Do old complaints still count?

One intuition says history matters: a company that shipped broken promises once has told you something about its character. The other says products change: judging this year’s software by 2016 testimony misdescribes the thing you can actually buy. People argue these two positions as if one must lose. Dates dissolve the fight. A complaint is a measurement with a timestamp, and measurements with timestamps stop contradicting each other the moment you stop reading them as verdicts and start reading them as points on a curve.

The cleanest instance in public runs on a single URL. No Man’s Sky launched in August 2016 into the loudest disappointment of its era; that October, the archived Steam page shows recent reviews at Overwhelmingly Negative, 13% positive of 8,260, with the overall standing at 34%. Hello Games then spent a decade shipping repairs in public: the release log lists 286 entries and roughly 36 named free updates, through The Swarm in May 2026. Fetch the same page today and recent reviews read Very Positive, 90% of 1,816, lifetime 81% of 182,256. In April 2026 the game took the BAFTA for Evolving Game, its second, nearly ten years after launch.

Now erase the dates and merge all 182,256 reviews into one pile. The pile still speaks confidently: 81% positive. It is a number about a game nobody ever bought. A purchaser in 2016 met a 13% product; a purchaser this year meets a 90% one; the undated average describes a product that never shipped on any date, and for a company moving the other direction it would flatter the decline just as smoothly. The date is the part of a complaint that keeps being true.

The platforms concede the point in their designs. Steam’s own documentation: At the top of the store page are two review scores - one from the past 30 days, and one for the product’s lifetime. Google Play goes further and reweights: the displayed rating is weighted towards more recent ratings, with the lifetime average kept in a separate ledger. Two scores instead of one is an admission that a single undated number misleads. But a 30-day window amputates in the other direction: it forgets the launch, and the launch is where a company shows you what it promises under pressure. The honest object needs the whole span with the dates kept on, which is a curve.

Testimony with dates arranges itself. Here are four reports about the same game, a decade apart, doing what a score never can:

Refunds demanded in 2016; grudging fun, bugs noted, by 2019; a 2023 report that praises the distance travelled and still ends with there’s still a lot; a 2025 explanation of the mechanism. A fresh check of the claim on 11 July 2026 returned 38 reports across eight platforms, and they hold the same shape: improvement widely acknowledged, with a residue that survives it, slow early hours and inventory friction. That is what a trajectory buys you: credit for the repair, with the launch kept on file.