maxben said:
Therumancer said:
See, if I rate a game a "5" or "6" nowadays on a 10 point scale it would be considered a scathing blast on the game, and calling it a piece of garbage, when in reality that's rating it as average or slightly above average.
Ok, but who the hell wants to watch an "average" movie (1:30-3 hours), or play an "Average" video game (6+ hours all the way to 100 hours of gameplay), read an "average" book (a 500 page book should take a week-2 weeks)?
THAT'S why consumers see 5 or 6 as "things to avoid". We have limited time and dont see the need to waste it on an average experience. Hell, in a BAD experience at least there is some enjoyment from how bad something is, the jokes you and your friends have about that crappy movie you saw for example. The "average" game has LESS entertainment value than a bad game for consumers.
So I see what you are saying, but that's because there is a disconnect between what consumers want and what statistics objectively mean. This has been a problem among reviewers in every medium. Remember, the reviewer has no time to waste (this is a job that they get paid for) and rarely buys access to the game/movie/book etc themselves. They know they cannot understand what consumers want exactly, they can just consider objective quality. The fact that this does not line up with consumer opinion is NORMAL
Why do you think consumer reviews tend to be 0 (do not buy) or 10 (buy)?
True, people are going to want the best possible products for their money. The idea of reviews is to help them determine that, and yes, most things being average (as they should be) is not going to cause them to act as a form of advertising... which is the point, reviews are not supposed to be advertisements. The problem with reviews is that they are being turned into advertisements by the games industry, and that needs to stop. Turning reviews into advertisements intended to help sell the products is why we see reviews becoming so top heavy. That said we already see a system where right now people are focusing on like a 2-3 number scale and making the same desicians based on whether a game got a 9.5 or a 10 or not, we've wound up in the same basic place anyway, it's just better to use the entire scale so more accurate analysis can happen. A 5 or 6 is about where an 8 is now.
As far as reviewers not matching the consumers, that's not true. No reviewer is universally connected to everyone, but most who become successful do so because they connect with the preferances of a huge group of people who think like they do. Leading to people having their favorite reviewes and trusted sources.
The thing with reviews right now is that reviewers tend to start out speaking for the fans, get their following, and then once they start to become known and influential you start seeing efforts to bring them in line with the desires of the gaming industry. They get pressured by their publisher who relies on advertising, or the reviewers are gradually corrupted by being offered money and perks by the industry in exchange for favorable reviews. Reviewers generally start out speaking for a large group of people, but inevitably cease to do so the bigger they become.
In general a reviewer tends to wind up losing credability right about the time they start getting invited to VIP events, E3, press conferances and similar things. The more access to information they should wind up having, the less critical they become of the industry and the more they gloss over failures until you start seeing a situation where they are rating everything with a lot of money behind it a 9+. This is called "Selling out".
How many times have you see a review who you once agreed with, wind up changing track under these circumstances, and then when questioned, go on about how much they support the industry, how great all the guys they have met in it are, and so on and so forth. Basically if your a guy who is palling around with the dudes your supposed to be policing, while they load you up with food and swag at press events, how the F@ck are you supposed to remain objective?
In general there is a sort of journalistic code of conduct enforced by larger news organizations to try and prevent companies from swaying the reviewers in exactly this way that so far has not been able to be applied to game reviewers. I could say a lot about how such things should be made to operate, but that would be a long post in of itself, and admittedly almost unreachable because it would require a lot of things to to alter
themselves in a radical fashion, involving the demise of most buisnesses that currently employ game reviewers as their very model of operation does not allow game reviewers and critics to remain independant. Basically game reviewers and critics should be feared by the industry more than being viewed as an extension of it's advertising branch. Much like how book, resteraunt, or movie critics from major publications like the New York Times can literally sink a business or product overnight, and are very difficult to sway due to the way things are made to operate (causing a lot of producers and creators to famously call for the deaths of critics... I feel a fairly adverserial relationship is for the best though... proof of a company corrupting a critic or reviewer should basically amount to the death of that person's career as well).
See, I think the industry actually suffers in terms of quality and control for the lack of anything equivilent to a "Phantom Gourmet", or dedicated consumer-reports type prescence on the product. In general an ending like the one in Mass Effect 3 which was so negatively received by so many people should sink the product... something like that should just not fly, and it's the job of reviewers and critics to catch things like that and act as our voice. Which also forces the game industry to take into account popular reception. Right now the whole "complete leap of faith" ideal of the industry doesn't really encourage it to produce quality products or take great care with it's writing and production. A reviewer saying without spoilers "this game features perhaps the biggest disappointment of an ending in history which will be rated from barely tolerable to absolutly morifying bad depending on the viewer" as a justification for rating it's writing as very low is EXACTLY the kind of thing we should have gotten before laying down $60 on a product. I mean it's easy for Bioware to sit there and go "lulz, our ending was meant to polarize people and illicit this reaction" once they have your money... and we see this very same thing continously recur for one reason or another with a lot of very expensive products... ME3 just being the example of the moment. Reviewers and critics are supposed to exist for basically that reason, and the fact that we saw all these perfect reviews, and not one mention of this from any review source before the game comes out demonstrates EXACTLY how bad the current system is.
