Rock Band 4 Developer's Workers Found Posting Amazon Reviews

Earlier this week, Amazon filed a lawsuit against more than a thousand individuals who allegedly offered to post fake reviews on Amazon in exchange for measly sums of money. The company did this for the expected reasons: fake reviews result in jaded customers, and the value of the company's reviews plummet. In light of that, it is especially bad timing for employees of Rock Band 4's developer, Harmonix, to get caught posting positive reviews for its own video game.

As is increasingly becoming the case, Reddit users were the ones to make the discovery. Posting in the subreddit r/Games, Redditor Documental38, who credited u/Camera9 for the discovery, posted, "Harmonix employees seem to have taken to Amazon to post their own favorable reviews of the game." That Redditors claims to have found seven instances of Rock Band 4 reviews from the developer's employees.

Harmonix confirmed the reviews, stating to Kotaku:

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. 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.

A quick look shows that some of the identified reviews have been updated to include full disclosure statements. It appears this is a case of workers posting reviews without making it clear they work for the developer, which runs afoul of what many consider an ethical approach to praising any particular product, though deceit doesn't seem to have been their intent.

SOURCE: Kotaku, Destructoid