I just want to highlight that there seems to be some blatant review manipulation going on for Baldur's Gate 3. The game appears to have received over 10 pages of reviews just today (I can't post links), almost all of which are one-line reviews giving 5 stars.

It would be nice to see GOG stepping in to address this. This rate of posting is far higher than the page has seen on average over the past 2-3 months, so there is obviously something suspicious going on.

I wonder if the botspam has also been timed for the end of the week, when the staff are most likely clocking off for the weekend ...

I think the increase in the number of reviews is due to the new way of reviewing a game on gog galaxy

Not much different from Fallout: London then.

Also, as far as I can tell: Every single one of these comes from a verified owner which is a rather good thing? And should excuse even the laziest reduced-to-the-bare-minimum-of-characters "review".
It's not explicitly verboten, after all.

Was that just added in the past couple of days? If so then, if the BG3 example is anything to go by, it seems to be attracting a large number of low-quality reviews: e.g. one line/one word. That's kind of annoying for those of us who like to read the reviews and value the more thoughtful, insightful ones.

It's going to be harder to find those, if the review pages are now being filled up with one-liner junk. I don't agree. If the review pages are going to be filling up with useless one-line 'reviews', then it will be a lot more work to find the more meaningful/helpful ones. That's not a good thing.

If this is where we're going, I'd like to see a minimum word count for reviews, for them to show in the reviews list. Sure, let verified owners just give a rating, if they don't want to write a proper review, but the review listing should only show the ones that are actually helpful.

LOL. I just had a look at those reviews.
5 stars. Text: "aad asdf"

^^ This is almost exactly what I would have written if GOG tried to force me to rate/review any game.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/galaxy_forces_me_to_rate_the_games

Supposedly not working as intended though, as per https://www.gog.com/forum/general/galaxy_forces_me_to_rate_the_games/post14

Prior to deploying such an update to the masses, developers truly should be thoroughly examining the behavior of their software. Following the addition of a feature, it is utterly preposterous that the programmers of GOG Galaxy would not perform even the bare minimum of tests (in this case, running a game which had previously been played for a certain amount of hours, and exiting).

While personally unaffected by this issue (as I refuse to use any and all clients), I do care about the longevity of GOG, and this oversight (amongst numerous others) is definitely a factor that can lead to reduced customer retention. Past public relations mistakes, as well as other 'issues' (such as poor data transfer rates when downloading installers from Fastly CDN), have contributed to a relatively-common negative perception of GOG (which, depending on a given facet, may be undeserved). It is bad enough, that upon the mere mention of GOG, the natural reaction of the average non-GOG user is that of disgust, often in the form of: "ugh!"

Good point, the new forced Galaxy review...

So the question to the OP: are those new reviews by confirmed owners of the game? I would be suspicious if they weren't but if they are, it is hardly a bot army making positive review bombing.

They do seem to mostly be by verified owners, yes. I wasn't aware of the change to Galaxy (I don't use it) and hadn't seen that other linked thread. So, I agree that if Galaxy is 'forcing' users to leave reviews, that might explain it.

Still, if Galaxy is forcing user reviews and that is leading to a sudden flood of low-quality reviews hitting the store pages, that would seem like a problem that needs to be fixed?

Well, yes. I dislike it on my Android phone as well how many applications try to force me to review them, and in more aggravating ways than what Galaxy apparently does (ie. you can't just select right there how many stars you give the app, but it takes you to a separate review section etc.).

Yeah, have to be careful with these kinds of things. Maybe a simple "do you want to review this game, yes/no?" once per game, after you have played it for longer, would suffice. Or not even that, just make it as easy as possible to review it, and people who want to review it, do so.

Reviewing a game you haven't completed can't be right either way... (Unless it's unplayable or incomplete and you want to warn others, of course.)

And we've been asking them to make the review system more useful, and instead they make bungling mistakes and make the review system objectively worse.

Begging people to review their games in Galaxy like it's a goshdanged phone app is easily one of the dumbest, marketing lead decisions I've seen; it just leads to worthless feedback and false engagement.

FFS:
It's a bug and they're working on it.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/galaxy_forces_me_to_rate_the_games/post14

I must agree this looks to me like a pretty normal reaction to the Galaxy bug (?) asking you to review the game each time you close it.
I know I was tempted to leave a half-assed review too just to make it shut up! :P

It never should have made it to PROD. I agree fully with what Palestine said.

Whatever development process GOG is using is completely backwards to the norm, and it's obvious they've never dogfooded themselves once.