DannyDanger
Member
I think weak should top out at 60
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OpenCritic - A new game-only review aggregator
- Thread starter astonish
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orthodoxy1095
Banned
I'm not a fan of the idea of sticking the bottom 70% of games under one heading.
Not at all. Terrible idea.
Not at all. Terrible idea.
Agreed.
If anything, I'd say it's fairly indicative of the games critic industry to generally not score anything under a 5, near as I can tell. If you consider that, I think it's probably a pretty fair assessment to say that the bottom 20% of games aren't "good." That is, if you take 50 as a baseline, rather than 1 or 0. It's technically possible to get those scores, but the only one I've seen in recent memory was for that awful new Langrisser game: https://www.destructoid.com/review-langrisser-re-incarnation-tensei-361889.phtml
That said, the strength-related terminologies kind of irk me, though for different reasons.
We do recognize the problem that different publications use completely different scales. The OpenCritic team has had numerous debates about Kill Screen specifically, to the point where we call the problem the "Kill Screen problem." (And to be clear, we love Kill Screen and think it's a great publication, but they're the most notable outlier out of the 100+ publications we support now).
We've been trending more and more towards Rotten Tomatoes if this update doesn't give that away, heh. For a long time, we debated switching over to the "% recommended" as the main score, though we'd need to make some enhancements before doing that (ex: letting publications/critics set their own benchmarks for what is or isn't "recommended" instead of an "8-or-higher" approach).
In hindsight, I wish we'd considered this more seriously, though I'm not sure if the outcome would have been different. OpenCritic's #1 challenge every day is still simple awareness. We jokingly call it the "CoD fanboy problem." One gamer persona we use is the gamer buys like 4 games a year, 3 of which are franchise games, 1 of which is always Call of Duty. That gamer is really fucking hard to reach and engage as a website that's not advertising. We felt like deviating from the current standard (Metacritic) too much might kill our chances at being included in gamer conversations, and thus kill our chances at reaching that gamer.
Anyways, just some random musings. The one thing I'd like to underscore is that everything is an experiment. As an example, we did author names when we launched. Critics and gamers liked them, so we expanded to getting critic pictures and profiles. Critics still seem to like them, so we're working on giving them direct control over their page and their quotes so that they can make changes at any time.
Just last week, we saw (for the first time ever) serious complaints about OpenCritic not including international publications. So you can imagine what we're working on now...
tl;dr - keep the feedback coming
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Edit:
It's the bottom 40% of games reviewed.
Reminder: review scores are absolutely not a uniform distribution.
Strongly recommend you look at it this way:
- Mighty: Top 10%
- Strong: Top 40% (not including Mighty)
- Fair: Middle 20%
- Weak: Bottom 40%
We chose the cutoffs based on these percentages. Initially we only had three tiers: top 40%, middle 20%, bottom 40%. Mighty was a late addition to recognize the best-of-the-best.
We've been trending more and more towards Rotten Tomatoes if this update doesn't give that away, heh. For a long time, we debated switching over to the "% recommended" as the main score, though we'd need to make some enhancements before doing that (ex: letting publications/critics set their own benchmarks for what is or isn't "recommended" instead of an "8-or-higher" approach).
In hindsight, I wish we'd considered this more seriously, though I'm not sure if the outcome would have been different. OpenCritic's #1 challenge every day is still simple awareness. We jokingly call it the "CoD fanboy problem." One gamer persona we use is the gamer buys like 4 games a year, 3 of which are franchise games, 1 of which is always Call of Duty. That gamer is really fucking hard to reach and engage as a website that's not advertising. We felt like deviating from the current standard (Metacritic) too much might kill our chances at being included in gamer conversations, and thus kill our chances at reaching that gamer.
Anyways, just some random musings. The one thing I'd like to underscore is that everything is an experiment. As an example, we did author names when we launched. Critics and gamers liked them, so we expanded to getting critic pictures and profiles. Critics still seem to like them, so we're working on giving them direct control over their page and their quotes so that they can make changes at any time.
Just last week, we saw (for the first time ever) serious complaints about OpenCritic not including international publications. So you can imagine what we're working on now...
tl;dr - keep the feedback coming
------------
Edit:
It's the bottom 40% of games reviewed.
Reminder: review scores are absolutely not a uniform distribution.
Strongly recommend you look at it this way:
- Mighty: Top 10%
- Strong: Top 40% (not including Mighty)
- Fair: Middle 20%
- Weak: Bottom 40%
We chose the cutoffs based on these percentages. Initially we only had three tiers: top 40%, middle 20%, bottom 40%. Mighty was a late addition to recognize the best-of-the-best.
I don't like score summary at all
Is the goal to move to a binary system? Seems like a better approach for games, since there isn't really a Rotten Tomatoes for games, if that's the goal, rather than "Strength of game X" - which seems kind of like what MetaCritic already does. Not sure how to tackle the whole "certified fresh" thing on Rotten Tomatoes though (to which I'm unsure of its meaning aside from it being better somehow than regular fresh).
Sortof.
The most common criticism against not just OpenCritic but aggregators in general is that different publications use different "scales." An 4/5 for one publication doesn't mean the same thing as an 8/10 for another. And that's a fair criticism.
The goal of moving to a binary system is that it should be a metric everyone can agree on: "would you recommend this game to a general gaming consumer?"
We felt like we couldn't launch with that system, however. It requires relationships with publications and critics, something we didn't have at our launch. We also had some real concerns that such a system was such a huge deviation from the norm that it might exclude us from gamer conversations (such as the conversations on Neogaf).
We might switch back someday, however. More likely is to add some dual-display (a percentage and the average).
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Why I actually came to post:
The E3 press conferences made me realize that there's not really a great visualization out there for major game releases or events. So I made a calendar.
http://opencritic.com/calendar
Oh wow that's actually pretty great. Thanks for making this.
Lupin the Third
Member
I would suggest Brash Games, but anyone doing that would probably skip on using OpenCritic anyway.
Edit:
Sorry for inconveniencing you. You'll notice I didn't bump it again to give you a reply. Have a nice day.
Edit 2:
Not especially. But it does seem like the Brash Pac-Man review thread title doesn't make it clear there's also OpenCritic related concerns inside. Also I see this kind of bump happen on GAF all the time. Apologies if it offended.
Great calendar!
Necrobumping this thread for some dumb joke is very nice of you.
I have nothing against bumping long dead threads but doing it because you feel like you need to post something like that says more about yourself than about the people you are trying to call out.
Christ you really got an axe to grind huh
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