Brainwaves Podcast: Honest Barrage

Great episode all the way through. Well timed on the last bit too, given recent events.

Review bombing is a strange topic. I have trouble feeling bad for publishers if their customer base is being let down somehow and lacks another way to directly interact. See Unbroken for an extreme example. I understand that it compromises BGG's data, but as it's a user aggregate and people don't hold themselves to the scale that's always been the case.

Let it burn, basically. The only people who seem really bothered by it are the people who directly benefit from said high ratings.

They open with talking about The Board Game Book. Our own Matt Thrower is one of the authors. Listen closely and you can hear him get a mention.

The brainstorm subject was totally coincidental as we actual recorded on the Tuesday before everything happened. We will be covering it as a news item in our next cast.

Whilst I don't mind people expressing themselves through BGG ratings, I think the only thing we need to be careful of is if publishers start to see BGG as the only tastemaker in the hobby.

Then they're subjecting themselves to the same risks that the "metacritic score" culture has introduced into the AAA video game arena, with the added perk that the only available aggregate doesn't have a split between "metascore" (critic industry average) and "user score," which is the entirety of BGG's data.

Yeah totally agree. We discuss on the cast that some computer game companies would give bonuses based on metacritic scores which is just horrible. I hope we never see anything like that in boardgames.

Very enjoyable podcast. Informative and entertaining, I'm looking forward to the next one. Welcome to TWBG!

Thank you very much. Glad you enjoyed it!