Isengrim said:
The matter is that I find the reasons behind gamers going into a "darkzone" of the Entitlement are in what I just presented. Leaps, lack of agreement between gamers and critics in "controversial" matters, lack of very public and very rough negative overviews of games.
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What is really sad, is that reviewers are supposed to be there to protect the customers, to be nitpicky, to be... well, critical.
What you see is that the "big ones" like IGN, are basically to comfortable in their privilieged seats of exclusive content and add revenue, that it almost seems like they try to scam you into a always positive attitude towards a product.
This is much closer to the truth than you know. (WARNING, THIS IS KINDA LONG)
1) BACK IN THE DAY...
Before the internet became as integrated into gaming as much as it has, our critical feedback came from magazines.
But right from the start, Publishers were trying to buy favorable opinions from these magazines (Acclaim pulled ads from EGM because EGM gave Total Recall an appropriately low score.)
It's been an industry standard practice for publishers to pay the critics of their games, for better and worse.
(And an endless source of debate)
2) THE RISE
I think more broadly, the gaming boom at the end of the 90s and early 2000s primed gamers for future disappointment.
Critical feedback, for once, was falling more in line with or exceeding gamers' expectations because the gaming tech was making advances by leaps and bounds every year, and the industry was trying SO MANY cool new things. It was an era of growth AND experimentation.
Grand Theft Auto was a highly NICHE game prior to GTA3. It's a household name today.
How many gamers knew of The Elder Scrolls before Morrowind? Not many.
Halo completely changed the direction of the shooter market by being the first truly mass-marketable console shooter since Goldeneye; to the point where I can point to its influence in the design of nearly every single mega-successful shooter of the last 13 years.
3) THE FALL
But no boom lasts forever.
These things have become standard. Normal. Routine.
What is Skyrim but a shinier Morrowind with dragons, yelling, and stupid internet memes?
What is Call of Duty 4 (or any CoD since 4), but a modern setting Halo with iron sights and some insta-win tech?
Grand Theft Auto 5 is the only game that's distanced itself at all from its Boom-Day GTA3 formula, and not by all that much.
We aren't as wowed anymore because these games, while "good" on their own merits and strong sellers, are routine.
4) DISSENT AND BACKLASH: TIDES OF THE INTERNET
By this point, the internet and gaming are so close as to be practically married. Even better (or worse), the internet is where any random person can get on a digital soapbox and express their opinion; we don't really need the old magazines anymore. We have sites like Metacritic, where we can access a small library of reviews on any game that matters.
The stage is set. Now we need an act.
While lots of gamers enjoy blockbuster the aforementioned titles, critics still hype them up like they're the most amazing, revolutionary thing to ever happen in gaming when they really aren't, because again, they're just routine entries.
And that dissonance more than anything, is dispelling this illusion of greatness that the major game critics have built up over the years for their publisher ad-partners.
Armed with a sense of disillusion and a public platform with which to express themselves, gamers started openly questioning the system. Years of pent up skepticism at the endless parade of one-sided inflated review scores were unleashed in a great reactionary wave.
Confused and threatened at this growing public response, publishers and their critic darlings responded in kind.
"Entitlement" is a 2nd wave response to dissent. One of many responses, in fact.
The market is slowly changing, but the big firms don't want to change with it because change is scary (which drives away investors) and costly. To them, it means a likely end to the easy money they've enjoyed for years.
In short, they're trying to marginalize and dismiss dissent to maintain the status quo; going so far as to try and trick the market into believing stupid shit like "entitlement".
Sadly, it seems to have worked for them thanks to the nature of the internet: the most vocal dissenters will exaggerate, troll and throw tantrums just to get attention (the "Darkzone" as you call it), making them an easy target to form some sort of moral argument against.
Said moral argument has since been thrown at everyone else as a convenient way to dismiss dissenting opinion.
It's using the exception to define the norm; it's scapegoating and exploitation of this "Darkzone", and it needs to stop.
There are many more factors to it than that and many notable exceptions, but that's my take as it describes mainstream gaming in general.