Slashdot Mirror
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."
Almost no games get below 40, while any game that doesn't get 80 or more is considerd a failure. Then you have people giving games 3 out of 5 stars which translates to a score of 60, which skews things even more. Plus tent pole games like CoD can be executed extremely well but offer nothing new so how do you review that? There are games with low interaction (point and click) or high interaction (RTS). How do you compare one against the other? Good reviews are also often given despite massive bugs, incomplete games being released or week 1 launch disasters (like Diablo III).
It's issues like that which make me understand the no score review trend.
The Steam User Score is currently my most trusted metric for how good a game is, something which is considered "overwhelmingly positive" with a couple thousand user reviews is usually a worthy purchase.
For non-steam users, imagine Metacritic except you can only submit your score/review if you own the actual game and it's either thumbs up or down.
I mostly read negative review. Yu can quickly differentiate between drama queen and people with legitimate gripes, then evaluate what they find frustrating and compare with my expectations.