Take-Two Interactive, the publisher behind Grand Theft Auto 6, has acknowledged “negative review campaigns” as a serious business risk in a recent SEC filing. The company admitted that review-bombing can significantly impact its operations and revenues, sometimes due to its own shortcomings when games fail to meet fan expectations.
This candid acknowledgment highlights the growing influence of online user reviews on the gaming industry.
Highlights
- Take-Two Interactive views “negative review campaigns” as a serious business risk.
- The company acknowledged that review-bombing works as part of a recent SEC filing.
- While Take-Two has been on the receiving end of many review-bombing campaigns over the years, the company conceded that such efforts can sometimes be its own fault if any given game is found subpar by fans.
Grand Theft Auto 6 publisher Take-Two Interactive sees review-bombing as a serious business risk. The company acknowledged as much as part of a wider overview of the potential impacts of “negative review campaigns” against games, which was recently shared with Take-Two Interactive investors.
While the emergence of video game review-bombing largely coincides with the rise of social media, the practice is as old as online aggregators of user reviews, such as GameFAQs. Gamers were given an even larger platform to have their voices heard in the early to mid-2010s, when Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox all started allowing user reviews.
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Take-Two Interactive Says Review-Bombing Works
Over the years, Take-Two Interactive has been on the receiving end of many review-bombing campaigns. The gaming giant has now officially acknowledged such online initiatives as a business risk, thus directly confirming that they work. It did so via its latest 10-K filing, an annual report detailing its activities over the previous fiscal year. As first spotted by Game File”s Stephen Totilo, Take-Two”s 2024 10-K filing with the SEC includes a lengthy passage highlighting the importance of obtaining and maintaining high game ratings on third-party platforms, not least because good scores improve product discoverability across such storefronts.
“Defamation campaigns” geared toward harming a given game”s ratings can hence have a material impact on the publisher”s operations, leading to a loss of players, revenue, or both, the filing reads. The risk assessment also notes that such initiatives can add to Take-Two Intearactive”s costs by, e.g., requiring it to increase its marketing spending in order to combat the effects of “negative review campaigns.”
Although the publisher did acknowledge the obvious in that barrages of negative user scores can sometimes be its own fault if a product is found subpar, the filing confirms that it sees protest campaigns as a separate but equally important business risk. That”s ostensibly because Take-Two Interactive has experienced no shortage of such fan initiatives in recent history. E.g., it was less than a year ago that the PS4 and Switch versions of Red Dead Redemption were review-bombed not because they were bad per se, but in protest of the fact that they weren”t proper remasters.
The GTA 6 publisher is not the only gaming giant to have confirmed that review-bombing works as of late. Sony signaled a similar stance, albeit only indirectly, when it backpedaled on the Helldivers 2 PSN account linking requirement back in May 2024, following a massive influx of negative reviews from Steam users.
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