Are Traditional Game Reviews Less Relevant 2021? - Game Reviews Broken?
15We all love gaming and while in the past we might have desperately bought a games magazine just to get any games news or reviews, the gaming industry and the coverage around it has massively changed and evolved, for better and for worse...
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I didn't realise it at first, but it's crazy to think that Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo all had their own official magazines, and they'd all give positive reviews to all their exclusive games. Reviews are supposed to be subjective but there can be agendas or bias behind them. Some games companies will not only give out free review copies but merchandise and treats for the game reviewers in an attempt to subtlety put the reviewers in a more positive mindset and get better reviews. If reviewers end up writing more critical or negative reviews, then some games companies will cut ties with the reviewers. There's so many possible layers of corruption or manipulation you might not have expected in your casual game reviews.
While today there's a lot less gaming magazines in your stores, you still get written game reviews - particularly on gaming websites along side video reviews. A lot of these big games news companies like IGN, hire interchangeable staff to write the reviews, maybe it'll be an expert on the franchise, maybe it'll be someone extra critical, or someone less experienced who has no idea what they're doing. It's sometimes a dice roll, and you'll just get a mix-match of quality in reviews, and there's no consistency or weight to these reviews from an inconsistent team and it breaks the whole review process for me.
There was one instance where an IGN reviewer had been caught stealing another person's game review word for word, it just blows my mind they think they can get away with this and just massively tarnishes the reputation of organisations like IGN.
That's why if I want to read or watch a game review, I'd rather hear a single dedicated person's experience, like Angryjoe. And if these are people you regularly watch you know their tastes and areas of expertise, I'll go to specific content creators for specific genres of games. For example, I'd want to hear what Maximillian Dood thinks of the latest fighting game.
When it comes to the content in a review, in some cases you can't fully discuss every aspect of the game without spoiling big moments, that's totally understandable. But you get these game reviewers that don't even finish the game before they review it, I'm not talking about getting 100% of every little side quest or achievement, they don't even finish the bare minimum of the main story or campaign. why in the seven hells do these organisations hire these people to half-arse review the game?
Well it could because they care more about getting the review out as soon as possible as opposed to having a quality review. It's a mad rush to get your review out first to get the most traffic and beat the competition.
Digital Stores like Steam allow regular users to post their reviews too. Services like Steam and Metacritic user reviews show the massive disparity between user and critic reviews, And on Steam reviews it actually shows the user's play time on the game, which helps add weight to their opinion, and to be honest I wish I could actually see the playtime of the big published reviewers, just to get a better sense of how much of the game they've actually played.
A lot of game reviewers give a game a score, usually out of 5, 10, or 100. But it's really weird because it's rare you see any games score less than a 7 out of 10. A lot of games companies play it safe when developing games, they'll stick to an existing format, and not get so experimental like the Playstation 1 era which was a crazy wild west of games. But game reviewers also double down and play it safe and most very rarely dip below a 7 out of 10.
Metacritic is a website that compiles all these review scores together to create an average score, but here's the sneaky catch - Metacritic makes different reviews have a different weight to the overall score, they could make an IGN score affect the average 2-3 times more than say Eurogamer. It just makes Metacritic useless to me, not to mention a lot of gamers will just be looking at the numbers and not the actual content and reasoning in the reviews.
Quite a few games reviewers have abandoned the numbered score at the end of their reviews, and after doing this they report that readers spent more time actually reading the review instead of just jumping to the scored number at the end...
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