Maybe we should ditch review scores

[Kthulhu]

I don't feel there are any positives to review scores, especially in this day and age. They only seem to enable toxic behavior and are useless in the era of big patches and overhauls.

The only positive I can see is for game companies who want a number to slap on the box or for consumers who can't be bothered to read a few paragraphs to get a critic's opinion. The former doesn't even seem to matter quite as much as game companies have included review quotes for decades in ads and on boxes.

Games like FF14, No Man's Sky, Fallout 76, Fortnite, etc have changed so drastically since release that the review scores serve only as a time capsule, not as something to inform consumer purchases. If you want an accurate picture of the game as it is now you have to either find someone who has bothered to look into an older game, or just jump in blind.

To me it seems like review scores just make the community more divisive and serve as free advertising for game companies, not something that helps inform consumers or encourages good faith critical discussion.

I know some game outlets have dropped scores in favor of a binary recommendation system or just not put out a score, but I'd love to hear from anyone who's done reviews what they think. Do journalists generally think scores have enough value to continue to be used, or are they no longer relevant? Maybe from a business case it doesn't make sense, as some sites are probably super reliant on people reading reviews even just to see the score at the end. It can't be for people who actually have read the review get your point, games criticism has come a lot farther then that. A number becomes redundant if you're a good enough writer to get your opinion across with words alone.

 

[Servbot24]

I volunteer to be a member of the Review Police and keep everyone in line.

But seriously though review scores are a shortcut for a mass audience to know whether to waste money or not. I don't want to necessarily read 5 pages for all 200 games that come out next year. If I see a game get some 9s that helps me know I should definitely find out more about it.

Reviews are for consumers, not fans.

 

[Xando]

I've been saying this for the past decade

 

[StrappingYoungLance]

I like review scores, though prefer a five star scale because it usually means the whole scale gets used. I find I'm actually *less* likely to read a review without a score.

I'd be disappointed to see them gone just because gamerz can't not be a toxic mess.

 

[PlanetSmasher]

Nuke scores from orbit. They don't realistically reflect anything and are only fuel for stupid arguments.

 

[DAHGAMING]

Ditched thwm years ago, along with the day 1 fomo mob.

 

[JEH]

Sometimes People don't feel like reading or watching something and just want a quick summary with a score to get the general temperature on a game.

Nothing wrong with that.

 

[TheSpaceBetween]

Should have been done a long time ago. I'm happy to see a lot of outlets have done away with them, but the biggest ones like IGN are to cowardly to do it.

 

[Dennis8K]

We have been talking about this for decades.

Not going to happen. Too ingrained in the industry and in gamers.

Shoutout to Edge scores which I frequently disagree with but at least use the whole scale from 1-10.

 

[Sarcastico]

I've stopped paying attention to them and just gather what I can from the review content.

 

[Leafhopper]

I liked letter grades that 1UP used to do. I think they actually made people read the actual review more. Although that might have just been my own personal placebo.

I can still see people going "It got a C+ so it's shit." and not reading a thing, so maybe nothing would change.

 

[Deleted member 22750]

they're mainly only using 6 through 10 anyway

 

[Soulflarz]

Reviews are still useful for people who want a quick singular thing to show them how decent a game is when they have no intention of reading through reviews.

 

[Dice]

Lots of sites won't, because a lot of clicks are come from metacritic literally organizing it by number.

The problem is people taking the number as sacrosanct and not a reflection of many factors, both objective for the game, and subjective to the reviewer. People don't understand reviews are somewhat (maybe even largely) personal in taste.

 

[abellwillring]

I disagree personally. I just think that the system something was reviewed on should be explicitly stated and it should not account for alternatives. It's not a like for like comparison to do a top-end PC to a console now.

I don't read reviews personally -- they almost always spoil things and I don't have the time or inclination as I'm just not very bothered outside of opinions of people I know. If a game looks interesting to me, I'll either get it or look for first hand input geerally. But I do also consult with the average review score for movies and games -- it does a very good job of weeding out stuff that isn't worth your time generally speaking.

 

[JT60564]

I think an up/down rec can be useful, or even a "Buy it/Don't buy it/ Wait for a sale" system. After all, most of us are just trying to figure out whether to fork over $60 or not, we aren't looking for an academic dissertation.

Having a faux-scientific rating system (often down to the decimal point!) definitely seems like a waste of time and effort though.

 

[Lobster Roll]

Call me crazy, but I wish that review scores went harder, or were more critical. It would be amazing to have a true 0-100 scale. I may not always agree with a magazine like Edge with it's individual scoring of particular games, but I respect that if they don't like something, they give it a truly low score instead of the Gamer-approved low score floor of "7/10".

 

[SteveWinwood]

welcome to the coldest take of 2008

 

[Ploid 6.0]

I stopped buying games based on review scores years and years ago. GTA4 was my wakeup call, and I was a massive GTA3's fan at the time. I quickly realized how boring GTA4 was, and I still haven't recovered from that one. "Oscar worthy story"... those were the days huh?

I now use twitch, youtube uploads of people playing the game, not massive review sites that get sponsors, and their face in the game mind you (haha), but real customers. I wait until their honeymoon phase wear off, and look up some videos of them just playing the game to see if they are still enjoying it.

I really like Watch Dogs 2, but I'm still waiting to see if I should get Watch Dogs Legion. The Cyberpunk 2077 reception really put WDL very high up on my radar though (not even funny, especially with how fun hacking is in WD1 and WD2, also no first person, and WD has good controls especially with vehicles. Oh and you can fly in WD with the drone at least).

 

[Issen]

I don't even really watch reviews anymore for the most part. Just gameplay videos, I'll be the judge. And when I do, it's usually from smaller youtubers who don't even bother with a score.

 

[Liam Allen-Miller]

Contentious opinion, but if gamers were more media literate and behaved less like babies then we probably wouldn't even have to have this discussion. I think the vast majority of reviewers do a great job and that they're not the problem.

 

[Geode]

I agree, get rid of them. Also, get rid of user reviews too. I think that's one thing EGS did right.

 

[AntiMacro]

I got rid of them in favour of a quick rundown at the end of What I Loved/Liked/Disliked/Hated, so people who don't want to read can just skip there and see what they think from that.

I mean it's all subjective, so if I give a 4/5 to a game because I loved the story and characters enough that the grinding wasn't a problem for me, it might be a 2/5 for you because you HATE grinding.

 

[samred]

hi from Ars Technica, where we have never used review scores—and covered why the trend began to change significantly in 2015:

The spotty death and eternal life of gaming review scores

Some outlets are dropping them, but the concept is likely to endure.

arstechnica.com

 

[julia crawford]

Welcome to 2010 when this discussion was a hot topic. There are a lot of outlets who don't measure things in numbers anymore.

 

[NinjaScooter]

Reviews and review scores become divisive here because they are consumed mostly by the people that need them the least. The only reason they are discussed or followed here is for validation.

 

[Alucrid]

 

[Dennis8K]

Click to shrink...

Snurgleton?

 

[Cess007]

The problem are not the score, or rankings, the problem is that people are not using the review scores as a general guideline, but rather as a validation of a preconceived notion.

 

[Temascos]

I prefer simple wording over numbers as it's less binary, something like

• Absolutely Recommended - Everyone with x should pick this up
• Highly Recommended - Most people will really enjoy this.
• Very good - One for fans of the genre, may be difficult to get into for casual players
• Good - Give it a try
• Wait For A Bit - Often for games that have potential and are otherwise fun but need time to iron out issues
• Average - You'll have an okay time but you also might not like it
• Not Recommended
• Avoid - For your Life Of Black Tiger type games

 

[SecondNature]

People follow and trust Youtubers

 

[Leafhopper]

Click to shrink...

Miss Gamepro

 

[MnM]

The fact that someone gives a shit about a review....

 

[Deleted member 79517]

I agree in an idealistic sense but realistically taking away review scores probably means less people clicking on reviews. Some people don't have any interest in the author's musings and just want the scoop on whether or not it's worth any money.

 

[Kthulhu]

I volunteer to be a member of the Review Police and keep everyone in line.

But seriously though review scores are a shortcut for a mass audience to know whether to waste money or not. I don't want to necessarily read 5 pages for all 200 games that come out next year. If I see a game get some 9s that helps me know I should definitely find out more about it.

Reviews are for consumers, not fans.

Click to shrink...

If they're not for fans then why do fans seem to get the most "passionate" about them. Are death threats and circle jerks worth saving a few minutes of time every time a major game comes out?

hi from Ars Technica, where we have never used review scores—and covered why the trend began to change significantly in 2015:

The spotty death and eternal life of gaming review scores

Some outlets are dropping them, but the concept is likely to endure.

arstechnica.com

Click to shrink...

Thanks! I'll read it when I get the chance.

 

[Dennis8K]

Individual scores are not that interesting though I do take note of the aggregate critic score as well as people here who usually have good taste.

 

[Soap]

Review scores aren't the problem, but the lack of using the entire range is. Edge do it best.

 

[hikarutilmitt]

Funny how this type of thread/discussion always comes up with a game reviews higher or lower than expected and there's some controversy over it. It's also an exclusively internet thing because this shit didn't happen in the magazine days, even among friends at school who disagreed with a particular magazine.

That being said, I personally have always felt giving scores with any sort of arbitrary mark of a number, letter or even just a thumbs up/down was a disservice, for any sort of medium. Simply review the content and your take on it and why. That's it. Maybe provide some context referencing another game in a similar genre or design.

Also feel like reviews can and should be updated based on patches. It's simple enough to leave the original review in place and republish it with the addendum so that you're not rewriting an entire article, it's not going to go as missed by people who care and it helps keep at least some of the old reviews from poisoning a sale to a new customer if the patches have made any sort of impact (NMS).

 

[Greigor the FellHand]

Review scores work.

Current reviewers don't.

Also no industry standard on scoring is a Shame.

It's okay for ba game to get 6/10. That should mean it's better than average. A 9/10 should be amazing. A 10/10 should be amazing with no bugs at launch.

 

[Rats]

I don't think scores are completely useless but I've thought for a long time that there's no need for granularity beyond a 5-point scale (possibly even 4). 100-point scales are utter nonsense, I defy anybody to tell me the appreciable difference between an 83 and an 84.

 

[Hazzuh]

Reviews and review scores become divisive here because they are consumed mostly by the people that need them the least. The only reason they are discussed or followed here is for validation.

Click to shrink...

Yep. There is plenty of good games criticism but on the whole review scores are just used so people can justify their decisions as consumers.

 

[RecRoulette]

I was thinking about this today. I wish that more of the non-scored reviewers actually put scores on them because it feels like those get ignored/swept aside because they don't affect the metacritic score. Not saying they should just slap a score on there, but I wish those reviews got brought up more

 

[AshenOne]

Iam one of those people who don't read stuff in full or detail for each and everything but need a tl;dr and a score as an indication. Reviews will be useless to me if that happens. I know this time, the scores don't reflect the console performance and the bugs in all versions of the game and that reflects a lot of the gaming market so more people are talking about it but PC users have been dealing with outstanding review for games that ran bad on PC, Batman: Arkham Knight, Horizon Zero Dawn as recent examples, for quite some time but despite that as someone who has faced scores not reflecting the game's performance issue in the past. I would say that scores should reflect the written content inside a review and the review should by all means take in how the game performs.

 

[Fawz]

I actually think we should go the other way around and invest even further into scores by having a much more granular and detailed breakdown

I'd love to see a breakdown of the scores for each section of the game (Visuals, Audio, Gameplay, Value, Narative, Online) and then have sub-categories for said sections (ie: For Visuals there'd be Performance, Art Style, Visual Fidelity) which outline why that section got said score. The overall game score would be a weighted sum of the parts which is reflected on the genre (ie: A strategy game doesn't weight Visuals as much as Gameplay, while a Competitive Shooter has a heavy emphasis on Online). Even better is that individual categories could be updated to reflect Patches or Platforms specific differences, and users could tweak how the overall score is weighted based on what they personally care about (ie: The deaf can fully remove Audio from the score calculation).

Instead we're just moving towards binary Recomended or Not system and I find that a shame, but that's clearly just me

 

[JuniperAndSage]

All the good sites have already done that.

 

[platocplx]

Scores are useless when everyone is using different scales as to how they would rate a game.
Going to more subjective terms like Do Not Buy, Wait For Sale/Updates, Recommended, and Must Buy or something like that is way better than review scores.
Wait for sale/updates on console versions of half baked games would make them more focused on fixing their games etc. and have reviews revisited yearly. Imo. Been saying for a while review scores are useless.

hi from Ars Technica, where we have never used review scores—and covered why the trend began to change significantly in 2015:

The spotty death and eternal life of gaming review scores

Some outlets are dropping them, but the concept is likely to endure.

arstechnica.com

Click to shrink...

Yep this is how it should be.

 

[PucePikmin]

Scores provide another tool for players to assess whether a game is for them, and I'm all for giving the reader as many tools as possible, even if they may not read my carefully-written essay. There is nothing inherently wrong with scores, it's the culture/obsession that's risen up around them. Fix the later, not a perfectly sensible thing like attaching a score to a review. Roger Ebert attached stars to all his reviews -- I'm not turning my nose up at it.

 

[JusDoIt]

Review scores aren't going anywhere because video game reviews are consumer reports.

We need more non-scored video game criticism, but to allow that we also need to relax the expectation that games criticism is only valuable near release.

Reviews can live alongside this kind of criticism. Scored reviews should be updated periodically alongside the game, because video games (unlike most forms of media) are regularly updated after launch.

 

[Deleted member 2620]

Even given that there's no objective measurement of quality, summaries (be they numeric, one-sentence, whatever) have obvious utility and I don't see a compelling reason to get rid of them. Without them you'll still have chuds harassing over negative high-profile reviews, you'll still have posters with embarrassing takes, and studios that use them as criteria for bonuses have much, much deeper issues at their core.

 

[Rosebud]

Honestly, I don't think it would achieve much.

Reviewers are harassed even when they don't give scores, or give high scores but criticize something on the game. Gamers would still use positive/negative reviews as ammo.