Slashdot Mirror
Review Scores the "Least Important Factor" When Buying Games
A recent report from a games industry analyst suggests that among a number of factors leading to the purchase of a video game — such as price, graphics and word of mouth — the game's aggregated review score is the least important measure. Analyst Doug Creutz said, "We believe that while Metacritic scores may be correlated to game quality and word of mouth, and thus somewhat predictive of title performance, they are unlikely in and of themselves to drive or undermine the success of a game. We note this, in part, because of persistent rumors that some game developers have been jawboning game reviewers into giving their games higher critical review scores. We believe the publishers are better served by spending their time on the development process than by 'grade-grubbing' after the fact."
maybe it's the other way around... You only have to buy a sucky game *once* based on a raving review to *never* trust those reviews again. While your friends can comment properly on the game without some obscure metric like '8/10 overall'.
If a magazine or website is really scoring out of 10 or out of 100, then we ought to see some 1's and 2's.
But we don't do we ?
The researchers would find more utility in measuring the correlation between ad spend and score.
Anyone think these two variables don't correlate strongly ?
Dominic Connor,Quant Headhunter
So, while there certainly is correlation between the review score and purchase numbers, there's very limited (if any) causation? With the immense integrity the game-review professionals command, who'da thunk it?
It all boils down to trust (or more specifically lack of it) on the Game review sites.
I'm not overly surprised that people don't base their buying decisions primarily on the review scores from game-sites. In most sites I've seen one or all of the following:
Personally, I usually wait a while after the game is out and then go check user reviews. If your discount the "100%, great thing since sliced bread" ones (which come from fanboys) you'll usually be able to get a good picture of all the above mentioned points that the game sites miss (bugs, long-term (re)playability, intrusive DRM, hands-on-beyond-hype experience)
Depending on how much the parent company spends in ads on the site/magazine, the score will be inflated higher. The few times that an editor or reviewer really did stand up and score a bad game as such, they were immediately fired by the advertising department. There was a big scandal a few years back when the editor actually spoke out against one such firing... I am too tired to look it up myself right now.
Anyway, reviews anymore from the "gaming press" are total garbage due to this mechanic. The ads in the magazine are more important to the company than the reviews themselves. When was the last time you saw an EA game get a 1 out of 10.... And trust me, there are many deserving candidates, like the yearly sports rehash which change nothing in the game, just which player is on which team. Or Race Driver Grid, or Darkar 2009, or Rally Stars.... The magazines would just not post a review of a game when it gets bad because they don't want to potentially lose their ads from the publisher...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I buy games when I've enjoyed playing the demo. If there isn't a demo available, I don't buy it.
Game world not designed to allow for demo-style play? Rubbish. You can sandbox an area of a GTA map, limit Dragon Age: Origins to one town, make level caps to prevent access to higher level play... It's just laziness.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Be extra suspicious of games that embargo reviews, or allow just a handful of "exclusive" reviews to break the embargo. More often than not those reviews have been paid for in one way or another. Just like with other kinds of media there is usually a very good reason that publishers don't want you to know upfront what a game is like - because the product sucks.
Except you just illustrate the problem: something that's just "good enough" (which really just means "mediocre") gets an 8 out of 10. I'm sorry, but in a perfectly linear scale, "mediocre" would mean a 5. That's the kind of a number you could punch in a formula and get a correlation or anything else.
Plus, if it were just a case of a honest review and the bad ones being already cancelled, the results would look much like the right half of a bell curve. You know, the curve with the below average ones removed. For virtually any sitze out there, it doesn't. It looks like a bell curve centered on 8 or 9, and which pretty much starts at 6 or 7. Sorry, that's not a case of the bad ones being already removed, that's a clear sign of an offset scale. It's what you get when the occasional "something that's truly bad" means you get to give a 5 or a 6, not a 1 or 2.
And then there is the occasional reviewer whose curve looks like two spikes. The kind who churns 90% to 99% scores all year long, and then occasionally picks up some 10 year old freeware game so he can give _something_ a 5% score and fix his street cred. Or publishes a yearly smack-talking "top 10 worst games of all time" -- conveniently all 20 years old and from publishers which are no longer in business -- just to show that he's that unbiased and can give a low score too.
But again, that's not being unbiased and fair at all, it's just trying to compensate one crap (or dishonest) job with another one skewed in the other direction. If it were a real fair and unbiased and non-skewed job, you'd get one bell curve centered in the right place, not two spikes centered near the extremes of the scale.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If a magazine or website is really scoring out of 10 or out of 100, then we ought to see some 1's and 2's. But we don't do we ?
My wife and I were having this same discussion the other day. I was going through some reviews of games that just came out, comparing them to older games in the series. When I spotted one and mentioned the poor review, my wife asked what was the score. "6 out of 10". She was confused that a bad game got such a high score.
I guess I've been reading these reviews for so long, I didn't think of it anymore. 10/10 is awesome, 9/10 is great, 8/10 is good, 7/10 is okay, 6/10 is poor, 5/10 and lower is terrible.
"But when was the last time you saw a 5/10?" I honestly didn't know. Even the big-name movie tie-ins that we all know to be awful will somehow manage to score "6.5". I actually had to go look up some reviews to find lower than "6" - but they are out there.
I've started to view the "out of 10" or "out of 100" scores like the old A-F grading system we used in school. A is 9/10 or 10/10 ("A+"), B is 8/10, C is 7/10, D is 6/10 ... F is 5/10 or lower. It's not ideal to view games this way, but it makes sense of the review scores.