Sony Lets Players Leave Written Reviews for Some Games on the PS Store

Sony has seemingly started to allow players to leave written reviews for some games on the PlayStation Store, following the lead of Steam and Xbox.

For a while now, players have been allowed to rate games on the PS Store on PlayStation 5 from one star to five stars based on their experiences. However, unlike Steam and Xbox, Sony had previously only allowed this and did not let players type out their full opinions on various titles.

Sony's Written Reviews on the PS Store

In a post on Reddit titled "When did PlayStation start allowing written reviews?", a user spotted that the platform was inviting a few select players to leave their personal opinions on certain games.

People who commented on the Reddit post said that PlayStation sent them an email asking them to review Helldivers 2, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Fortnite, and many others on the official website, according to GamesRadar.

While there are only some certain games that players can leave written reviews on, there is also the requirement that you need to own the digital version of the title. There is still currently no way to leave a review directly from the PlayStation 5 console itself.

Many see the more muted approach by Sony as an effort to prevent situations like the Helldivers 2 review bomb that happened a while ago. The studio's decision to limit which users can leave reviews and where they submit them takes some of the power away from the community as a whole.

Launching a New Campaign

User reviews usually can go either way as there are some who believe that the user score, not the critic score, is the "valid" rating to look at when judging games. However, this can sometimes lead to review bombing campaigns as a form of protest, said Forbes.

Valve has somewhat of a way to prevent this like putting users' playtime of the game they are reviewing next to their rating on Steam. There are many critics who welcome user reviews as being more beneficial than detrimental to the video game industry.

But right now, some fans are not really happy about how Sony is playing out the new written reviews on the PS Store. One user said that it needs an "Hours Played" tag for each review or to do something that Xbox or else user reviews will be "worthless."

Others pointed out that when you see a user review by someone who has spent thousands of hours into a game can provide some credibility to their comments, according to GamingBible.