I trust other people playing the game way more than the people who make the game, sell the game, or get paid to review the game.
If everyone I know with similar tastes to mine says something sucks, there’s a 99.9999999% chance I will independently think it sucks anyway; so I might as well listen to others who have played it and save myself some time and money.
My favourite is when you have a friend, or known reviewer, going on about how something sucks, and you realise that it sounds right up your alley.
I specifically rented The One, because of Roger Ebert’s 1 and 1/2 star review in the newspaper, trashing Jet Li’s The One (just to totally date myself).
That’s why I went and saw Dude, Where’s My Car in the theatre. Because Siskel and Ebert had given it their worst score ever and I thought if those chucklenuts hated it, it must be good.
I’ve actually been surprised but how many gems I’ve found in games with a 70% rating or a 82% rating. Sometimes ratings can be impacted by feelings about a company or a media incident when the actual game is rock solid.
I wouldn’t say those numbers are for games that suck, anyway. That’s a decent, just not mind-blowing game. Anything that’s 40% or lower is what I would say almost universally sucks. But I would also take into account review bombing for things beyond the scope of the game itself, as it is very often reported on when it happens.
Suda suggested that one reason is publishers and developers focusing too much on Metacritic scores, and deciding to play it safe and stick to what is conventionally known to ‘work’ instead of taking risks with new ideas.
I think most people are missing that they’re talking about them from a dev and publisher standpoint, not consumer / gamer.
And from that perspective it is problematic whenever things that are supposed to be used to assess something become targets to shoot for. Oscar bait, teachers teaching the test and not the subject, etc.
Although from a consumer standpoint it’s true a well. Official reviewers are often bought (directly or not), pressured in other ways, operate on nonsense scales, and are infamously not actually that good at video games. Player reviews are a Little better, but you have to be adept at weeding out whinging from people who suck at games or just suck broadly.
Streamers/YouTubers are the only real option, imo, as they actually show what they’re doing (no lying!) and have to build up an actual reputation of some kind to be noticed.
My county has a food safety rating Needs Improvement/Ok/Good/Excellent and when I see Chinese, Teriyaki, or Thai restaurant with Excellent i stop in. Always been the best food I’ve ever eaten. I mean the rating is based on health inspections, but there’s a corelation that has yet to fail me.
The correlation that failed you is the one between your anecdote and the topic of the article 🤣
