The negative reviews for Simcity were approaching 2,000. Now its back under 1500. And the most 'helpful' reviews have been removed. Although they have been replaced by equally negative reviews. EA CEO must be on the phone with amazon falsifying these reviews. Ultimate shady...

I assume reviews were removed because they had language that wasn't in line with Amazon's terms of use and it turned into an offensive circle jerk. It's hardly some big EA conspiracy, since Amazon even has a warning message that the game is messed up on the purchase page.

It doesn't take a a conspiracy theory to remove reviews. It's a phone call that says. Hey, your not going to get your share of the AAA game profits unless we quell this.

And the top voted review was very appropriate and laid out well. it had 4,000 votes on it. It's now gone.

Its not like amazon hasn't done this before. Anytime someone says something really stupid on the news or something and has a book out the internet will screw with there reviews, then a month later they fix it.

@lego_my_eggo:bummer

Amazon can do no wrong...YOU TAKE THAT BACK.

User reviews are mostly garbage anyway so... good on them? Metacritic is probably the worst.

this is surprising? review bombs happen, and websites respond?

I think the difference between this and most cases of mass negative reviews is that this is deserved. When people give the new Call of Duty a 1/10, they are just wrong. They might not like the game, but it's not a broken waste of space, in fact, it's not even a bad game. At worst, it's entirely mediocre. SimCity, on the other hand, is completely unplayable. There may be a great game there, but all I can get to is a title screen with buttons that don't work. That's a 1/10 in my book.

I'm fine with it if Amazon is just deleting reviews that have no meaningful content, but they shouldn't be deleting reviews that say the game is a broken mess, because it is.

I believe the reviews that are getting removed are the ones that aren't helpful at all. I've seen numerous one line reviews bashing the game's DRM and that is it. No constructive criticism at all. I think it is real dumb when people as @mellotronrules put it, review bomb a game.

That's odd. Amazon is usually pretty good about review stuff.

You seem pretty paranoid. If I had to wager I would bet that they are removing reviews that violated their terms for reviews in some way. The kind of people who would go and review bomb a game don't strike me as the kind of people who would respect those rules.

Eh, in fairness according to Amazon SimCity is not out yet. And it won't be out again until the servers are fixed. Thus a lot of the content of the reviews will be useless to people buying when it is made available. That doesn't make it better for people who have bought SimCity before they pulled it and want to vent their frustrations but if they really regretted buying the game Amazon is apparently taking returns last I heard. Way I figure those people are like me. Angry they can't play it but goddamn it do they want to play it.

They will be back...