I'm afraid you've missed the point of my post.Originally Posted by Scruffington
Indie developers are rarely advertisers because they rarely have money. This example doesn't contradict anything I've said.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.
Seeing as the majority of critic reviews score in the 75-100% range regardless of how bad the game is I'm not sure why I should care that the last few years have had a few less over 90. Particularly when the last few years have had series like Assassin's Creed release games that were actually broken at launch, and we're seeing fewer massive triple A franchise titles every year with the skyrocketing of development costs in the last 20 years. In fact, all your link is evidence of is that there are fewer games getting over a 90% average. Whether it's because reviewers are more honest or there's simply fewer games is not something you can discern from that metric alone and it's silly for either of us to try and read any of that into it.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.
Considering I didn't look at his cited review or use it to support my argument it's not really ironic at all.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.
Fair enough. But I disagree with the idea that all game journalists are professional enough to separate their financial incentive to give good coverage from their evaluation of a game, or that their editors and superiors would let them publish anything that was too disparaging. The simple reality is, and this is the point I was making, so long as such an obvious and significant incentive to go easy on big game publishers exists with nearly every media organization out there, we can't say whether their reviews are reliable or not with any certainty. They may be, but there's plenty of reason to think they wouldn't be either. And if we can't tell whether they let that financial bias sway their opinion then the only choice we have to protect ourselves, as customers, from bad information is to assume that they can't be considered reliable and read anything they publish with that bias in mind. It doesn't mean everything they say is worthless. A preview of a game where they show or describe how it works is probably pretty reliable at least in so far as telling you what the game is supposed to be like. But it's foolish in my opinion for anyone to spend money based solely on the word of professional critics.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.
It'd be like a politician who got most of their campaign money from the oil industry telling you that what the world needs is fewer environmental regulations around the extraction and transportation of oil. Are you going to take that politicians word for it that less environmental regulation is in everyone's best interests when they're literally being paid by people who would financially benefit from such laws? Of course you wouldn't. So why assume that every reviewer is credible when the companies they review are literally paying their salary?
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