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Are reviews tougher today than years ago?

Glio

Glio

Member
Oct 27, 2017
24,518
Spain
So, out of curiosity, I was checking Metacritic for the best games of each year for one thing, and it struck me that there were many, many more games with very high reviews.

I have not done a statistical study (although perhaps I could do it later with R) but it seems that since perhaps the PS4 / One generation the reviews have been getting tougher. Maybe I'm imagining things, I don't know. Perhaps before there were more official media that inflated more the notes of the exclusives, idk. What is your opinion?
 
Crossing Eden

Crossing Eden

Member
Oct 26, 2017
53,334
Audience expectations rise as does the expectation of reviewers, especially with the death of traditional AA games. Something like the Order 1886 would've been a 10 out of 10 if it was released five years earlier than it was.
 
Niklel

Niklel

Prophet of Regret
Member
Aug 10, 2020
3,987
Not sure I agree. And even if they are, I still think that review scores for lots of popular franchises are crazy inflated.
 
dark494

dark494

Avenger
Oct 29, 2017
4,552
Seattle
Doesn't feel that way at all. If anything it's going the way of shovelware, many more reviewers/outlets diluting the pool with far less competent reviewers and a lot more extreme outlier reviews that make no sense in context.
 
Aztechnology

Aztechnology

Community Resettler
Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
14,139
I don't think so, I think standards/expectations have risen.

Plus there's still plenty of padding review outlets.
 
Maffis

Maffis

Member
Oct 29, 2017
1,314
I think reviews aren't tougher per say, but there are more of them and because of this we are seeing a bigger difference in scores. I also believe that because of social media and the like that word-of-mouth is more important than reviews.
 
JoRu

JoRu

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,791
Back in the day there were a lot more genuinely shitty games among the major game publishers and that got reviewed (obviously we still have loads of crap these days too, but they are mostly on Steam, mobile etc.), and so the good games stood out more. That's my only guess really.
 
Zukkoyaki

Zukkoyaki

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,282
I believe outlets just explore a bit more of the scale than they used to along with increased expectations.

There's also a hell of a lot more outlets being posted to Metacritic than years ago which can impact averages.
 
SuperFakerBros

SuperFakerBros

Member
Oct 26, 2017
9,827
It certainly seems that way, especially with fewer and fewer games scoring at or past 95 on Metacritic. I imagine it helps that, on consoles, there's a lot less shit and, with the average quality of games being higher, it means you need to do that much more to be scored higher. Of course, gaming scores are still overall inflated compared to, say, movies

Tofer said:
generally yes but less so for some publishers/developers
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I wonder which ones you're referring to...
 
TripleBee

TripleBee

Prophet of Truth
Member
Oct 30, 2017
5,669
Vancouver
From the big sites, perhaps. But the rise of a billion platform-centric fan reviewer sites has over inflated the metacritic reviews for some titles.
 
N.47H.4N

N.47H.4N

Member
Oct 27, 2017
8,096
I think we have more reviews today, which increases the chances of a bad review to tank the final score, also there is a lot of nitpick and click bait today.
 
PlayBee

PlayBee

One Winged Slayer
Member
Nov 8, 2017
5,540
There were definitely more 90+ aggregate scoring games 10 years ago.
 
Snefer

Snefer

Creative Director at Neon Giant
Verified
Oct 30, 2017
340
Average review scores have been going down steadily for the last couple of decades. It's much much harder to get a 90MC now than 15 years ago.
 
Vervain

Vervain

Member
Oct 27, 2017
291
I don't think it's that reviews are necessarily tougher than they used to be, but that the increase in number of them has meant that games are less likely to hit that highest percentile, while a general increase in quality and budget in the medium has eliminated a lot of the lowest scores.

What results is less games getting 95+ because there's a larger pool of reviews that can pull the score down and leas games getting sub-60 or so because publishers and developers have realised that most shovelware doesn't sell and tools/skills have improved over the years.
 
Papercuts

Papercuts

Prophet of Truth
Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,026
The 360/ps3/wii gen was pretty nutty. I remember people getting in ridiculously stupid arguments over something being a 9.4 instead of a 9.5. Part of the toughness seems to more more sites using a 10 point scale instead of 100. That said it's still generally "soft" in my eyes, the full scale is never legitimately used, and a game merely releasing and passing a checklist of being functional and having graphics/music is enough to get a 5/10 atleast. But it's definitely not as easy for a game to be a 90+ MC, though it now means the majority of games are in the 80s with divisive games being in the 70s.
 
OP
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Glio

Glio

Member
Oct 27, 2017
24,518
Spain
I have checked for example 2012. Do you think that nowadays games like Borderlands 2, Mark of Ninja, Mass Effect 3, Telltale: The Walking Dead, FIFA 2013, NBA 2K13 or Far Cry 3 would have 90+?
 
NuFrontier

NuFrontier

Member
Apr 19, 2020
319
With the increased influx of game journalism publication websites, along with the transitioning in standards among the majority, it's certainly true that reviews are much more stringent than say in the mid 90s-early 2000s. But then again, social media also contributes to it as well, which is tbh good and bad.
 
DarkFlame92

DarkFlame92

Member
Nov 10, 2017
5,644
i think yes. Some years ago we reached peak generosity in scores and then the memes started,now we are back to 8/0 being a great game
 
KaiPow

KaiPow

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,116
Grading criteria nowadays feels less geared towards how unique an experience is and more just how well it plays.

And I've been harsher scoring on remakes/remasters than the original games because of the standards of expecting more than just prettier graphics.
 
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Glio

Glio

Member
Oct 27, 2017
24,518
Spain
Papercuts said:
The 360/ps3/wii gen was pretty nutty. I remember people getting in ridiculously stupid arguments over something being a 9.4 instead of a 9.5. Part of the toughness seems to more more sites using a 10 point scale instead of 100. That said it's still generally "soft" in my eyes, the full scale is never legitimately used, and a game merely releasing and passing a checklist of being functional and having graphics/music is enough to get a 5/10 atleast. But it's definitely not as easy for a game to be a 90+ MC, though it now means the majority of games are in the 80s with divisive games being in the 70s.
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I mean, the biggest difference between videogame reviews and film reviews is that people review bad films.

Nobody reviews bad games unless it's out of curiosity like Sonic Boom or that Rambo game.

If you are just Steam shovelware, no one is going to review you. That makes the average higher than 5, because we are eliminating from the average all the games that would be below 5. It is as if when taking an average of the height of the people you said "I don't really want to measure short people because it's boring", the average would come out higher than it really is.

I get it, because it takes me two hours to see a bad movie and ten hours to play a bad game. Nobody wants to review games that do not generate clicks because it is wasting time and money.
 

Deleted member 17627

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
5,364
In some ways, yes. In some ways, no.

Scarlet Nexus is sitting at an 80 on Metacritic, and I assure you, despite getting that Day 1 tomorrow, I know that were it to have been reviewed back in the early 2010s, it would've been more like high 60s on its artstyle alone.
 
ghibli99

ghibli99

Member
Oct 27, 2017
17,783
I was watching MakeBetterMedia's Truman Show analysis (which is excellent BTW), and he makes a great point about review scores, in that he hates giving them out because he admits that it's extremely difficult to stay consistent with them. It's so true. I don't know if reviews have gotten tougher, but I think that there are a lot more review outlets these days and platforms on which they are posted, even compared to the relatively recent PS3/360/Wii generation. So maybe today the number of reviews per title is different/higher. I also don't see as much of the "9.2" or "7.7" in reviews anymore (maybe there are and I just don't follow them), opting for 5 and 10 point scales (with .5 increments), or no scores at all, which always makes me wonder how those are weighted, if at all.
 
jmsebastian

jmsebastian

Member
Nov 14, 2019
1,094
It's kind of weird, because on the one hand, it does seem like the aggregated score is trending lower. On the other hand, we're still seeing a lot of games get very high scores that are then almost immediately re-evaluated as being worse than those scores would suggest. I think that's due to the insane number of games being released and the insane length of a lot of games. Reviewers just don't have the time required to do their best evaluation. How could they? They often have to play the games on their own time, and crank out reviews as quickly as they possibly can, often with incredibly short leads before a game launches.

As a result, some games aren't looked at as critically as they deserve up front because they felt good to play at the time and you just gloss over stuff that would not hold up under more scrutiny. By the same token, you may think a game is not very good, but may have doubts that you just aren't seeing the best parts of it or maybe you think you just aren't grasping a mechanic as well as you might if it was the one game you were going to play for the next month or two. So maybe you bump up a score a bit as a sort of benefit of the doubt thing.

Review scores are inherently a bad idea, though, because they are arbitrary. There's clearly no platonic ideal game that every other game can be judged against. It's better to just give your honest opinion on the game, with all the caveats of your own life that that incorporates, and let the reader decide if your opinions are worth considering.
 
Diogo Arez

Diogo Arez

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 20, 2020
17,645
Yeah I guess, I'm way more strict nowadays but that doesn't mean I still don't give high grades, it's just more rare
 
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Glio

Glio

Member
Oct 27, 2017
24,518
Spain
ghibli99 said:
I was watching MakeBetterMedia's Truman Show analysis (which is excellent BTW), and he makes a great point about review scores, in that he hates giving them out because he admits that it's extremely difficult to stay consistent with them. It's so true. I don't know if reviews have gotten tougher, but I think that there are a lot more review outlets these days and platforms on which they are posted, even compared to the relatively recent PS3/360/Wii generation. So maybe today the number of reviews per title is different/higher. I also don't see as much of the "9.2" or "7.7" in reviews anymore (maybe there are and I just don't follow them), opting for 5 and 10 point scales (with .5 increments), or no scores at all, which always makes me wonder how those are weighted, if at all.
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Oh, decimals in the reviews are dumb, totally agree with that.

What is the difference between a 9.2 game and a 9 game. It's just dumb. I can understand, X.5, but putting 7.7 or 8.3 it's just dumb.
 
Cosmo Kramer

Cosmo Kramer

Prophet of Regret - Chicken Chaser
Member
Oct 28, 2017
2,180
México
I think some games/franchises are still given a pass but in general reviewers do seem to be harsher when judging games.

I think during the PS3/360 gen games were being rated higher than they deserved in most cases, it changed when the XOne/PS4 released
 
GamerJM

GamerJM

Member
Nov 8, 2017
15,636
Glio said:
Oh, decimals in the reviews are dumb, totally agree with that.

What is the difference between a 9.2 game and a 9 game. It's just dumb. I can understand, X.5, but putting 7.7 or 8.3 it's just dumb.
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I think rating scales like 9 vs. 9.2 make sense if you're a weirdo like me who internally ranks games (I've ranked basically every video game I've ever played against each other, and I do the same thing for movies, anime, and albums), but the outside public isn't going to be familiar with the internal logic of your ranking system.
 
Oleander

Oleander

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,589
Certainly seems that way. For instance, there is yet to be a game released this year that has scored a 90 or more on Opencritic.
 
cognizant

cognizant

Member
Dec 19, 2017
13,755
I wouldn't say they're tougher. My dodgy memory tells me that magazine reviewers were just as sycophantic and fawning back in the 90s. The best reviews are Let's Plays on Youtube. I'd rather watch someone play the game than read the insufferable hyperbole of a reviewer who got a free copy with a poster and toy included.

What galls me the most is when reviewers completely fail to mention bad performance, FPS, crashes, bugs, etc. The paying customer has to be the one to discover such things. Even now. In 2021. How on Earth is it that reviewers keep getting away with this type of omission?

Also, everyone pays far too much attention to numbers instead of the content of the reviews. Same shit in the Rotten Tomatoes threads, it's like nobody bothers to read the reviews at all. If they did they'd see the reviews often don't reflect the 'fresh/rotten' rating at all. I most recently saw this with Snyder's JL with plenty of reviews ostensibly suggesting "it's not as bad as getting stabbed in the face I guess" = automatic fresh rating!
 
Akela

Akela

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,849
Glio said:
I mean, the biggest difference between videogame reviews and film reviews is that people review bad films.

Nobody reviews bad games unless it's out of curiosity like Sonic Boom or that Rambo game.

If you are just Steam shovelware, no one is going to review you. That makes the average higher than 5, because we are eliminating from the average all the games that would be below 5. It is as if when taking an average of the height of the people you said "I don't really want to measure short people because it's boring", the average would come out higher than it really is.

I get it, because it takes me two hours to see a bad movie and ten hours to play a bad game. Nobody wants to review games that do not generate clicks because it is wasting time and money.
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What the film industry considers a "bad" film is pretty different from the video game industry though, there's seemingly much higher standards. A film like The Rise of Skywalker can get atrocious reviews despite being (and sometimes because of being) a blockbuster movie with a massive budget with a huge amount of visual splendour over narrative coherence. There seems to be more diversity of opinion as well, film reviewers aren't afraid to give a fairly competent film poor marks if it doesn't align with their own tastes - which really isn't a bad thing.

Yes, there's no such thing as a "broken" film in the same way that a game can be broken, but at the same time simply being a competent film usually isn't enough for high marks, while in many cases it can be for a game. Film reviewers also aren't wowed by visual spectacle in the same way many game reviewers seem to be, which seems to be the primary driver for inflated AAA game scores.
 
Hailinel

Hailinel

Shamed a mod for a tag
Member
Oct 27, 2017
35,527
dark494 said:
When reviews were more limited to the various magazines (that no longer exist today) in circulation?
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'90s magazines were either glorified advertising, staffed with platform warriors, or just generally lacking in depth. Even into the early 00s, there were print magazines that would be seen as embarrassing today.
 
EloKa

EloKa

GSP
Verified
Oct 25, 2017
1,906
I think some reviewing standards have rising to a better level while other standards have also fallen down. Some former kinda-serious outlets are now basically marketing instruments that spread paid articles / opinions while other outlets took a more journalistic approach. In the end the average is pretty much the same imho.
 
Quinton

Quinton

Specialist at TheGamer / Reviewer at RPG Site
Member
Oct 25, 2017
17,276
Midgar, With Love
Speaking as someone who has only very recently had my first few reviews published, I try not to think about whether or not they used to be too soft and/or whether they're too harsh today. I just do what I can.
 
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