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Rock Band 4 studio admits that employees left 5-star Amazon reviews for their own game
A few enterprising Redditors recently discovered that several employees of the studio behind Rock Band 4 left 5-star reviews for their own game on Amazon, and now developer Harmonix Music Systems Corp has fessed up.
Reddit user Documental38 posted a thread yesterday claiming that he had found several Amazon reviews for Rock Band 4 that he thought looked suspicious, and after digging a little deeper he discovered that the names of several of the reviewers (discovered by viewing their public Amazon wish lists) matched the names of Harmonix employees.
“At first I thought it was a rogue employee or two but then I dug around for about a half hour and found seven of them and so it appears to be more of an initiative. I’m sure there’s more than that,” Documental 38 said on Reddit. “I don’t know the legality of this but it’s highly unethical and extremely disappointing. No excuses. Companies are not supposed to reviewing their own products, PERIOD.”
Other users were skeptical at first, but more and more reviews were discovered that could be linked to Harmonix employees, and now Harmonix has officially come out and admitted that some of its employees left reviews for the game, but it did not take any responsibility for influencing them to do so.
“Harmonix has clarified its internal policy about posting reviews of our own products on retail sites, and we’ve asked that existing reviews be edited to identify Harmonix employees or be removed entirely,” Harmonix said in a statement to Eurogamer. “While we believe the reviews posted by a few employees were sincere and without ill intentions, as a studio we don’t believe these are appropriate actions. We appreciate the feedback from the community, and take our relationship with our fans seriously.”
Aside from the ethical quandary of companies leaving fake reviews for their own products, perhaps one of the most disturbing takeaways from the Rock Band 4 scandal is how easy it was to tie anonymous reviews to real names on Amazon.
If nothing else, Harmonix employees will likely be a little more careful in naming their Amazon wish lists in the future.
Image credit: Harmonix / Rock Band 4
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