Forza Motorsport – is Microsoft controlling the narrative or is it just moderating user reviews?(Picture: Microsoft)

Microsoft is accused of manipulating user reviews for Forza Motorsport from the Xbox store, even though its user score is still surprisingly low.

Given how frequently people abuse user review sections, using bad faith arguments to make perfectly fine games seem worse than they really are (e.g., Resident Evil 4), they’re something that now requires considerable moderation.

Metacritic pledged to implement stricter moderation to prevent ‘abusive and disrespectful reviews’ from being published. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s solution is apparently to just delete some reviews wholesale from the Xbox storefront.

This is according to Forza Motorsport players who noticed that the total number of user reviews has been dropping since launch, with the assumption being that Microsoft is targeting negative reviews to improve the game’s user score.

At the very least, there is corroboration that user reviews on Forza Motorsport’s Xbox store page are vanishing. On October 11, NeoGAF user Heisenberg007 screengrabbed the page for Forza Motorsport’s standard edition, which had 847 reviews at the time.

It later dropped down to 602 reviews and, at the time of writing, we can confirm that it’s since dropped even further to 476.

Over on Reddit, some players are understandably not happy about Microsoft seemingly trying to control the narrative surrounding Forza Motorsport. User Optimal_Sand_5329 calls the company ‘petty’ while Illustrious-Thing528 describes the game’s launch as ‘embarrassing.’

However, if Microsoft is trying to shut down any sort of negativity and improve the user score, it’s doing a really bad job of it, since the average user score on the Xbox store is currently 2.4/5, with 45% of reviews scoring the game one star out of five.

None of the negative reviews we found contained abusive language or bad faith arguments (Picture: Microsoft)

It’s also very easy to find negative reviews for the game and a quick scout suggests that the PC release is to blame. Several players cite its poor optimisation, graphical bugs, and crashes.

‘The game cost more than any game I bought before and quite frankly, not worth £10 at time of release.’

‘This has to be the worst Forza launch to date, I thought it couldn’t get any worse than Forza Horizon 5 but it has.’

‘I would refund this game if I could. AI is so bad you may as well play by yourself.’

Even some of the positive reviews are not without complaints. The most amusing one we spotted was a four-star review for the console version that describes it as ‘unfinished’ and demands Xbox boss Phil Spencer be sacked.

It’s possible that the reviews being deleted were ones riddled with abusive language, irrelevant tangents, or were simply unhelpful, but it seems unlikely that would account for fully half of the total reviews.

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The Metacritic user reviews seem to bare out the idea that it’s only the PC version that has got fans upset, with the Xbox user score being 7.8 (which is still notably lower than the critic score) and the PC user score being just 4.0.

Meanwhile on Steam, user reviews are classified as *mixed*, although the majority are negative, which seem to confirm that the PC version is the primary source of fans’ ire.

Forza Motorsport is available for Xbox Series X/S and PC.

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Microsoft is accused of manipulating user reviews for Forza Motorsport from the Xbox store, even though its user score is still surprisingly low.