It’s really interesting to see how so many people now see games like this.
Some of my personal favourite all time games were like a 7/10 and years ago that would’ve been considered a good game.
Two serious questions:
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Why do you think so many people view games this way now?
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What are some of your favourite games that never reviewed well?
32 Comments
I’ve heard people literally say this lol.
“bad graphics, meh story, boring gameplay. 8/10”
A score of 7 and up is good enough for me. 6 is where I draw the line on a game not being good.
I remember when people would shit on IGN for doing this.
We went from making fun of the IGN scale to using the IGN scale.
I feel like ratings have been like that for a long time. Similarly when you get a survey at like a grocery store or car maintenance, they’ll often ask to please rank 10/10 as corporate considers anything lower as a failure.
I agree it’s dumb. I agree these ratings should leave room for more nuance. But it’s not new.
Because they’re not very good at their job, nor at creating helpful reviews and professional opinions.
As simple as that, as sad as it might sound.
For me it’s always 1-5 is not worth playing. 6 is like an aight game. 7 and up is solid games and really the only ones worth playing
people misusing scales
anything above 5 is good anything below 5 is bad and 5 is average. if every game you review has a 5.1 rating there is nothing they could complain about
thats why LuL guy never used a scaling rating in his game reviews RIP 6 years ago
It’s why numerical scores are mostly useless. At this stage it may as well just be “good, ok, bad”.
A perfectly average game should be rated a 5.
Any bad game should be below 5. Anything good should be above 5.
The system isn’t difficult and yet nobody gets it right.
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourPointScale](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourPointScale)
Partly its because publications/websites don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them and provides advertising and review copies.
Who wants to play a 6 or 7, when there’s so many 10 games out there?
But that’s how it is in every industry, if it’s on a scale of 10 than anything less than a 10 is a 0. If it’s a 5 scale anything less than a 5 is a 0. It’s just easier for the suits to read that.
That’s why I pretty much ignore all video game reviews from journalists. If I’m interested in a game but still on the fence, I’ll watch actual gameplay footage of it first. If it seems like something I’ll enjoy, I’ll buy it.
Because it’s all sensationalism. The number rating system can honestly be replaced with a Yes/No scale on whether you think someone should play or not because that’s ultimately what most modern audiences are looking at when it comes to reviews (That is to say, they’re skimming for Yes or No and tally up which is more common). The only way to give or get an earnest review is to give lengthy explanation which, in an age of tiktok and TLDR internet use, is increasingly uncommon.
8 – Good
7 – Mid
Less than 7 – Garbage
Paid and/or don’t want to lose future free game handouts.
People who don’t want to come off as too critical / negative.
I ignore the numbers and read the reviews, you can usually see more if it’s for me or not.
To me 10 is amazing, 8 or 9 is great, 7 is good you like the genre.
6 is meh, and anything below it may as well be the CDi Zeldas.
While this system is absolutely flawed it does help me filter out the good games to a certain degree.
How this works? Well people do tend to only buy good reviews so if you find a game that has tons of average ratings from 6 to 8 you can be sure that while it might be far from perfect it is possible to expect a certain amount from fun.
There simply have been too many incidents of reviewers not been giving a key anymore after giving their honest opinion to still have trust in the “system” around it.
Instead of going to sites giving ratings I tend to mostly watch reviews on youtube or even some twitch streams as you can get a better insight there which might be considered a sad development but at least there are still places to look.
People have been saying this as long as I can remember and I’m 40 next year.
5/10 should have always been avg
Even rating webs do be like that.10/10 – nonexistent, 9-8/10 awesome, 7-6 everything bad except one aspect (usually graphics, gameplay, optimization, story) 5-0 we don’t talk about that.
I feel like people will play any game if it’s above a 7
From Reddit 8 years ago. So yeah, it’s not new. [https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/4k7b4q/review_score_inflation_and_why_it_exists/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/4k7b4q/review_score_inflation_and_why_it_exists/)
>Why do you think so many people view games this way now?
* Because they’re paid.
* Because there is no need to be bad mouth each other. Game Publisher and Game Journalists are dependent each other.
* Because low scoring (< 5) is considering fail anyway. So 0~4 don’t have much significance. I think as a school grade. Student A got 0%, Student B got 49%. They are both fail. People will not buy it anyway. The real scores will start from 5 or 6 onward.
>What are some of your favourite games that never reviewed well?
Several games, but my the quickest one I can thought now is Mario Color Splash, because I just playing Thousand Year Door now.
I don’t go there anymore but IGN was like this 20 years ago. To be fair, when a game is bad, it’s usually just bad. I don’t want to play 5/10 game anymore than I want to play a 2/10 game. I think a 5 star system has always made more sense.
5 – all timer, will probably be considered a classic
4- great with a few minor flaws
3- Good to decent. Definitely check out if you are a fan of the genre
2 – mediocre, only worth maybe checking out if you are a huge fan of the genre
1 – Crap. Stay away.
Because readers started treating the scores this way so reviews started doing the same.
As for why readers do this I think it’s because when there are 10/10’s you still haven’t experienced why waste time on a 7/10 ya know?
A 7 still sounds like a good time but if you can have an even better time playing something else why wouldn’t you do that instead? Games take so long and backlogs are so big there is just no time for a 7/10.
A lot of us have lost the ability to differentiate Subjectivity and Objectivity or Opinion and Fact.
Fact: Halo Combat Evolved is an FPS on the Xbox and received accolades from many sources.
Opinion: Halo Combat Evolved is the worst FPS in recent memory because it just rehashed Sci-Fi movies from the seventies through the nineties.
Objectively the game sold well and received a lot of good reviews, subjectively? I don’t like it and find it unworthy of the praise.
It is more the end user
In a world of so many games getting 9-10, you’re going to play those first given the same time resources.
Why bother going lower unless you are scraping the bottom of the barrel for a given genre
Human psychology. Most people think anything above 50% chance means a sure thing and anything below is impossible. People give percentage chance in 10% increments unless it’s 25% or 75%. Similarly most won’t rate anything out of 10 using any number below 7. People think in simplistic terms of yes/no, great/good/bad based on their overall impression rather than examining anything in detail.
It *is* weird now that you mention it. Someone will completely shit on a game and say it was 8.5/10 lmao
That’s why I prefer out of 5 ratings
For me it used to be that 10 was something you’d be nostalgic over for years to come, 9 was excellent like a Valve quality game, 8 was something like the yearly COD because it’d be fun with friends or multiplayer but otherwise fairly uninspired while having its qualities, 7-6 was something that wasn’t going to be too great on wider sales but maybe dedicated fans would be alright with.
5 was a hard sell but not an automatic fail, 4 and lower just seemed to get into no-buy territory or even buying out of curiosity or meme value.
I always felt like the 5 star scale was much better. Psychologically 3 stars sounds much better than 6/10.
It’s why I prefered the old way they did it in gaming magazines that used a 100 point system.