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.
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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