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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
When I personally buy a game, I look at gamefaqs user reviews instead of Metacritic. When looking at the main page of a game on gamefaqs, the first two averaged review numbers are exceptionally useful to me. They seem to give a very strong feel of what the general reaction to a game is - anything under a 7 is probably not worth my money. Also, user reviewers seem to me to play the games more thoroughly than someone who does reviews for a job, and game depth/replayability is a big point for me. Although, if I think about it, I generally buy games for Nintendo DS - price is pretty uniform and graphics can only get so good. In order to look up the game at all I had to have heard about it from my friends or some sites, so my experience doesn't really contradict his research at all.
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)
If you ask people if they are willing to pay more for quality 90% will answer yes. However when the moment supreme is there to purchase for example a new notebook 80% will go for the cheapest and don't care about long term stuff like quality. I think there is a good chance this survey works the same; People SAY they are not influenced by reviews because 'Hey, I'm an original, I don't let anybody influence me'.
This is certainlhy an issue with US based sites/magazines. Over in the UK it's less driven by advertising spend (in my experience, at least). I've given fairly bad reviews to a few products and I still get new stuff from them to look at. Equally, I've had software from the US where they've asked outright if the review will be looked upon favourably if they advertisise with us. They seemed amazed that I was adamant advertising and editorial don't talk to each other. They can't, otherwise the whole point of reviewing is null and void.
There is possibly an argument that because some firms let you keep the kit (sometimes quite expensive kit) and others always want it sent back, that this could affect your scoring but I try hard not to fall into that trap. That said, I often request review items I actually have a need for and this can actively work against it if it doesn't do what I'd hoped.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
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.