Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post
So he's right, pretty much every professional game journalist and critic is unreliable because they have a huge financial incentive to not tell the truth about bad games. Does that mean they all lie all the time? Probably not. Does it mean their review scores are largely meaningless and they may have to be very careful about tearing apart bad games from major publishers? Absolutely. The present way that game journalism works is an incestuous relationship between the people reporting on games and the companies they're reporting on. The former can't really afford to exist without the latter. I see no way that a person can know that without taking everything they report and every review they write with a pretty hefty bit of salt. And again, I'm not saying they're bad people, but they're in a pretty smurfed up situation that does not lend itself well to keeping up ones professional ethics.

At least with user reviews, especially for big titles and despite the possibility of there being some fake reviews or trolls eviscerating a game for no reason and fanboys giving it a 10 because they love the series so much, I'll get thousands of people who's only financial connection to the company is that they bought the game saying what they think of it rather than the views of a few dozen people who have plenty of reason to appear biased whether they are or not. Personally, I'm going to give more weight to the 20,000+ that review a game on the steam store than to journalists.

But then, I've worked as an auditor before and one of the things you learn is the appearance of bias or unethical behaviour (taking money from the people you're supposed to report honestly on) is just as bad as actual bias because everyone outside of your head will never e able to truly tell the difference between the two. If you want to be credible as a game journalist, you've got to be independent from the game advertising. It doesn't work otherwise.
If you want to wear a tinfoil hat and believe that every review is paid for, that's on you.

There are dozens of examples to the contrary -- including one just recently where an indie developer threatened to not give more game keys to a reviewer if they gave the game a bad review. The reviewer publicized this threat.

Even beyond that, there was a report just recently about how there is a steady decline in games with 90+ review scores on Metacritic. Clearly reviewers aren't afraid to give games the scores they deserve, as you seem to suggest they are.

The ironic part about your argument is that the example FinalxxSin cited was a reviewer speaking their mind and giving their honest opinion about a game, which they thought had an overpowering water element and gave it a score of 7.8 / 10. It was clearly not a "paid review" as you seem to suggest most are, yet he made fun of the reviewer anyways.

Honestly though, I don't put as much stock into reviews as my posts would indicate. I originally just used review scores as a way to argue that the game was worse received than XIII -- at least by critics. The only opinion that matters to me about any piece of media is my own. Of course it's always nice when others share your opinion, but if they don't...that's okay too.