Reviw Score Inflation

[Crunchy English]

All this talk of Medal of Honor has me thinking about review scores. It's all well and good to say "I don't read reviews" or "Review Scores don't inform my purchases". That doesn't really help, however, when development teams, publishers and other industry types use metacritic and other aggregate scores as one metric to measure their success. People's jobs and occasionally entire development cycles depend on this stuff. Medal of Honor is considered a "disappointment" by many analysts because it ONLY got a 7.5. That's messed up, but its an undeniable truth of the industry. Plus, sites like this one that use a 5 point scale tend to mess it up. A 3/5 and a 6/10 SHOULD be the same score, but we all know it's not. A 3/5 is a pretty good game you can try, but a 6/10 is probably tough to play through without drinking.

What kind of score does a game needs these days to be considered a "success"? What's considered a failure? How would you fix it?

 

[Pingieking]

I consider anything 7.5 and above to be good enough for me to give it a try, if I was interested. Anything 8.5 and above is a game that I should try even if I'm not really interested. From 6.0 to 7.5 is something that will be hit-or-miss, so only try if I am really interested. Below 6.0, probably something that I should avoid.

However, the market seems to think that a metacritic score of below 8.0 is pretty bad. Though there are some pretty good data indicating that sales correlate more with marketing spending than review scores.

 

[thenamelessloser]

Score doesn't matter that much when it comes to reviews for me personally. For instance, I really liked Alpha Protocol which got some bad reviews, but the things the reviews didn't like about it didn't bother me or even in some cases I actually liked what they didn't like. I do like reading pro reviews just because they come out sooner than others and even if their opinion sucks you can still tell certain things about the game.

 

[Pielikey]

If you really want to know then read the actual review instead of just scrolling right down to the scores ;_;

I think anything above maybe 8/10 if it's $50, 7/10 if it's $40, 6/10 if it's $20, and it has to be AT LEAST a 10/0 if they want me to spend $60 on the game.

EDIT: yes, 10 divided by zero. it's not a typo.

 

[AnOriginalConcept]

I consider anything 7.5 and above to be good enough for me to give it a try, if I was interested. Anything 8.5 and above is a game that I should try even if I'm not really interested. From 6.0 to 7.5 is something that will be hit-or-miss, so only try if I am really interested. Below 6.0, probably something that I should avoid.

However, the market seems to think that a metacritic score of below 8.0 is pretty bad. Though there are some pretty good data indicating that sales correlate more with marketing spending than review scores.

This pretty much goes for me, too. Reviews are still informative.

 

[CK76]

Looking at Metacritic I'd say 75-80 range seems to be cut off for where "good" is set at.

Conversely, films seem have much higher standards where many good (I'd argue even great) films finish in 60-75 range (Inception, Scott Pilgrim, Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Girl with Dragon Tattoo and Moon)