Review Scores the "Least Important Factor" When Buying Games 169
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."
Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Interesting)
There was the Mag Innovision letter to the editor after it's 17" monitor received the worst ranking in a roundup of 17" monitors. The Editor's choice award went to a Gateway 2000 monitor. The point of the complaint letter? "This is the same monitor, we just print different labels on the ones we ship to Gateway 2000." Or words to that effect.
So as a general rule I have very little use for published reviews of any product. Word of mouth, and personal trials work best. Also it's good to know what advertisers are allowed to lie about.
"This POS is the best on the market" -: Allowable lie.
"This overpriced crap is great value for money" -: Acceptable lie.
"This 500GB drive holds more data than 750GB of data without using compression" -: dangerous ground.
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I.e. If you want to win one, just buy lots of advertising.
Does anyone really believe the scores ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ?
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Part of the problem is everybody only quotes aggregates of the professional reviews. Take Farcry2 PC for example. Metacritic's Pro-review aggregate is 85/100 from 34 reviews. The user rating revew is 5.4/10 from ~580 reviews.
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Yeah because $52.99 is such a big difference... I've never seen a used price from them that was even near $10 less than retail.
Personally: Demos.
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Re:Does anyone really believe the scores ? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, here in Portugal our only magazine dedicated to PC games (there's no market for more than one, really) gives plenty of low scores, and you're right, that's one of the reasons I trust their reviews. Besides the full text, the scores range from 0 to 100, and a few months ago they gave 4 to one game. Most games get between 50 to 60, but there are plenty of 30s and 40s.
I actually like the magazine very much, and had it subscribed a few years ago, but I end up playing only one or two AAA games each year, so it's not worth it. I hope they don't go under, though. We never had a strong PC games market, but now I fear it's reducing to new lows.
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Ouch. What game got a 4?
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Not sure, and I don't remember the exact issue, but it was some random RPG which featured 800x600 maximum resolution, isometric view, and it couldn't even smooth scroll; besides the texts had plenty of grammatical errors and the sound quality was worse than phone line. Oh, and plenty of story inconsistency.
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You shut your whore mouth.
Re:Does anyone really believe the scores ? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a reason for that. It's a lot of hard work and cost bringing a product to market and generally, the real dogs are killed long before they hit the shelves. I've been reviewing hardware/software for 20 odd years now and I can only remember giving a score of less than 4 a handful of times. Equally, 9 & 10 is rare (for me). The vast majority of stuff is 'good enough' and merits 7 or 8 out of 10. TBH, I get really frustrated by constantly dishing out 7s and 8s and the few times something has turned up for review that's truly bad, I'm been delighted as it gives me a chance to have a real opinion.
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That or the games are shovelware. The publisher knows they are crap and sees no reason to send review copies out when they'd earn an abysmal score for their troubles. Better to just push it out there and hope that grannies and five year olds will be fooled into buying it.
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Not even that. It costs money to do the boxes, ship them out etc. They just can them and write it off.
Except you just illiustrate the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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It annoys me when new games are rated lower than old ones that were worse. It's hard to figure out if a game is worth it. This often happens when a game is "more refined, but doesn't add anything innovative."
So, is the 65 rating from 2009 better than the 95 rating from 2005? Maybe. Maybe not.
For me, it usually comes down to which one is less crash prone according to forums. I'm more likely to enjoy something if it doesn't disappear and leave me at my desktop all the time.
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As a tester who works with rating scales, I have to point out that a scale that has values that are never used is a pointless scale. If the range of scores reported by raters is from 5-10, then you don't have a 10-point scale; you have a 6-point scale. Also, if you're only using a few bands on the scale, you need to decide whether the raters need to be trained to discriminate more bands of the scale, or if your scale needs to be rewritten to allow such discriminations to occur, or if such discriminations ca
Re:Does anyone really believe the scores ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does anyone really believe the scores ? (Score:4, Interesting)
I find that when the spread is large, the extreme ends tend to point to piss-poor reviews that I can safely ignore. If there's a lot in either end, however, some of those are probably worth paying attention to. Most of the time, I look at a few "trusted" sites in the middle of the pack, such as IGN and GameSpot. GS invariably gives a lower score than IGN to any game, so I end up looking at that most of the time.
Finally, if a game gets mostly high scores, the low score reviews tend to be informative, and vice-versa.
So any time I buy a game or browse around a store, Metacritic is the first place I check, and then combine that information with the price of the game to arrive at a decision. So far the only times I've missed is when I didn't check Metacritic carefully.
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How is 7-8 reasonable for "good enough". Back in my non-US university days 8/10 would be a Distinction grade, and 7/10 would be a Credit grade.
Surely "good enough" is a simple Pass, ie: 5-6/10?
And "not good enough" would be 0-4/10 or a Fail.
Averaging 8/10 would get you into the honours program of the degree, which should take more than "good enough". Heck it'd get you into the phd program.
You must have got an amazing number of good games, the majority of games I've played I would be giving a score of less t
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That certainly is a valid point. A previous editor opined much the same and thought as you do that an average product (i.e. most of them) should be a 5. However, people have got so used to seeing 5 as being a crap product that it would effectively mislead readers unless the entire reviewing industry adopted it en-masse. i.e., it ain't going to happen.
We have a situation where most product is broadly similar in terms of quality and does what it is supposed to by
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You misread him. His argument was that after that effort, the ones that deserve 6 and below are cut and don't reach reviewers, and therefore don't exist.
My personal opinion is that this means that he should rescale 6 down to 1, and leave 0 for what he now calls 0-5. If something is that incredibly rare, it doesn't deserve half the namespace to be allocated to differentiating between just how exceptionally bad it is.
But he didn't say anything about sympathies to the devs.
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And your evidence for this would be what?!?! Games are cancelled [wikipedia.org] all the time. Many of these were cancelled WELL into production.
Only a fool wo
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That's odd. I know a whole stack of people who work on games - mainly designers and graphics artists and they often get games pulled during development, often right near the end and sometimes for no reason other than a change of management at the publisher who decide it's not what they want after all.
It's far worse for smaller developement houses with 50 staff as they work hand to mouth with the milestone payments keeping them going and the next game slated to start after the current
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Why is FIFA 2010 with update graphics worth less then 9/10? Sure, if you already have FIFA 2009 it might be worth 4/10, but if it's your first ever FIFA game, it's probably worth 9/10.
Not saying I actually ever played the game or care about soccer games the slightest, just that the fact that it's an update doesn't mean it can't be reviewed for it's own merits.
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Re:Does anyone really believe the scores ? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that you need a scale that encompasses everything from "hideously bad" to "sublimely good", and very, very few commercially released games these days actually fall into the former category. Sure, the usual anti-modern-gaming crowd here on slashdot likes to decry the latest overhyped blockbuster as "worst game ever", but in reality, pretty much every such game is "mediocre" at worst, and actually reasonably good fun if considered in isolation, on its own merits. It's not really fair to score a game down for being overhyped - only to review the game in front of you.
Genuinely bad games with genuinely low review scores do exist. Even if you look at IGN, who are generally felt to "score high", you can use the review filters to find plenty of games with scores of 3.0/10 or less. These are mostly clustered on the PC, Wii, PS2 and handhelds - platforms with relatively low development costs prone to low-quality shovelware (which is by no means to decry all titles for those systems as low quality). However, the development costs for high-end games these days are such that you really can't afford to let an absolute stinker go out the door. This does make the odd rare exception that slips through, such as Lair, all the more deliciously awful.
So yes, it's not a big conspiracy that you tend to get a clustering of review scores around the 7-9/10 mark. It's just a fair reflection of the overall quality of most modern big-budget games. Reader reviews, on the other hand, often tend to be callibrated to a less objective scale, and to take more account of factors such as the degree to which the game had been hyped (and to the kind of emotive factors that the console wars stir up), leading to a wider variation.
You do, of course, get the occasional game where the "professional" review scores seem a bit out of whack. Modern Warfare 2 felt like a bit of an example of this to me; I could have seen it as an 8/10 kind of game, but I suspect that review scores above that are being hype driven.
Ultimately, I find that the best way to use reviews isn't to go off meta-critic rankings or composite scores. It's to find a review site whose tastes generally accord with my own and use this as a rough guide. I already know in advance broadly which games I'm interested in. If I read the review, I use it as a guide-post and look for issues mentioned that are of particular importance to me. If a review flags that a game has an overly restrictive save-system, then I won't buy it even if the score is good, because I hate repeating content I've already passed unnecessarily. If a review criticises and marks down a game for not including online play, however, I won't let that deter me; it's not usually a huge issue for me, as aside from WoW, I'm primarily a singleplayer gamer.
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The French PC games magazine Joystick, apart from fairly objectives reviews, has a kinda effective and clear system. Apart from the regular notations (0-5 stars "a blank CD is marginally more fun"... to "for genre fans only" ... "Good Game !"), and they do use the whole gamut of grades, they add
- a Megastar status which means that the game pretty much is a must-have. They give out a handful of those annually
- side warnings if the translation sucks, or if the game requires a very powerful config to run, or i
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You do, of course, get the occasional game where the "professional" review scores seem a bit out of whack. Modern Warfare 2 felt like a bit of an example of this to me; I could have seen it as an 8/10 kind of game, but I suspect that review scores above that are being hype driven.
Oblivion? Bioshock?
Should I name others? :P
Totally agree with your points - I tend to comb reviews for insights into how the gameplay works, and any important flaws that would detract from the experience. So far it's kept me pretty safe.
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And yet I've played plenty of games which I would recognise as over-hyped, but which I have also enjoyed. I mention Modern Warfare 2 in my post. Is it overhyped? Yes, wildly so. It's not even as good as its own prequel, due to a ludicrous plot which really shatters any suspension of disbelief. However, it's a lot of fun to play; the combat feels slick and precise, the weapons are well implemented and the scenarios provide a good degree of variety. So it's a very good game - but not one that's going to redef
Re:Does anyone really believe the scores ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't even read a review in 20 years.
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How do you rent PC games? :P I don't mean pirating. :P
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OTOH, name me one single game that deserves a 1 or 2 out of a 100 score.
Games may be bad, but their production value is rarely low enough to warant such low scores.
If I were to publish a single picture of a maze, that would still be entertaining enough to score atleast a 3.
Perhaps a virus would score a 1 or 2.
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Duke Nukem Forever?
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It's A-F (Score:4, Insightful)
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. [gamespot.com]
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.
How to get the correct score (Score:2)
50 = 0.
60 = 20.
75 = 50.
95 = 90.
And so on.
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With magazines, traditionally, no. If a game is THAT bad, the magazine won't bother to print a review of it. Not that there isn't plenty of inflation going on, but there are other less-nefarious reasons you don't see terrible reviews.
Same goes for restaurant reviews from respected restaurant critics; if you see a really awful one, it's generally going to be of a well-known place wh
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I've never trusted them to be honest for this reason. The fact is reviews are just a form of protection racket.
I've played plenty of low rated games that were far better than high rated games with many of the high rated games being awful.
It basically comes down to whichever publishers/developers have sent across their protection racket money to all the reviewers, those that haven't get shit reviews and shit numbers on their site, those who pay up or send the required sweeteners beforehand are guaranteed an
We don't see ones and twos because.... (Score:2)
... if its obviously a piece of crap, the reviewer isn't even going to bother with it.
I think 6/10 is the low limit for anything to get reviewed.
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I agree, but I think we both get some entertainment from reviews of crap.
Also it would warn people away from wasting their money.
Games are not cheap, and some are bought by wholly clueless adults for children. A grandparent who thinks they are buying a real treat, only to see the kids face drop hard deserve a bit of objective advice.
Why (Score:2, Interesting)
And why? Because the grade-grubbing means that as of about 10-15 years ago, reviews are nothing more than adverts, and ratings are nothing more than auctions to the highest bidder.
I've *never* bought any game because of a review. Not even back when they were a bit more honest (e.g. in the Spectrum days, it was very common to see sub-50% and even sub-10% scores of games, some of them were even immortalised in things like a "crap games collection"). Game preference is completely subjective and neither word
I don't think they're all 'bought'. (Score:2)
We just released a game that has been getting some really nice reviews, and have spent very little on promotion (we don't have any money). Everybody has different tastes. Perhaps your tastes just happen to clash with those of the reviewers you read.
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The trouble is that your game will sink into the piles of "8's and 9's" like everyone else. There's nothing to distinguish your game from, say, a crap game from a big publisher that has bought the review. That's the problem and, unfortunately, that's why I can't trust *any* review, wherever it's come from.
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And why? Because the grade-grubbing means that as of about 10-15 years ago, reviews are nothing more than adverts, and ratings are nothing more than auctions to the highest bidder.
Exactly true. Now, reviews are all about who can provide the most perks to the reviewers.
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Why limit yourself to only one free tape a month?
I still have them all in boxes in the attic.
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I was a "whatever had the best game on the covertape" reader but I basically bought every magazine going.
Crash was okay with tapes, not so fun to read. Your Sinclair was good to read and had fairly decent tapes. And Sinclair User - I probably never read enough of them to make a choice.
I had a letter published in Your Sinclair once, so you'd probably say that was my favourite, given the evidence. In reality, I was just after a freebie and their cover tapes.
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I had a letter published in Your Sinclair once
I bought almost every copy, so chances are good that I read your letter. Weirdly enough I was discussing programming on the Spectrum in Basic a few weeks back. Man did that conversation make me feel old.
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A few years back, I bought every copy of INPUT - a Marshall Cavendish collect-each-weekly-part programming magazine that was released back in the Speccy days. Every page has Speccy, Amstrad, Commodore, Dragon/Tandy code, and code for other machines of the era, that you had to type in. That magazine single-handedly got me interested in programming. And then a few years ago I mentioned it on Slashdot and spoke to someone who had written one of the big games (10 or so issues full of code) that was published
I look at Gamefaqs (Score:4, Interesting)
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Color me shocked (Score:2, Insightful)
Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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Of course they're better: they're newer
Duh.
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Not really certain about how much scores are creeping. There are a lot fewer really shit games out there these days, plenty of games I don't like, and plenty of let downs, but really shocking crap either doesn't make it or doesn't get reviewed. I've also seen games with huge full page adverts get panned in the same magazine, though I haven't read one in a few years.
Game bugs are a funny thing. Sometimes they're really massive game crippling bugs which should have been caught, but a lot of the times they're
Actually, most bugs are just bugs (Score:2)
Actually, the vast majority of the bugs I've encountered in various games were just plain old fashioned bugs in their code, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the drivers or hardware configuration. They were script bugs (e.g., a dialog option remaining active when it should be gone), pathing bugs, collision or physics bugs, balance problems, AI bugs, interface problems, the occasional race condition, memory leaks, etc.
E.g., if you think that any hardware or drivers could stop WoW from having bugged enemi
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I'm not excusing the developers. I'm excusing the reviewers.
It's the responsibility of the developers(and testers) to design and test code appropriately to find bugs.
It's not the job of some magazine reviewer to test out the software they're reviewing on every single variant of PC. That's not part of the review process. My point was more that while the bugs are still the fault of the developers(at least most of the time), they're often triggered by hardware or software issues which the developers may not ha
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Well, point taken for the hardware bugs. But, as I was saying, some bugs are really independent of those. I just can't imagine how a pathing or AI bug would depend on the video drivers or whatever. I would very much expect a reviewer to mention those.
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that's assuming they even reviewed the game and aren't just regurgitating the press release and images from the press pack
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Personally, I usually wait a while after the game is out and then go check user reviews
I like user reviews as well, and especially in combination with numbers of reviews.. It tells me much more when 80 people have reviewed something and given it a good score, than it does when 5 people have.
People SAY they are not influenced by reviews (Score:3, Interesting)
Luckily with PC games you can test them for free. (Score:3, Informative)
Having said that, I do realise that this applies less to console owners, who are in a more difficult position because they generally can't test games before purchasing it, meaning they will have to live with a lower signal-to-noise ratio. (But then, they were the ones who chose to invest in a closed platform.)
Anyway, I'm fairly happy that most games are available for free testing (I'm usually not really in a rush to get any particular game), because - looking back - I can't really say that I found very many games that would've been worth my money if I had bought them (not even when they were sold at half 'list' price).. For the last couple of years the list would pretty much be limited to Portal, EU3, World in Conflict, Vampire: Bloodlines and Civ4 (and Arkham Asylum was OK too, just not at the current prices). Not a very long list, I might note.
In all, I would suggest people don't get consoles, as too much bargaining power is taken away from you in getting one, and too many games just aren't worth wasting money on.
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XBLArcade and PSN do have demos of games.
Unless by demo you mean, pirate.
Yes, stealing is the way to do it. (Score:2)
So you'll grab a torrent of a hacked up game with viruses, play it all the way through all the while bitching on the forums that it runs like crap, righteously deny the devs payment, and go on to your next theft.
Then you'll bitch because nobody develops for the PC platform anymore.
As a dev and a pc gamer, all I have to say to you is "Fuck off and die, you fucking thief."
It's pathetic that you'll commit a felony for 60 bucks.
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Anyway, I'm glad you care so much about your line of work, but I have bought EU3 and a few other Paradox games, as well as Civ4.
But I don't really think a game with 0 replay factor is worth €60/50+$. And while I'm sure game development takes more time nowadays than 5-8 years ago, the current prices are just ridiculous. And yes, I might then "conscientiously" d
Re:Luckily with PC games you can test them for fre (Score:2)
Game demos are readily available for consoles since the time of PS1; over a decade.
Furthermore, the signal to noise ratio was actually kept high also, among other things, closed market (for devs) - with barriers of entry it was sensible to try harder. It was also sensible to focus more on gameplay, since you knew the rough limits in GFX. Most importantly there were strong forces at work - console manufacturers - that promoted development of very good games.
And...console games have generally better resale va
Review Scores are all payola.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, reviews anymore from the "gaming press" are total garbage due to this mechanic. The ads in the magazine are more important to the company than the reviews themselves. When was the last time you saw an EA game get a 1 out of 10.... And trust me, there are many deserving candidates, like the yearly sports rehash which change nothing in the game, just which player is on which team. Or Race Driver Grid, or Darkar 2009, or Rally Stars.... The magazines would just not post a review of a game when it gets bad because they don't want to potentially lose their ads from the publisher...
Re:Review Scores are all payola.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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EGM is back again, that's a good thing, though it's not as great as it was from say 1993 - 2003 or so.
Review - yes. Score - no. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have three tiers of deciding on purchase of the game.
1. I read the review about what the game contains. I thoroughly ignore any "positive personal thoughts" about the game as marketing fluff. The negative ones do add to the value of the review but aren't all that important. I just read what is the concept of the game, and whether it is anything original, with potential - a good idea. If the review talks loads about graphics and sound and development time and prior franchise, even in total superlatives, it means the game is junk. A reviewer would concentrate on the really good points if it had any.
2.I check some Internet fora to see what people complain about. If there is a number of complaints about the same thing, it may turn me away again. The thing being "awful execution of the wonderful idea" is one of possible choices.
3. Then I grab the game off a torrent. After I'm through with it, I look back at how it felt. The only deciding factor is "I enjoyed it". Yeah, I enjoyed Stalker: Clear Sky, despite hopeless story, dull ending and reuse of content. I enjoyed Oblivion despite being dumbed down to knees level of Morrowind.
If the game passes the three tiers of classification, I buy it.
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Yahtzee! He's a little PC and shooter centric for my taste, but yeah. His reviews of Oblvion and Fallout 3 are spot on, still fun games though.
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If I find my food at restaurant disgusting, I will send it back to kitchen without paying. You could argue I shouldn't do so if I ate more than half. But if I was feeling it tasted funny but kept on, until I found a used condom baked into the last piece of my pizza, fuck you, I will return all your food, all over your clothes and let's see if you demand money on top of that.
Argue lies with my wallet. It doesn't lie. Good games get rewarded. Decent games get rewarded when their price drops to their value. Ba
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Hey maybe the comdom was in the second slice of pizza but you kept eating to the end. Anyone can make an analogy that works for them.
That's what the cafe owner might claim.
But I -know- where it was, and I have absolutely no intention to argue about the payment, I just walk away from the vomit-covered asshole.
Of course I stop playing if I don't like the game and it shows no promise of improving. The case where I get to the end, and still decide the game wasn't worth it is relatively rare. I buy most of games
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...oh, and it took me about a year and a half since finishing playing Oblivion to finally decide to buy it. I was MAD at Bethesda for dumbing it down. I hated them for making it a console hack&slash with RPG elements. The stupid linear mcGufin quests. The leveled everything. The pathetic railroading. I despised it for being so shitty comparing to the godly Morrowind.
Only in hindsight I realized it was NOT a bad game. It was actually rather good. It didn't reach the knees level of Morrowind but I did enj
Amazon (Score:3, Interesting)
Demo's (Score:3, Insightful)
Game world not designed to allow for demo-style play? Rubbish. You can sandbox an area of a GTA map, limit Dragon Age: Origins to one town, make level caps to prevent access to higher level play... It's just laziness.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not really all that simple. A sand boxed area of GTA wouldn't feel like the real GTA does, and more than half the beauty of Dragon Age is how deep and rich and real the world is, one town even the best town wouldn't give you that.
Add in the fact that in a lot of cases the demos, even with everything cut out of it, are as large as the full game, and you're sort of in a bit of a tough situation.
Re: (Score:2)
Besides, a game doesn't need to be huge to be fun. I bought Audiosurf based purely on the demo, as I wanted to play the other game modes. I still play it probably two hours a week, with new songs or getting better scores on old songs
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you should change ISP? I am from the UK, and my ISP has a 100GB/calendar month cap. 8Mb is my regular speed, I can pull 12Mb in the early morning.
Watching 2hrs of online TV per day, playing a few online games, and downloading a demo probably every 3 days gets me to 50GB typically. Just up your allowance.
Bought reviews (Score:2)
a modest proposal (Score:3, Funny)
Since the publishers are so keen on getting 8/10 reviews, lets replace the stars with a scoring system that just gives them more of what they want.
A good game gets one (8/10).
A mediocre game gets 3: (8/10)(8/10)(8/10)
And a terrible game gets a whopping 10: (8/10)(8/10)(8/10)(8/10)(8/10)(8/10)(8/10)(8/10)(8/10)(8/10) ... the publishers get what they want, and anyone with a calculator to hand knows what we really mean [google.co.uk]
Garrison Keillor says... (Score:2)
Because at Lake Wobegone Software Publishing, all the secretaries are efficient, all the managers intelligent, and all the developers are above average.
--
BMO
Re: (Score:2)
That's a really, really old quote, bud. You better Google it to be certain, but just yesterday I heard that Lake Wobegone Software Publishing was under-water [wsj.com].
Wait a few days (Score:3, Insightful)
Be extra suspicious of games that embargo reviews, or allow just a handful of "exclusive" reviews to break the embargo. More often than not those reviews have been paid for in one way or another. Just like with other kinds of media there is usually a very good reason that publishers don't want you to know upfront what a game is like - because the product sucks.
Re: (Score:2)
Every time someone preorders a title, they are basically gambling with their money when a few days would tell one way or another what the consensus is. That could be critical consensus as well as what fans of the genre thought of it.
I never read reviews as reviews. (Score:2)
I never read reviews as reviews.
A review to me contains two or three things: advertising for the game, some more details about the gameplay that might be missing from the full-page graphic laden ad or TV spot, and possible it might compare the game to relevant reference points (other games, other relevant media, etc.). If I want an opinion beyond those bits of factual information I will look elsewhere - within days of a game being release there will be many opinions out there to pick from. Admittedly you ha
Real reason here: (Score:2)
Only a minority of gamers read reviews, get fact before buy. Theres a big group of people that just buy a game based on the box. And this groups is probably the bigger.
I am tempted to say that very few people that buy games are gamers (!). I mean, gamers as people that have gaming as his hobby.
News? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
20% - previous history with game franchise or developer
For me that'd be much more like 80%
Eg; I'll NEVER EVER EVER buy a Funcom game ever again.
Re: (Score:2)
We are a smart bunch, but so dumb some times. I say the average I.Q is what 130+ and yet we are so egotistical that we think advertisement does not work on us.
The average IQ is supposed to be 100. Over 70% of Americans think they are smarter than average, better drivers, et cetera, though.
P.S. I don't have an iPhone.