And the game isn't even out yet. It's pretty ridiculous.

...Care to elaborate?

If you're talking about here on the site then yes, I'd agree with you.

Not yet released and it already has 4 1/2 stars with 22 votes. Ridiculous indeed. The rating system should be disabled until a game is actually released to the public.

Ah, that!

I thought you meant the game had got bad reviews somewhere, I should have quessed.

I agree.

It should also be limited to people who have already bought the game. Its not super common, but I've seen too many people just make comments (such as about price or a similar title) in the review area.

Though I'm also a grouch that "not helpful" votes most reviews I see that are only a couple sentences long and are summed up as "Yeah this is fun. Buy it." without really saying WHY.

I guess the system works that way because the "old" games had been available to the public before selling on gog, so people could post a "real" review before the game were available to buy here. But of course, for new games it doesn't have any sense.

well thing is most of these games are older games, that for instance I might already own on disc or maybe on steam. So I may not want to (yet) buy on GOG but doesn't mean I haven't played the game already and have an opinion.

But yeah for an unreleased game ratings shouldn't be enabled, just doesn't make sense.

Part of actually owning our copy of the game (disregarding that its EULA dream logic may claim otherwise) is that we are free to give it to somebody else. We may not have permission, but an essential component of freedom is not needing permission. So there is no way of knowing whether or not the reviewer owns the game. And there shouldn't be any way of knowing. It's not our business.

The obvious solution is moderation of the reviews. Numerous ways of handling this have been absolutely perfected over the past decade and a half. Many of them are opt-in, decentralized, personalized, or all of the above. The only reason we don't have these options is GOG doesn't bother to make them available, because we don't need them, because they are just game reviews.

It looks like the GOG team listened to our concerns about posting reviews before the game is released. The mean page for The Legend of Grimrock states "Reviewing and rating will be enabled as soon as the game is released". Thanks GOG!