Review bomb
organized or coordinated effort by a group of people to flood an online platform or website with negative reviews or ratings for a particular product, service, or content
A review bomb is an Internet phenomenon in which a piece of media like a video game, a film or a TV series receives a large number of user-contributed reviews in response to actions of the media's creator or distributor that are not directly related to the media itself. In most cases a review bomb arises from highly negative reviews to draw attention to perceived cultural or political issues, especially if the vendor seems unresponsive or inaccessible to direct feedback. Review bombing also typically takes place over a short period of time and is meant to disrupt established ratings that a product already has at review sites, sometimes backed by campaigns organized through online message boards. It may be used as a mass-movement-driven coercion tactic, as a form of protest, or may simply be a form of trolling. Review bombing is a similar practice to vote brigading.
The practice is most commonly aimed at online media review aggregators, such as Steam, Metacritic, IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, or app stores. It may be motivated by unpopular changes to an established franchise, political or cultural controversies related to the product or service, or to the actions of its developers, vendors, or owners. Some owners of aggregate systems have devised means to detect or prevent review bombing, such as only allowing reviews from official sources such as web sites and/or magazines and, in the case of Steam, only allowing people who legitimately own the game to leave a review on it.
Origin
One of the first appearances of the term "review bomb" was in a 2008 Ars Technica article by Ben Kuchera describing the effect in regards to Spore, in which users left negative reviews on Amazon citing the game's perceived lackluster gameplay and digital rights management system. Kuchera wrote "Review-bombing Amazon is a particularly nasty way of getting the point across as well; casual gamers who aren't aware of this campaign may not bother to read the content of the reviews and only assume the game isn't very good."
History
Video games
The increasing prevalence of review bombing was precipitated by the increase in influence of online user reviews in the main storefronts where games are sold, combined with little to no oversight of the content of these reviews.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Review bomb” as organized or coordinated effort by a group of people to flood an online platform or website with negative reviews or ratings for a particular product, service, or content. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as organized or coordinated effort by a group of people to flood an online platform or website with negative reviews or ratings for a particular product, service, or content. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q39086821. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Review bomb” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.