Phil Spencer has suggested that some bad reviews have been written purely just to get people clicking. “I mean somebody gave Forza Horizon 3 a four,” he told Gamespot. “I think there’s certain reviews that are written more to get clicked on than they are to actually accurately reflect the quality of the game, and that kind of bums me out.”
Please be assured that our reviews are actually reviews rather than click bait, and we spend ages deciding on the final score. Well, that’s normally the case, when Sony deposit a couple of grand in our personal bank accounts then it’s always at least a 9 out of 10.
Source: Gamespot
Starman
He’s definitely right. I think the way some sites do it is to give a game to a reviewer who dislikes the genre, so even if it’s the pinnacle of the genre it’ll still get a bad score.
MrYd
That works both ways though. Give a game to a reviewer who is a massive fan of a particular genre and it might get an unreasonably high score.
A decent review shouldn’t be affected by the reviewers like or dislike of the genre. Which a hard thing to do, and probably involves people accepting that a score of 7 or 6 or even 5 isn’t a bad thing. Adjust that for your personal genre preferences and those games are more like what people seem to think scores should be.
I happen to like odd JRPGs and probably more musou games than I should. Quite often getting review scores around 5 to 7. Which I think are perfectly fair scores. They tend to get judged quite reasonably as games rather than how well they fit a reviewers preferences. And while those scores are probably correct, I get a lot more fun out of them than I would from a FPS that got a 5.
Starman
Giving a game to a fan of the genre to review is giving it to the target audience so I’m cool with that. It’s still an opinion either way but I think reviews should always be done by people with who least a like the genre. They’d be no point me reviewing a dubstep album as I’d give every one 0/10!
MrYd
But that just means the game scores more than it deserves.
So people who like that particular genre are happy. It’s as good as the review says.
But for everyone else? It’s scored 9, so it must be good. Not my type of game, but it’s obviously really good, so I’ll give it a go. Oh, wait. It’s a bit disappointing. Not bad, but definitely not a 9.
Or you try and score things more fairly, and it’s a 7. Looks interesting, I’ll give it a go. Yeah, not bad, quite enjoyed it.
Of course, then you get some idiots saying “But I like that genre and it’s one of the best games of it’s type. Why did it only get a 7?”
And what is this “dubstep” of which you speak? Is it one of those new-fangled types of “music” the young people today enjoy? In which case, 0/10 is being generous. ;)
aerobes
Isn’t everything written for clicks? Positive, negative, indifference or otherwise.
It’s telling the difference between the inflammatory and the unbiased opinion that’s the problem.
Having been a longtime participant in this particular corner of the internet I feel like I’ve got that mostly nailed down.