Maybe we should ditch review scores

[knightmawk]

I don't really have a problem with scores, but I think aggregate scores miss the point. Like Metacritic and that. Every person is going to have different taste and some things that are deal breakers for one reviewer might not be a deal breaker for me or you. Generally I only pay attention to review scores if I know I usually agree with the particular reviewer, if there's no one reviewing the game that I know I usually agree with, then I'll find a handful of places and read the reviews, then stitch together my own opinion independent of the scores.

I also think people have way to aggressive expectations for review score where only like 8 and above is positive and everything below is total crap, that's kind of a different conversation though I guess.

 

[ket]

As a former games reviewer, I always found review scores to be pointless and arbitrary.

 

[HighFive]

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Lol, was that EGM? 😂

 

[Ringten]

No. Scores are easy to understand, and with the hundred of outlets, the average is a nice representation even when some use different criteria or scales

 

[Servbot24]

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?

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Sounds like your problem is with shitty fans more than with review scores.

Fans get toxic in all aspects of video games. That doesn't mean we stop video games from existing.

 

[HighFive]

Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down. Pretty simple. Is it good, or not?

 

[Ultima_5]

I️ like em. I'm not reading multi page reviews of a game to find out it's a 3/10.

 

[Salamando]

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?

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The reviews aren't the problem there, it's the wankers who feel it necessary to destroy someone for having an opinion. Even without a score, jerks can still cherry-pick quotes from a review to whip their twitter-sphere into a furor.

Scores serve a place in a review. Right now I'm buying presents for family who enjoy things that I am not familiar with at all. If I have to read a 3-page review for a book to see if it's worth buying, I'm going to gravitate instead to a review with a concise summary. I shouldn't need to do hours of research to see if my niece will like this teenage adventure story.

 

[GrinWithoutaKat]

The only thing I like about them is being able to sort by metacritic rating when I'm looking for something new to play and want to see what's highly rated. Much harder to do that when it's just recommended or avoid.

 

[ViewtifulJC]

Removing review scores didn't make the divisive arguments around negative TLOU2 reviews any less. Removing numbers because people are fuckin stupid babies with entitlement issues ain't a good argument.

 

[Anacaona]

Keep 'em

 

[Grand Galvantula]

Reviews WOULD be better with no score, but we'll never get that

so instead, everybody switch to a 1-5 ranking system

the more and more increments you add to your scoring system the worse it is. Like somebody else said, we only basically use 6 to 10 anyway, so just simplify that.

 

[JusDoIt]

As a former games reviewer, I always found review scores to be pointless and arbitrary.

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Aren't all reviews literally arbitrary? It's personal judgment, not objective truth.

 

[Deleted member 16908]

review scores are for babies who cannot read

 

[deepFlaw]

Getting rid of review scores would be nice.

Getting rid of this site's weird obsession with aggregate scores would be even better.

 

[TheOther]

Review scores as part of a bonus structure is incredibly shady, IMO.

 

[Micro]

The day one review score of a game being worth something is antiquated, and has been for some time. Whether games are fixed, have features added/removed, micro transactions added/removed... all of these will change the quality of the game. Destiny 2 is basically a completely new games since launch, for example.

A quick paragraph with a timestamp (launch day, one year later...) is worth more than an arbitrary number.

 

[blitzblake]

When did we stop reviewing each platform separately and having seperate listings on opencritic and metacritic??? It needs to be made more obvious which platform the "mighty" rating is for... it's ridiculous..

 

[Elfgore]

If it reduces tribalism and other bullshit surrounding them, then I'm all for it.

Personally, I've stopped using them after the "too much water".

 

[Kthulhu]

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

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Does Metacritic not use non score reviews for the aggregate score? I think Open Critic does, but I can't remember.

 

[Blayde]

I can't believe no ones thought of this before

 

[dom]

Review scores are the start to whether you follow up and look more into a game or completely bounce. Everyone's scale is different.

 

[Sparks]

If we ditch review scores? How the hell will I know if I'm RIGHT and someone else is WRONG?

 

[Kthulhu]

Sounds like your problem is with shitty fans more than with review scores.

Fans get toxic in all aspects of video games. That doesn't mean we stop video games from existing.

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These people often aren't reading the review at all though. A blurb might get taken out of context sure, but they'd still have to read up to that point first.

The reviews aren't the problem there, it's the wankers who feel it necessary to destroy someone for having an opinion. Even without a score, jerks can still cherry-pick quotes from a review to whip their twitter-sphere into a furor.

Scores serve a place in a review. Right now I'm buying presents for family who enjoy things that I am not familiar with at all. If I have to read a 3-page review for a book to see if it's worth buying, I'm going to gravitate instead to a review with a concise summary. I shouldn't need to do hours of research to see if my niece will like this teenage adventure story.

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Hadn't considered gift buying angle before. When I'm buying games for myself I personally want to know as much as possible that's not a spoiler before making a purchase. Plenty of games I thought I might love but realized I would've hated it if I hadn't read the reviews first, and the score didn't necessarily help with that IMO.

 

[More_Badass]

Scores aren't the problem. People trying to measure reviews from different people, for games in completely different genres, like those scores are objective metrics and not rubric shorthand, is the problem

In other words, keep scores, and promote better reading comprehension and critical thinking

 

[kcp12304]

We probably don't need them but the problem is people who can't deal with reviews that don't validate what their opnions. It's not going to stop people from being too emotionally invested in video games.

 

[thenexus6]

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.

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I've felt this way for years. the 1-10 or 1-100 doesn't work because reviews don't use the entire scale properly.

Anything under 6 / 60 is regarded as a bad game. So what is the point? You might as well use the 5 point scale. In the simplest form:

0/5 Horrible
1/5 Bad
2/5 OK
3/5 Good
4/5 Great
5/5 Incredible

Of course, there is a level of finesse. But if you give a game 2/5 I think I get it in terms of the scale. What is the difference between 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 in the 10 point scale?

If you were to remove putting a number on it, why not something along the lines of:

Should you play this game right now?

Then reviews can go into the technical state of the game, how it lines up with previous entries in the franchise, or games similar to it. It is worth the subjective amount of money in terms of content (although that's an entire rabbit hole topic).

 

[trashbandit]

Review scores are mostly pointless, especially when no one uses half the damn scale except in the most egregious of situations. Also getting rid of them is one less vector to swindle devs out of money for not reaching some arbitrary threshold. Assuming this thread is a response to CP77, I don't think removing the score would change the fact that a not insignificant number of outlets gave a game that is unusually broken a fucking 9/10. The game would still get the mark of approval despite how dire a state it was released in.

 

[Servbot24]

These people often aren't reading the review at all though. A blurb might get taken out of context sure, but they'd still have to read up to that point first.

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It doesn't matter. You're not going to stop dumb people from existing just by removing a number from a review.

 

[Dr. Doom]

I can't remember a single time where I've relied on review scores to dictate my purchases except steam user feedback.

 

[Kthulhu]

review scores are for babies who cannot read

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I don't really think that's fair. I'm sure some have good reasons to want them.

Plus if they couldn't read then how can they get mad about a 7/10?

Review scores as part of a bonus structure is incredibly shady, IMO.

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I agree but that's more on the game companies, not review sites.

 

[Greywaren]

I've been saying this for years, and it's even more relevant now that games change a lot over time.

 

[rntongo]

I voted to have binary recommendations, have the normal 5 star or 1-10 rating and the update reviews. Because the combination fo those make sense. If a game is really bad, give it a low score. If its really good give it a high score. If it gets a low score but would recommend, give it a recommend. Then update when patches come out.

 

[Dogo Mojo]

I don't think I've ever been able to get a straight answer on what makes a game a 9.5 vs a 9.7, or what determines if a game gets half a star. Reading the words of the review will always be more valuable then whatever score system the individual review outlet uses.

 

[Zero83]

A 5 star review scale is useful, as long as there are no half stars to mess it up.

1 - terrible
2 - bad
3 - average
4 - very good
5 - essential

You don't need to mess up that scale unless you're desperate to know how many percent better one game than another, which doesn't make much sense.

 

[Dogui]

We definitely don't need scores.

My favorite reviews are the ones with a list of pluses and minuses. It's not only great to make the review a lot more "to the point" but also it's easier to understand how different are your tastes compared to the reviewer's.

E.g. i dislike open world but the reviewer likes it so a game with a big open world would be on their list's plus, but i already know it would probably be in my minus list, instead.

Of course, nothing replaces actually reading the review, but a good plus/minus list is a great tl;dr imo.

 

[JoRu]

Definitely for ditching review scores. Reviewers can provide short summaries providing the gist of the critique for those who don't want/have the time to read full reviews, while sites like Metacritic and Opencritic can gather reviews and try to provide some kinds of "consensus".

You can have people at those sites writing short texts to summarize what reviewers think of the game, and/or perhaps develop some smart algorithm using AI techniques to find keywords and common points in reviews (such as the game being buggy, or having great graphics). Review aggregators should aggregate opinions, not scores.

 

[StrappingYoungLance]

I've felt this way for years. the 1-10 or 1-100 doesn't work because reviews don't use the entire scale properly.

Anything under 6 / 60 is regarded as a bad game. So what is the point? You might as well use the 5 point scale. In the simplest form:

0/5 Horrible
1/5 Bad
2/5 OK
3/5 Good
4/5 Great
5/5 Incredible

Of course, there is a level of finesse. But if you give a game 2/5 I think I get it in terms of the scale. What is the difference between 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 in the 10 point scale?

If you were to remove putting a number on it, why not something along the lines of:

Should you play this game right now?

Then reviews can go into the technical state of the game, how it lines up with previous entries in the franchise, or games similar to it. It is worth the subjective amount of money in terms of content (although that's an entire rabbit hole topic).

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"Should you play this game right now? yes or no" feels like a useless summary to me, I don't base my purchasing decision on a binary recommendation like that and I'm probably more likely to just move on once I have that info.

I like having a 1-5 scale (zero too if the game is the most absolute dirt worst and broken to all hell, I guess?), the score helps set a tone for a review, doesn't lay out the final recommendation and the fact that the scores are far from granular means I'm much more likely to read on to find out what makes a game a 3/5 this time around, for example.

 

[ZeoVGM]

I like review scores. The issue for me is critics purposefully ignoring issues as to not have them reflect in their score.

 

[Aegis Renfro]

There's nothing wrong with the system as-is. It works in just about every other type of media.

The problem is that games don't lend themselves to a "bleeding edge" approach to reviews like film or television or music can, since games have the ability to improve (or worsen) over time through patches and added content. Fallout 76 and No Man's Sky stand as examples of games that prove this.

As long as people are more interested in being first than they are in being thorough, you're going to get all of the same results. Game companies know this - that's why they'll gladly push out unfinished games that require immediate patches. It literally does not matter what a game is like at first review when, not only will people keep pre-ordering games months in advance in the expectation of greatness, not only will video game websites and streamers continue to try to be "the first with the exclusive world premiere" on a game, but the game developer and publisher can just pump out a couple of patches and turn that 6 out of 10 into a 9 out of 10 overnight.

If you want to fix the system, somebody has to break the chain - pre-orders have to end, or some major "influencers" have to enact a longer period before they actually put out a review of a game, or publishers have to stop patching games.

 

[Stuggernaut]

Reviews are a weird thing for me... I usually care a shit ton less about a lot of the stuff most care about (FPS, graphic fidelity, UI options, online components, etc) and more about "Am I going to have fun?" ... I usually have a few people I trust as they have similar likes to myself, and that is all I need.

Edit: Cat stepping on my hand while I was hovering over button lol...

I think a bigger problem I see in many reviews is the reviewers themselves coming to the table with a pre-existing bias/expectation. So if they react a little heavily to one side or the other. Like "I love all Dark Souls games, so Demon Souls is a 10/10" regardless of bugs or any issue (just using that as an example) or the reverse of that "I have never like the formula, and this is just more of the same, skip it".

Anyway, you get the idea.

 

[carlsojo]

I'm largely for scores but I think Eurogamer's system is the ideal alternative.

 

[Khanimus]

No outlet outside of dedicated communities has the staff to allocate to rereviewing every game for patch updates. Unless you're talking about major named content drops, that's not realistic.

 

[tokkun]

I've felt this way for years. the 1-10 or 1-100 doesn't work because reviews don't use the entire scale properly.

Anything under 6 / 60 is regarded as a bad game. So what is the point?

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There's no great mystery about it. People use a scale similar to the one used to assign grades in school, because it is something that is intuitive to the largest number of people. Clear communication is more important than using all of the scale.

 

[Chopchop]

I think a 1-5 or a 1-10 scale is fine in a vacuum, but there are huge cultural problems surrounding the review process that are poisoning the whole system. Among them:

- Cultural expectations that pressure people to use a 7-10 scale instead of 1-10. 5 should be average. 7 should mean above average, instead of being seen as a shitty score that sets the internet on fire.
- Fans thinking it's okay to flip the fuck out and abuse reviewers for not giving perfect scores to games that they anticipate but haven't even played.
- Businesses hinging business decisions such as employee bonuses on Metacritic scores.

 

[Deleted member 16876]

I think this rating:

-Buy
-Buy on sale or once the game is fixed
-Don't buy



Is the best way forward.

 

[ket]

Aren't all reviews literally arbitrary? It's personal judgment, not objective truth.

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in the context of consumer journalism? No

 

[Jane]

I reckon even if people don't want to read an entire review, you can sum up how good a game is and who you'd recommended it to in a few sentences. Marginally more effort to interpret than a number but allowing virtually infinitely more nuance.

EDIT: to be clear, I'm opposed to scores. A binary rating of recommended/not recommended isn't any better either, as whether a game should be recommended or not will almost always depend on what kind of game someone is looking for.

 

[Ascenion]

I'd say keep scores or do binary recommendations. I'm a busy person like most I imagine. I don't have the time or the will to read a whole like 3 page review. Keep it simple, or cut out the fat if you want me to read it.

 

[thecaseace]

I'd rather publishers didn't have the crutch of a subjective number bestowed by reviewers to determine whether people get paid properly or not.

Additionally fans and gaming enthusiasts have shown themselves unable to interpret nuance beyond the score, might as well encourage the reader to actually understand the opinions of the reviewer in full beyond just reading the score.

There are tonnes of ways to get the full picture nowadays better gamers get.used to understanding that rather than just sounding off once their favourite game gets an 8.