There are many ways to respond to a bad review of a game you made. One of the first to pop into my mind is to do better next time. If the guy who gave your game a negative review also happens to be a writer with a book listed on Amazon, you can also try and Amazonbomb his own book's reviews. High Voltage, the folks behind the Wii FPS Conduit 2, reportedly chose to go with the latter approach.

According to Marooner's Rock's account, it all started when Joystiq's T. Michael Murdock gave Conduit 2 a 1-star review. In retaliation, High Voltage's art director, Matt Corso, sent out an email urging his fellow staff members to "return the favor by writing a reader review for Michael's book for him."

The email was sent out on May 3rd, the same day the Joystiq review was published. Three 1-star reviews on Murdock's book The Dragon Ruby appeared on Amazon that very same day, with another one showing up a day later. We can still probably chalk that up to cosmic coincidence, but only if High Voltage denied that the email was real. Which they didn't do. In fact, Eric Nofsinger, the studio's chief creative officer, confirmed that Corso did send out the email.

Matt Corso did indeed write that internal email, however if you read the email he encourages folks to read Mike’s book and then write their own review in a “turn-about is fairplay” sort of way. The email went to 70+ people on the list contains nothing slanderous or inflammatory; I believe people took it as such (the fact that there aren’t 70 negative reviews would support that assumption). Sure, it’s a tad unprofessional but if you knew Matt personally as I do, you would know it was nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek jibe at most. And for that, I apologize on behalf of High Voltage Software.

Corso has since apologized, backing up Nofsinger's claim that it was all just tongue-in-cheek stuff. 

My mind really wasn’t in that dark of a place when I wrote that. In fact I seriously considered buying the book myself. I wanted to know how good it really was that this guy felt so in the right to trash our game and give away the ending like he did. And then post a plug to his book at the end, implying that we suck and he is totally great. Then I forgot about it, and got busy with other stuff. But I can see why some people might try to read more into this. But I did mention that people should read the book before giving a review.

 

My point is: I did want you to know we don’t hold a grudge against reviewers for their opinions. We learn through critique.

Via [Marooner's Rock]

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