-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Is 7/10 a good, average, or bad review score?
- Thread starter oni-link
- Start date
I'm assuming you mean in videogame terms, then 7 is a bad score.
This is how the overall gaming community, and reviewers, see it. You can disagree, as I do, but that's how it is. Just do this experiment: think of an extreme hyped game. Think of it getting a 7 from IGN.
Or think if games like The Last of Us, GTA, Elder Scroll, Zelda, etc, got a 70 metacritic score.
This is how the overall gaming community, and reviewers, see it. You can disagree, as I do, but that's how it is. Just do this experiment: think of an extreme hyped game. Think of it getting a 7 from IGN.
Or think if games like The Last of Us, GTA, Elder Scroll, Zelda, etc, got a 70 metacritic score.
C is for cookie, and it's good enough for me.
More nuanced answer, it's perfectly passable entertainment that some will find amazing, and others, fairly rote but fun. Plenty will defend it and their time spent with it, but there will often be discussions as to its merits or flaws.
More nuanced answer, it's perfectly passable entertainment that some will find amazing, and others, fairly rote but fun. Plenty will defend it and their time spent with it, but there will often be discussions as to its merits or flaws.
I think the GOTY, GOTG and GOAT obsession made people too crazy about this kind of stuff. For me, there are games that are "Good" and games that are "Bad".
A "good" game is the kind of game which I would eventually pick and play, regardless of it's faults.
A "bad" game is the kind of game which I wouldn't have the slightest interest on it. And there always some 10/10 on it, like The Last of Us 2.
Saying that, I didn't played Ratched & Clank: Rift Apart, but looking only at some videos, it's easier to understand why the game is a 7/10. Generic characters, lifeless ost and repetitive gameplay. The only thing that impressed me was the technical aspect.
A "good" game is the kind of game which I would eventually pick and play, regardless of it's faults.
A "bad" game is the kind of game which I wouldn't have the slightest interest on it. And there always some 10/10 on it, like The Last of Us 2.
Saying that, I didn't played Ratched & Clank: Rift Apart, but looking only at some videos, it's easier to understand why the game is a 7/10. Generic characters, lifeless ost and repetitive gameplay. The only thing that impressed me was the technical aspect.
Obviously you're not one of those posters who assesses the quality of a game based on a singular review, there's plenty of them in the recent Edge thread you should check it out.
7/10 means I probably won't buy it until it's dirt cheap. But then I will most likely not have enough time to come around to play it so it will rot in my backlog.
It's good, and I think as a whole, society needs to not cast the educational scale to ratings for product reviews, where "A" or "B" grades are all that really grabs respect.
IMO, 5 should be absolutely middle of the road, bog-standard mediocre. Not bad, not great; functionally adequate. I find it more mathematically pure. It's only 4 and below that should give pause. 6 should even be a valid, slightly positive score.
By that logic, 7 is a good score.
Also, 10/10 should never mean perfection (where one might argue that it should never be used because no game is perfect) -- it should just denote that the reviewer had an exceptionally good time.
IMO, 5 should be absolutely middle of the road, bog-standard mediocre. Not bad, not great; functionally adequate. I find it more mathematically pure. It's only 4 and below that should give pause. 6 should even be a valid, slightly positive score.
By that logic, 7 is a good score.
Also, 10/10 should never mean perfection (where one might argue that it should never be used because no game is perfect) -- it should just denote that the reviewer had an exceptionally good time.
7 is good. 6 is average, 5 has some major flaws but can still be a fun ride. 4 and below is bad. 8 is very good, 9-10 are excellent.
Any notion that a 7 is average is silliness, and completely invalidates anything below a 6 really.
Any notion that a 7 is average is silliness, and completely invalidates anything below a 6 really.
You didn't play it…. But you know the characters are generic….
Is that what you get from my post? A 7/10 game for me means a game that does something right and I might be intrigued to buy it when the price is right. I bought many of these games on sale thinking I will eventually play them. "Eventually" turns into 3 years, 5 years, a decade etc. I unfortunately have to ignore most of these games since there will always new games coming out that I want to play more. It's not a financially responsible habit but it's my habit nonetheless.
As others have pointed out, on a 1 - 10 scale, most only use the 5 - 10 where 5 is trash fire, 7 is ehh, 10 is goat.
I want to say it's a bad score, but only because it's average, but average means different things to different people. To me, an average experience typically isn't worth spending time on; especially for games, where an average experience can overstay its welcome by... tens of hours. YMMV of course, but I think it's a bad score and I would neither want to play nor recommend games I thought were 7/10.
Of course it was a first impression based on someone which played really bad, but who knows?
Well, there are some which are good on breaking the monotony by adding elements and situations towards it, but as I said, it was an impression by someone which never had interest on the series.
I'm proud of Ars Technica's stance on review scores, the same now as it was in 2010:
arstechnica.com
The above article goes into detail about how even Metacritic, at one point in time, had its own stance on interpreting outlets' scores:
Game reviews on Metacritic: why we avoid inclusion
Metacritic can bring readers and more links to your reviews, so why wouldn't …
arstechnica.com
The above article goes into detail about how even Metacritic, at one point in time, had its own stance on interpreting outlets' scores:
I'm simply saying that just going "repetitive" shouldn't be used as a negative criticism considering that's every game in existence.
I dunno why people transfer the number scale into a school grading scale. A 75 for a video game should not equate to a "C", which is "average". That's a perfectly good game. The problem of that transfer is that anything 59 or below is a failing or F grade, which doesn't take advantage of the whole scale. Out of 100 a C, the average, should be 50, not 75.
The scale is completely arbitrary, is what you're missing. How you map a normal distribution to a scale is entirely up to the reviewer.
They choose to map the distribution onto a 1-10 scale such that the bulk of the games fall on a 7, but they could just as easily have picked 5, or 3 or any other number for that – it's arbitrary. Saying "the average game is a 7 because the quality distribution is such that the bulk of games are pretty good and pretty good is a 7" is just a convoluted way of saying "the average game is 7 because the score we give the average game is a 7". It's tautological.
Last edited:
Yep, this is how I still view the rating scale despite it definitely not being that way anymore. To me a 7 is a good game.
A 7/10 game, reads, to me, that they're doing something niche that not everyone will enjoy, and also have some rough spots.
Games like: OG NieR, Earth Defense Force, Demon's Souls, Armored Core, Gothic, etc...
Games like: OG NieR, Earth Defense Force, Demon's Souls, Armored Core, Gothic, etc...
Depends on the game, the more anticipated it is, the more torches and pitchforks people tend to bring out if they ever give a game a 7/10, as a certain Sterling knows.
7 is good, it could mean more of the same but still fun to play.
I put 1000+ hours into a 7/10 game called Destiny.
stop listening to reviewers people, they are not you, think for yourself.
I put 1000+ hours into a 7/10 game called Destiny.
stop listening to reviewers people, they are not you, think for yourself.
When I think of "7/10", I think of:
Something that might be cool but has enough jank/technical problems to turn some off of it.
A game with a really dull story or protagonist, but still is decent enough in the gameplay department to snag some fans (like Watchdogs).
Sports game sequels that aren't worse than their predecessor, but only have incremental improvements.
A decently done "clone" of a more well known franchise.
Edit: No idea what is typical in the review score world of 2021. Can't say I've paid attention to reviews for many years, except for the occasional Era review thread. They don't do much for me in a world of Live Streams and Lets Plays.
I find a fair number of people who get emotional over reviews have a rather trinary scale. A game is GOTY, very good, or trash.
Something that might be cool but has enough jank/technical problems to turn some off of it.
A game with a really dull story or protagonist, but still is decent enough in the gameplay department to snag some fans (like Watchdogs).
Sports game sequels that aren't worse than their predecessor, but only have incremental improvements.
A decently done "clone" of a more well known franchise.
Edit: No idea what is typical in the review score world of 2021. Can't say I've paid attention to reviews for many years, except for the occasional Era review thread. They don't do much for me in a world of Live Streams and Lets Plays.
I find a fair number of people who get emotional over reviews have a rather trinary scale. A game is GOTY, very good, or trash.
Last edited:
It always annoys me when I see critics give a game a 7/10. To me, that is the copout score, where you really don't want to commit to an honest perspective.
IGN is guilty of this all the time, but they hide their true 7/10's as 8/10's. They hand out 8/10's like candy on Halloween.
IGN is guilty of this all the time, but they hide their true 7/10's as 8/10's. They hand out 8/10's like candy on Halloween.