Trap of Dissociated Feedback

Back at the end of August 2025, my friend and I made a bet that emerged from a long discussion about the global Steam audience. One of my ideas, among many others, was that Battlefield 6 will not receive a high positive rating on Steam. My bet was that the game will receive 70-75% positive in 3 weeks after release; my friend didn't have a strong prediction, but bet against me and said it would be 80+. When I asked a couple of other friends, all of them gave 90+ with no doubt. And that idea was so counter-intuitive if you watched the community response closely. The insanely successful first beta launch created a strong impression among players - It's just like Battlefield 3-4, but newer and better. In the next few weeks, along with the second beta launch, we saw glowing feedback videos across all social platforms, including YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter. People were praising the dynamics, the lack of critical performance issues and bugs, supportive and responsive developers, and overall similarity to "classic" games of the series. Of course, it wasn't fully perfect, people reported some minor issues with TTK, visibility, and minor bugs, but overall reception suggested that it was a massive success. How could anyone bet on this game to have mixed reviews? Let's briefly touch on my understanding of why it was inevitable before continuing. Back then, my main arguments were: Highly anticipated games are failing, or doing way worse than expected. Many of the biggest hits of recent years came out of nowhere. ( Palworld , Schedule 1 , Banana , Lethal Company , Vampire Survivors ). Some older games have surprisingly strong longevity ( TF2 , Witcher 3 , Fallout 4 , Civilization 5 ) Players often overestimate the quality of "classic" games, both in visual and technical condition. Basically, it all can be described vaguely as "Audience's explicit desires contradict their actions". And explicit desire here is not strictly defined, it is an attempt to generalize things like "wishlists", "social media discussions", "early-stage polls", "reviews and scores". But this article is not about showing off prediction accuracy, or telling you what to do with the insights we're gonna discover. No, with this article we're gonna dive into an in-depth analysis of how we all got into the Trap of Dissociated Feedback, and potential ideas on what to do in a world where feedback mechanisms are hiding real incentives.