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[TangoAlphaLima]

Here's Metacritic's breakdown of what they deem to be Good, Average, and Bad scores.

http://www.metacritic.com/about-metascores

The first thing you'll notice is that Video Games have a completely different scale. Movies, TV, and Music all use the same scale, but for some reason that scale isn't used for Video Games.

Now digging into the differences between the scales, the bottom end is relatively similar. The biggest divergence is in the Good and Average categories. For a movie, TV show, or music album to be considered Good, it only needs a minimum of 61. A video game with a 61 score, however, lands right in the middle of the Average category.

Video gamers know that review scores are juiced by game journalists (when compared to other media reviews), I just find it surprising that a review aggregator like Metacritic would acknowledge this and go so far as to use a completely different scale for video games when compared to every other form of entertainment.

How did we end up here? Why is it that video game reviews are so substantially different from other media reviews that they require a separate grading scale? Can the system even change at this point, or are we stuck with this apparent norm in the industry?

 

[Imp the Dimp]

Because video game journalism is god awful.

 

[Savantcore]

Music, TV, and film are almost universally reviewed on a 1-5 star scale (You'll notice that your image caters to this). That scale exists for games as well, but in my experience the majority of reviews go for 1-10. Double the score range requires more particular grading and averages, which I think is what justifies Metacritic's method.

 

[LorDjidane]

It's because of the scales people use for video games I guess. They rareley rate below 5 and 7 is a polite meh game.

 

[tryagainlater]

Metacritic and video game ratings are dumb.

 

[archnemesis]

This scale is slightly exaggerated although games with a Metascore below 70 are usually unpolished. You can find gems with low scores, especially in niche genres, but most of the time the Metascore is a good indicator if a game is worth spending any time on.

Scores in gaming media are so inflated it's difficult to tell apart average from good. It would be nice if more outlets would hand out 3s, 4s, 5s, and 6s for games that are alright but nothing special.

 

[Revs]

That's because in game industry reviewers are heavily dependent on publishers: preview events, review events, review discs. If you don't live good with publisher you won't receive invitations/disc to have articles at release date and you are out of money. Almost all trafic generated by previews/reviews takes place in hours after previews/reviews goes live. Who isn't there at hour zero loses tons of money.

Even games is crap you give quite high score, so that is what keep average and scale this high. Probably in Music/TVShows/Movies things are different.

 

[TangoAlphaLima]

Music, TV, and film are almost universally reviewed on a 1-5 star scale. That scale exists for games as well, but in my experience the majority of reviews go for 1-10. Double the score range requires more particular grading and averages, which I think is what justifies Metacritic's method.

Many the 4 or 5 star scales I see with Movies, TV, and music reviews have half stars as well. So essentially they're on an 8 or 10 point system.

 

[Bloodworth]

It takes a couple hours to review a terrible movie, and at least a full day to review a terrible video game. Not that many people have the time or resources to waste on the truly awful.

 

[Neuromancer]

The 100 point scale for video games is truly useless, since the way most sites review games is that anything less than a 70 is dogshit and not worth anyone's time. Metacritic can say that 40 is mixed or average all they want, but we all know that's a lie.

Many the 4 or 5 star scales I see with Movies, TV, and music reviews have half stars as well. So essentially they're on an 8 or 10 point system.

Yeah half stars are dumb, I agree.

 

[Revs]

It takes a couple hours to review a terrible movie, and at least a full day to review a terrible video game. Not that many people have the time or resources to waste on the truly awful.

That also.

 

[Impeccable]

People care too much about a number and not enough about the content of a review as it relates to their interests. I personally haven't been swayed on a game since TLOU and that is only primarily due to other NeoGAF members loving it.

Couldn't name a time a bad review stopped me from getting any game at all.

 

[Santiako]

Because with games it is usually
Less than 7 - garbage
7-8 - alright
9 - good
10 - goty

 

[War Raichu]

Because video game journalism is god awful.

first post nails it

 

[Phrozenflame500]

In general I consider 80-100 to be average, 70-80 to be either niche or a disappointment and <70 to be bad.

Seriously, we need a better system.

 

[BinaryPork2737]

I think it's mainly because new games, on average, retail at a higher cost than something like an album, DVD, or movie ticket. Since it's a higher price, you get a wider variety of (generally) polarized reviews that will either hype the game up or bash the game.

The only reason I ever actually browse Metacritic is because the site links to multiple reviews. If there's a game I'm interested in, even if it has a lower Metacritic score than other games, I'll look up several different reviews to get a more definite consensus rather than looking at just one person's opinion.

 

[TouchMyBox]

This scale is slightly exaggerated although games with a Metascore below 70 are usually unpolished. You can find gems with low scores, especially in niche genres, but most of the time the Metascore is a good indicator if a game is worth spending any time on.

Scores in gaming media are so inflated it's difficult to tell apart average from good. It would be nice if more outlets would hand out 3s, 4s, 5s, and 6s for games that are alright but nothing special.

It's definitely an accurate chart for any "AAA" games.

In general I consider 80-100 to be average, 70-80 to be either niche or a disappointment and <70 to be bad.

Seriously, we need a better system.

My vote is for no system.

 

[archnemesis]

It takes a couple hours to review a terrible movie, and at least a full day to review a terrible video game. Not that many people have the time or resources to waste on the truly awful.

I would be fine if people reviewed games without beating them as long as they're open about it. That's one thing Kotaku does better than any other large site. They typically state exactly what they played for the review.

 

[georly]

It takes a couple hours to review a terrible movie, and at least a full day to review a terrible video game. Not that many people have the time or resources to waste on the truly awful.

Not only does it take a while to review a video game, it also takes a lot of time. Even the shortest of games are longer than the longest of movies.

It's a commitment thing. I only have so much time in my life, so I can only commit my time to the BEST games. When I can only play 1 or 2 games a month, I will want to pick the 1 or 2 BEST games that month, so I'll look at the 8's or 9's. A movie takes 2 hours to watch. I can watch 20 movies in the same time I can play 2-3 games, so a few 6-7 in there don't hurt as much with movies.

I think that's why it's skewed. Game publishers know that most people only have time for 9's and some 8's, so if their game is below that, it's considered not worthy of player's time.

 

[jschreier]

A few answers:

- Video games are active experiences and their "quality" is subjective and difficult to analyze, particularly compared to films or books. Music is a more apt comparison - and how often do you use album reviews to decide whether or not to buy or listen to something?

- Many of the games released in any given week are terrible and unpolished, encouraging review scores to skew higher for big-budget AAA releases that generally "feel" like "good games."

- Review scores are arbitrary and meaningless.

- Metacritic is flawed and easy to game. See: http://kotaku.com/metacritic-matters-how-review-scores-hurt-video-games-472462218

 

[2+2=5]

Well Metacritic knows what's going on.
Anyway only game industry care about metacritic, so probably this had some influence.

 

[AHA-Lambda]

Because video game journalism is god awful.

DING DING DING!!

 

[Opiate]

A few answers:

- Video games are active experiences and their "quality" is subjective and difficult to analyze, particularly compared to films or books. Music is a more apt comparison - and how often do you use album reviews to decide whether or not to buy or listen to something?

- Many of the games released in any given week are terrible and unpolished, encouraging review scores to skew higher for big-budget AAA releases that generally "feel" like "good games."

- Review scores are arbitrary and meaningless.

- Metacritic is flawed and easy to game. See: http://kotaku.com/metacritic-matters-how-review-scores-hurt-video-games-472462218

Insightful points. I'd add that there really was a time when better graphics highly correlated with better games (and we're talking the NES-PS1 era here), mostly because graphical fidelity in that time period was primarily constrained by talent rather than money. In the last 6-10 years, that has clearly reversed.

But I think this old outlook still colors people's perceptions. We still think of better graphics as indicative of better gameplay because that argument frequently held up for decades in the early days of gaming. It will take another decade to convince ourselves that isn't really true anymore because we've ingrained that thought process.

 

[McDougles]

Doesn't the rating system for games reflect the American grading system, where 59% is an F and 69% is a D?

It's like the community is upset that there isn't an arbitrary bell curve for grades and that games aren't unnecessarily ranked lower due to arbitrary reasons.

 

[Kai Dracon]

A few answers:

- Video games are active experiences and their "quality" is subjective and difficult to analyze, particularly compared to films or books. Music is a more apt comparison - and how often do you use album reviews to decide whether or not to buy or listen to something?

- Many of the games released in any given week are terrible and unpolished, encouraging review scores to skew higher for big-budget AAA releases that generally "feel" like "good games."

- Review scores are arbitrary and meaningless.

- Metacritic is flawed and easy to game. See: http://kotaku.com/metacritic-matters-how-review-scores-hurt-video-games-472462218

One problem is that this situation seems to have engendered a circle of life - much of the gaming public now takes review numbers as objective proofs about whether a game is "good" or "bad" in a very simplistic sense. You know, "I only buy games rated 9 or above, because they're guaranteed to be amazing."

It feels as if there's no motivation for anything to change since the audience has become complicit in reinforcing the review practices with their wallets and their views.

 

[Neuromancer]

A few answers:

- Video games are active experiences and their "quality" is subjective and difficult to analyze, particularly compared to films or books. Music is a more apt comparison - and how often do you use album reviews to decide whether or not to buy or listen to something?

- Many of the games released in any given week are terrible and unpolished, encouraging review scores to skew higher for big-budget AAA releases that generally "feel" like "good games."

- Review scores are arbitrary and meaningless.

- Metacritic is flawed and easy to game. See: http://kotaku.com/metacritic-matters-how-review-scores-hurt-video-games-472462218

I don't understand the basic premise behind tying bonuses to Metacritic. Why not tie them to sales? That might not work out every time for the studios, but at least there's a one to one financial relationship.

 

[Opiate]

Doesn't the rating system for games reflect the American grading system, where 59% is an F and 69% is a D?

It's like the community is upset that there isn't an arbitrary bell curve for grades and that games aren't unnecessarily ranked lower due to arbitrary reasons.

I would very much argue this is post-hoc rationalization. There is tremendous pressure on game reviewers to post high scores; when they are called on their high scores, reviewers say "oh uh we're using the system where anything below a 70% is a terrible grade. Like the American grading system!"

I don't think it's how they approached it to begin with, I think it's how they justified it once called on it.

 

[jett]

Because video game journalism is god awful.

Does anything else need to be said?

Actually, yes. An actual problem is that too many outlets have 10 point, 20 point, or even 100-point review scales. That last one is just fucking moronic. Most movie critics score movies based on a 4 star rating, leading to less movies landing in the 90-100 side of things. I wish game reviewers adopted a smaller scale, what we have now gives us frankly grotesque results. If these people had only 5 points to give out we'd have a more sensible average.

 

[Phades]

A few answers:

- Video games are active experiences and their "quality" is subjective and difficult to analyze, particularly compared to films or books. Music is a more apt comparison - and how often do you use album reviews to decide whether or not to buy or listen to something?

Why does this perception exist? Everything can be viewed as subjective in this instance, but this doesn't seem to create the same kinds of problems universally for other mediums. Arguably, within the video game medium, there are more opportunities (albeit time consuming) to be more objective and less subjective with the way frame rate, stability, and features offered exist.

- Many of the games released in any given week are terrible and unpolished, encouraging review scores to skew higher for big-budget AAA releases that generally "feel" like "good games."

Doesn't this just confirm a negative feedback loop with garbage in and therefore garbage out?

- Review scores are arbitrary and meaningless.

They are as meaningful as the thought put into how they work. If most have no thought put into them, much like the writing supporting a AAA title due to only how it "feels" after a few minutes compared to an indy title, then why are we only throwing out the score in this instance as being flawed?


You have good points, but isn't this an opportunity to offer up a better methodology? I mean sure, I was nodding along with what you are saying, but this would serve more to just steer folks away in general from published reviews entirely.

 

[IISANDERII]

Games have a higher standard because they need a larger investment, both in time and money.

 

[angrygnat]

I like what Metacritic tried to do. Looks to me like they wanted 50 to be the middle and average to be high 60s low/mid 70s. Then the truly great games in the 80-90s. Gave themselves plenty of room to actually rate the game. But jackasses rate every game 100s so it blows up the scale. Then you have their user ratings where if a game is exclusive to their favored console they rate it a 10 and if it's on the other evil console it gets a zero. Even if they didn't play it. It's not the system that's bad. It's the 25% of users that have so little confidence in their chosen console/company that they feel they need to prop it up with bullshit. You can't account for assholes in an open forum like that.

 

[Mt Heart Attack]

- Video games are active experiences and their "quality" is subjective and difficult to analyze, particularly compared to films or books. Music is a more apt comparison - and how often do you use album reviews to decide whether or not to buy or listen to something?

Well I don't agree at all on this point. I feel there are many vital factors pertaining to videogames that can be easily and, to a certain degree, objectively critically evalued. I'm talking about graphical fidelity, performance, voice acting, controls and so on, and virtually none of those applies to movies or music (sure you can tell whether the recording quality of an album is good or not, but often times that can be an artistic choice, while a shit framerate is just a shit framerate).

As a matter of fact, I assumed, a big reason why videogame reviews appear to be held in higher regard than reviews for other forms of entertainment is that they actually "work", at least for games that belong to a well defined genre and follow its tropes. It's easy to tell a competent shooter from a shit one, not so easy to tell a good noise-pop album from a bad one.

 

[Stumpokapow]

A 2.5 star out of four movie review is considered a weak recommendation. Would you recommend games that you would give a 6.25/10 to personally?

 

[AniHawk]

the idea of weighting scores per site is an interesting one, but it should be done per person, as a person can jump from website to website, and metacritic currently treats a site as some giant entity. gamerankings does it more honestly with a straight-up average.

 

[Griss]

- Many of the games released in any given week are terrible and unpolished, encouraging review scores to skew higher for big-budget AAA releases that generally "feel" like "good games."

This is one of the biggest one, I think. Movies, TV and Music are viewed purely as entertainment. But with games there's still an element of 'software competency' that used to be a huge feature of reviews, and is still a vestigal kind of a feature.

For a long time, a game would get 6/10 just because it wasn't buggy unplayable trash. This made sense in the NES era as 6/10 games would actually be buggy, unplayable trash. Though such games are far less common on modern home consoles, that feeling of 'must rate this at least a 5, as it's technically competent software' still remains, I think.

On the other side, the reader considers the 'average game' to be an average experience, with the 1-10 scale assuming every game is technically competent. In this way a 5/10 game would actually be 'average'. But because of where we've come from that's not the case.

I haven't been very eloquent about it there, it's been a tiring day at work. But I think some of you will see what I'm getting at. Other media: review the experience. Games media: review the competence of the software, then review the experience it delivers.

 

[TangoAlphaLima]

A few answers:

- Video games are active experiences and their "quality" is subjective and difficult to analyze, particularly compared to films or books. Music is a more apt comparison - and how often do you use album reviews to decide whether or not to buy or listen to something?

I think this is debatable. The fact that video games are "active experiences" should not really have a bearing on a review score; I don't see how it changes anything, it's simply a component of the review.

As far as quality being more subjective when compared to films or books, I think that's a bit of a cop out. There is nothing inherently different about video games that prevents them from being objectively reviewed. I think where this misconception comes in is when video game reviewers review a game for a genre they are not interested in or comfortable with. And I understand where that comes from; reviewers have to play a lot of different games, not one specific genre. So when it comes time to review the newest iteration of Street Fighter, Gran Turismo, or whatever, you don't feel comfortable, because a player needs to invest a lot of time in those genres to fully understand them. The solution to this problem is to diversify the reviewing staff, but that's not always a feasible option.

- Many of the games released in any given week are terrible and unpolished, encouraging review scores to skew higher for big-budget AAA releases that generally "feel" like "good games."

Surely the same would be true for Movies and TV shows as well though, right? I mean, Breaking Bad certainly "feels" a lot better than Two Broke Girls to me.

- Review scores are arbitrary and meaningless.

Yes, Kotaku is a big proponent of this line of thought. And I don't necessarily disagree. The content of a review is much more important than the score assigned to it.

That being said, there is a benefit to some kind of scoring system, and of a review aggregator like Metacritic. Personally I don't necessarily have a great interest in every game released, so I don't read reviews on most games. But when a game gets significantly better or worse scores than I would have expected, it's worth taking a deeper look at.

Additionally, considering your own argument that game reviews are subjective, an aggregator like Metacritic is actually beneficial. If I were to just read Game Informer's review of Knack (an 83), I'd probably have a pretty good impression of the game. But Metacritic's aggregated score of 54 from a total of 82 reviewers tells a completely different story. Now maybe I like what I read from Game Informer's review more than the others, so I tend to agree with their opinion. But maybe I don't and Metacritic helps me realize that Game Informer's review may have been too subjective. Regardless, I think there is a benefit to aggregating services.

 

[Hyperactivity]

Yeah, its an idealistic way of looking at the 10 point system.

I wish it worked with stars, as when I see a 3 or 3.5 star review, I think of a good game, but a 6 or 7m out of 10 is either bargain bin, eventually get, or never get

 

[down 2 orth]

Thats a pretty dirty system letting websites owned by big media companies have more sway in the aggregated scores.

Also, has anyone noticed that good (not great) Japanese games tend to review much lower than good (not great) western games?

 

[UnrealEck]

I only use scores as a rough guide. If a game gets a 9 out of 10 (or 90 out of 100) from most big name sites, I'd say it's probably a good game. What I don't pay attention to are the user ratings on metacritic. Those only paint a picture of fanboyism.

 

[mclem]

Also, has anyone noticed that good (not great) Japanese games tend to review much lower than good (not great) western games?

I think an aspect of that is simply a matter of regional tastes. There's similarly some review houses which will have a lower median for handheld titles than console ones.

 

[Domstercool]

Isn't the difference something to do with the variety of various reviews for games that have different scales?

Most places that do film reviews often do them out of 5.

 

[Stumpokapow]

the idea of weighting scores per site is an interesting one, but it should be done per person, as a person can jump from website to website, and metacritic currently treats a site as some giant entity. gamerankings does it more honestly with a straight-up average.

In theory I agree but in practice the difference in the weighting is rarely more than a few points and certainly nothing that challenges the consensus on the game. So I feel like it's relevant for trying to rank the best reviewed games ever and thus splitting hairs but little else

 

[nullref]

- Review scores are arbitrary and meaningless.

They're only arbitrary if the review sucks (by not expressing a clear opinion/judgement), or if the score scale used is pointlessly granular (explain the difference between a 7.9 and a 8.2).

Any clear, fully-formed judgement -- which is what a review should express -- can implicitly be summarized in a simple 3-5 point scale (e.g., very positive, positive, ambivalent, negative, very negative). By making that explicit in the form of a score, you allow people to use that score as buying advice, and avoid having to read the full review, which necessarily spoils the game to some small degree. Then they can read the full review after they've played the game, and can compare their opinions with that of the reviewer. (This is another enjoyable way to read good reviews.)

You also make reviews more useful in aggregate, as people can then get quick guidance on "what games should I check out for <platform>?" by sorting a corpus of reviews by score.

 

[Opiate]

A 2.5 star out of four movie review is considered a weak recommendation. Would you recommend games that you would give a 6.25/10 to personally?

No, but a 2.5 star is a "weak recommendation" while 6.25 is profoundly awful for a game.

 

[Doctor Decimate]

3 out of 4 is a pretty common "good" movie rating, and that ends up being a 75. One step above that, 3.5, shoots all the way up to 88. A 2.5 is a 50. It's pretty obvious why the scale is the way it is.

 

[TangoAlphaLima]

Isn't the difference something to do with the variety of various reviews for games that have different scales?

Most places that do film reviews often do them out of 5.

That doesn't explain why video game reviews on a 10 point scale (seemingly the largest group of game rating scales) should be demonstrably different than movie, TV, and music reviews on a 5 point scale. Also, as I noted earlier, many 5 star scales have half stars, essentially making them 10 point scales.

 

[GetemMa]

I think the discrepancy in scale has a lot to do with how movies are rated versus games and generally accepted norms of each.

Most movie reviewers use a 4 or 5 star scale.

Most people would go see a 2 or 3 star movie but a lot of people would not go see a movie if the reviewer gave it a numerical equivalent of 50 or 60 because their sense of scale is distorted by numerous factors, the educational grading system being a prime culprit. Metacritic probably realizes this and says 3 out of 5 stars is still a decent score so it lands in the green.

Most game reviewers use a 10 point scale which translates pretty strongly to the educational grading system, which I think Metacritic also realizes so they account for it by making games who are in C- , D, o F territory in the yellow.

This all seems pretty obvious to me. It is also a pretty pointless debate because even if every reviewer in the world readjusted their scaling and used a 5 point scale, gamers would just bitch about industry pressure and bloated scores when everything got 60's on Metacritic instead of 70's.

 

[Fugu]

A 2.5 star out of four movie review is considered a weak recommendation. Would you recommend games that you would give a 6.25/10 to personally?

I went through my own catalog of completed games and rated them all on a five-point scale a couple of months ago. At first, I really found myself being a victim to the industry standard of using only the upper quadrant of the scale to describe anything that's not total garbage. The upward shift will continue so long as people feel obligated to use big numbers to describe anything that doesn't suck because in the current model giving a game a 3/5 is condemning it even though that may be the most accurate rating to give it.

 

[ThaRagingAsian]

When you have game review sites like IGN, Polygon and a few others passing out the same scores on PS4 and Xbox One even though there are resolution and fps differences (COD Ghost, AC4 and Tomb Raider), then the metacritic reviews are not to be trusted.

 

[TangoAlphaLima]

No, but a 2.5 star is a "weak recommendation" while 6.25 is profoundly awful for a game.

Let's use a real life analogy for this. Lightning Returns has a 68 on Metacritic for PS3, and a 70 for the 360. I think we can conclude this is a disappointing score.

The movie Lone Survivor got a 60 on Metacritic. I have heard nothing negative about this movie other than Mark Wahlberg being a lousy choice for the lead. In fact, I'm pretty interested in seeing this movie.

There's just a huge difference in how video games are reviewed when compared to other media. If we were using the Movie/TV/Music scale, Lightning Returns probably deserves something under 50. But such a review on our special video game scale would be considered absolutely abysmal. It's just kinda bizarre.