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Are Review Scores Pointless?

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-if-you-love-arguing dept.

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."

5 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Meta scores and user's meta scores by Deffexor · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've found Metacritic to be a good aggregator of scores, but more importantly, the "users" scores (and reviews) tend to be more reliable in terms of not being overly critical of games that are generally pretty good, but don't meet the expectations of "hard core" gamers.

    1. Re:Meta scores and user's meta scores by jclarker6 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Totally agree with this. And taking it a step further one could say any single score on it's own is not that reliable, when taken in aggregate the cream definitely rises to the top

    2. Re: Meta scores and user's meta scores by Anubis+IV · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'd go even further than that and say that it depends on the type of scale being used as well.

      When it comes to user reviews, if the reviews are thumbs up or down, I'll do the same as you and read the thumbs down reviews first, since it's easier to filter out the extreme reviewers and get a sense for the common issues. If it's a 5-point scale, I'll read through the 2s and 4s, since those reviews can give you a quick understanding of the pros and cons for the product, without nearly the level of overstatement that you'll need to filter through in the 1s and 5s. And I don't even bother reading reviews based on 10-point scales, since the way that everyday users grade on a 10-point scale is arbitrary to the point of uselessness (e.g. some people treat it like a 5-point scale with better granularity, while others treat it like an academic scale).

  2. Game reviews have always been broken by Piata · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Steam User Score beats traditional scores by Holammer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.