all of this as it unfolded and discovered some interesting, irrefutable evidence.
Primarily, he noticed that overnight, the Metacritic Death Stranding average score leapt from 5.1 to 7.4. Now it’s averaged out a lot closer to the score for the game in our Death Stranding review. The reason this average has taken such a drastic leap is that Metacritic Death Stranding skulduggery was eventually noticed. Metacritic’s response was to remove all the fake stuff. That being around 6,400 bot related ratings!
We thought the Metacritic scores observed in our Death Stranding Is Not Simply A FedEx Simulator piece looked a little odd
Reddit user argandg also observed the master of this bot attack was sly in their approach. On a daily basis, 200 positive ratings would go up. But so would 250 negative ones. Eventually, the negative ratings won out by a large margin. Thankfully Metacritic noticed this misbehaviour and Death Stranding now has a more deserved score.
In the final days prior to Death Stranding’s release, some fiery debate could be found at every corner of the internet. Fiery is frankly putting it lightly. As one comment rightly said, “considering you don’t like it so much, it’s surprising the effort you’re going to to let everyone know”. Ultimately, the moral of the story is – if you don’t like something, just let others enjoy it!
