I have a feeling this will get some TL;DR's lol.
Hi everyone. I'm the fella who was interviewed in the article mentioned by the OP. I must say, I'm surprised there's been this much discussion on the topic. I was a little hesitant to post here, however I feel like the topic is turning a little toxic and believe I can provide some context for the reason I agreed to be interviewed.
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First of all, thanks for sharing your thoughts; it's more interesting to discuss with the actual participant rather than what we imagine they're like based on an interview!
For years I've felt as if video game developing has been kind of culled (if you will). It's seemed as if over the years quality seems to be going lower and lower on the priority list, and money-making (yes I know how important this is) is making it's way near the top of the priority list. Whereas in the past, it seemed as if money-making was secondary to making a product which was meant to entertain.
Out of interest, what days are you comparing it to? At the risk of beating my own dead horse, I'm wondering if you're comparing it to the PS2 era or earlier, when development of AAA content was considerably more affordable. Going way back, the time I'd associate with entertainment being the priority for developers would be the 80's era of bedroom coders, which is in
some way existent today in the form of indies, but AAA devs have their own sustainability to take into account and have to factor that in - leading to, I would suggest, a number of the situations people release 0-star reviews about.
During the interview with Rich, I explained to him my philosophy on the subject. I explained that my purpose for writing zero-star reviews (with many other products as well) was solely to stir enough attention to the issue of quality in video games, that developers were forced to at least take a step back and look at the product they are creating. It was not meant as a spiteful act to kill sales (as if negative reviews actually make that much of a difference) or to discount anyone else's value on the product. Yes, you could say "that's not true! You clearly said 'if you support games like this you are the reason the video game industry is the way it is today'" and I would agree. That was emotional (as one person here has said).
It does sound like - as I suggested in an earlier post in this thread - you're viewing the 0-star review as a protest vote in some form. That's where I can understand to some extent - you need to express frustration, and that's an avenue by which you're doing so - and in doing so, you're serving to corrupt the existing review aggregation process with an outlier.
So then it boils down to 'is it okay to do that?', and I daresay that that's the divide people are going to fall on either side of. My concern is comparing it to things like how the various Puppies factions served to brigade the Hugo award nominations a few years ago and in doing so corrupted those awards; the awards themselves used a different voting process which were more representative of the community, and as a result the community spoke up and blockaded many of the brigaded awards; 'no award' won a surprising number of the awards.
So I'm broadly okay with an individual expressing a protest vote - that has minimal impact on the aggregation in itself - but when a large group of people do it such that it outweighs sincere votes from sincere people, that corrupts the result, and that absolutely is a concern.
There's a followup, of course: Does that
matter? I mean, it's only a number on some website, is it so important that it matters if it's ruined by people who feel passionately about a subject, it's just reflecting their feelings? That's something I can't answer, ultimately, because it's kind-of dependent on who
uses user scores and whether this action is useful
to them. Ultimately a review is a service
for others, but I'm never really clear on how many people actually use these metrics.
(I should add that this is in no way defending FO76 - and as a corollary, not related to you - but if we're taking the phenomenon as a whole, we have to also take into account the situations where people are using this power for
evil)
However, I do feel as if the new generations of gamers have less and less of a standard of quality. Don't get me wrong, there are some series of games being released – such as The Witcher – that deserve plenty of praise, but, there are equally as many games being released that are clearly thrown together, that did not have any hard work put into them, and were created only to be monetized. That's the reason I'm mad – that's the reason I give zero-star reviews.
I'd question 'equally as many', I don't think there's many games that are
quite as disastrous as FO76! Still, it's fair to say that there's a lot of things to complain about in the industry as a whole right now - the question, I guess - and this would be a personal thing for you - is whether you feel your complaint is so significant that it should disproportionately outweigh the opinions of someone who doesn't share it. Which again, of course, perhaps highlights that this isn't a metric people should particularly care about anyway!
