Lets Talk About Video Game Review Scores
A couple of weeks ago I made a post about the problem with modern game review scales. I talked about how we have been conditioned to view game scores a certain way. Most people are then influenced by the scores of a review and that affects the sales of a game. This is often unfair because A game that is actually good is overlooked and skipped by the majority of gamers. I was checking out video game images and I came across these awesome images that I think perfectly sum up what I was talking about. I wanted to share these with you guys and ask do you guys think their is a problem with modern game review scales? what do you guys think can be done about it if you do? and have you guys ever not got a game because of a review score?
Here we see a comparison of how most reviews are perceived and what the actual distribution should be. This scale is exactly like my personal scale when I review games.
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This other image even compares the scores to school grades like I did in my original post.
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This last one shows how the numbers below 7 become useless
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I believe we should stop using a score scale to review a game. In this case, words are more representative in my opinion. So it would be : Very bad | Bad | Average | Good | Very good. People would have less trouble understanding how good the game is. Steam uses this way of rating, even though it's an average of all the users critics, with a scale going from extremely bad to extremely good. It's crazy seeing how awkward the score scale has become, that's why I've stopped judging games by their review scores.
Yup word are best, my personal scale is Terrible|Bad|ok|Good|Excellent. I did not know that steam used that kind of system. that is much better! I hope that more and more reviewers move away from a number scale because it is sort of irresponsible at this point.
Thats great, I have too, their are so many awesome games that get overlooked because of their scores.
When I started doing reviews on my channel I made the conscious decision to never use a numerical scale. It's arbitrary and all it does is make people say "how can you give this game a 9 when you gave this game a 7?"
I used a recommendation scale for a little while where I would say whether I recommended something, didn't recommend it, or would wait on it to drop in price.
Eventually I threw that out as well and now I just make a review as in-depth as possible so that the person can make their own decision based on the things that I have seen. I've found that this way is much more enjoyable for me when I review something because I'm not worried about what score I would give and it lets me focus on the game more.
I would say that these charts are pretty accurate.
Agreed! You sir are a good and responsible review! I love to go in depth when I review the games as well. I like to sort of say Who I would think, would like the game.
9.5/10 "It's okay" - I.G.N.
haha exaclty