Are Review Scores Pointless?

donniebaseball23 writes: With Eurogamer being the latest popular video games site to ditch review scores, some are discussing just how valuable assigning a score to a game actually is these days. It really depends on whom you ask. "I've always disliked the notion of scores on something as abstract and subjective as games," says Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail. From the press side, though, former GameSpot editor Justin Calvert still believes in scores. "I've been basing my own game-purchasing decision on reviews ever since I picked up the first issue of Zzap! 64 magazine in the UK almost 30 years ago," he says, while admitting that YouTube is certainly changing the landscape today: "There's something very appealing about watching a game being played and knowing that the footage hasn't been edited in a way that might misrepresent the experience."

Comments

Re:Meta scores and user's meta scores

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding me? The user scores are just full of people who mindlessly rate the game 0/10 or 10/10 based on the current score in order to pull it up or down.

Or whenever there's a controversy in the game, they'll rate it 0/10 for a tiny reason to bring the score down.

There's nothing useful in user reviews of popular games.

Steam's system is a little better, it only allows a positive or negative experience, and the reviews just show the consensus as "mixed positive". Still, there's bandwagoning but at least there's no illusion of a numbered score.

Re:Meta scores and user's meta scores

[Dutch Gun]

the "users" scores (and reviews) tend to be more reliable in terms of not being overly critical of games that are generally pretty good

In my experience, users are very extreme in their assigned scores. If they enjoy the game, they assign it a 100 (ZOMG, Best Game EVAR!!!). If they didn't enjoy the game for some reason, it rates a 0 (WTF?! Worst !@#$!@ game of ALL TIME!!!). There are often relatively few scores in the middle. Also, user ratings will often pick up on issues that the press doesn't touch, though, which is a good thing. For instance, when a company introduces intrusive DRM, or if an online-only game has a very bad launch, users will flood the systems with very low scores, where professional scores would not have touched (or perhaps seen) these issues.

Generally speaking, if a game gets universal praise, there's probably something worthwhile about it, at least to many people. If it generally gets horrid scores, you know that there's something seriously wrong. No, review scores aren't pointless at all. If you want to get the details, then read the actual review, and you can find out if you agree with those specific points or not.

Eurogamer isn't really dropping the score, incidentally. They're just moving to a "four star" system ("Avoid", "No Recommendation", "Recommended", and "Essential"). In truth, I think that's probably a more honest way of scoring, because it's sort of silly to try to rank a different games based on a one or two percentage points of difference, which is probably completely arbitrary. For instance, what's the difference between a game that ranks 90% on metacritic and one that ranks 89% ? Answer: one more high profile review gave it a five out of five stars instead of four out of five stars. This also avoids the problem of having to try to rank very different genres against each other, or try to convey what a particular score "means" (there's almost always a chart along with the score). In a sense, giving it one of four rankings is sort of cutting out the score as a middleman.

Also, honestly, I sort of wonder if dropping numeric ratings is a way for gaming sites to give themselves an "out" with publishers, who may apply pressure if their review scores are too low. I've heard of bonus and such being tied to metacritic review scores, which is a pretty nasty thing to do to your employees, IMO. Also, I'm guessing websites don't care to have their review simply aggregated by metacritic into a single, unified score.