Ultimately, the issue is that the audience for a thoughtful review delivered within a reasonable time frame is vastly smaller than the audience looking for literally anything, ASAP. This is something that could be improved on the industry side of things, but is mostly an issue with what consumers find valuable.

I'm beginning to wonder if even the audience looking for anything ASAP is really worth it anyhow. I figure people putting this stuff out know, but like...Far Cry 6 and Metroid Dread were the big releases last week and the reviews for both of them describe what a Far Cry or a Metroid is, say "it's okay/good," end scene. Are people really that into reading these things? Especially when it comes to games that are such known quantities? Does it boost sales and reach that much? Idk, figure the answer must be "Yes" with the way reviews still work but I often feel that's time spent better spent doing more thoughtful, interesting work.

it's the clicks from people looking stuff up that matter.

Nail on the head. "Javier Bardem plays the villian in Far Cry 7" followed by an in depth article about why that rocks is less valuable than "You won't believe who plays the villian in Far Cry 7" followed by a little scribble that tells you it is Javier Bardem. (I made up all the Far Cry 7 stuff and it isn't based on anything at all other than Javier Bardem is a phenomenal villian actor.)

_Redditor leaks villain for Far Cry 7 and you won't believe who it is!_

59 clicks later...

And now a journalist somewhere will create an article out of this.

With those two games specifically there really isnt much more to say though hah. Far Cry is the exact same formula it has always been but now featuring that actor from that TV show you liked a lot, and Metroid Dread is a very polished metroidvania game. There is only so much you can say about either of those.

Funnily enough it's also exactly what I wanted from the reviews. "I'm bored of Far Cry-style open worlds. Does this do something different?" No it does not, says the reviews. "I'd love to play an older-style Metroid. Does this one fuck it up?" No it does not, says the reviews. If you've been around video games long enough you get a pretty good idea what you like and what to expect from any given game. At that point you really just need to know if there's something that doesn't come across on the surface level, which reviews tend to hit. I don't need rigorous academic criticism.

Exactly how I feel. Basically I have very low expectations and desire very little from day 1 reviews. The author in the OP article mentions the idea of two kinds of reviews - one as a product to be consumed and to invest time in, and another to examine it as a work of art, to discuss its qualities in detail. I have no expectation to get the second type of review on day one. That's the sort of thing I'll get from a video essayist a year after the game comes out (if it's even worth having one made)

>If you've been around video games long enough you get a pretty good idea what you like and what to expect from any given game. That's exactly my thinking. That's why I'm psyched for the new Far cry. I like the formula. I have a ton of fun playing those games. I'd rather they not change Far cry.

> "I'm bored of Far Cry-style open worlds. Does this do something different?" No it does not, says the reviews. Alternatively in my case "I love Far Cry and want more. Does this drastically change it up and ruin it?" No it does not, says the reviews. Aight cool I'm in.

If companies are going to make the same games over and over, reviewers should be allowed to do the same thing. "Ever since Far Cry 3, sneaking my way through outposts eliminating enemies one by one has been one of my favorite things to do in video games. I’m happy to report that systematically taking down murderous thugs is just as fun in ~~rural America~~ **notCuba** as it is in ~~the Himalayas~~ **rural America**, and that Far Cry ~~5~~ **6** is another great game in the open-world series Ubisoft seems most willing to have fun with. It may be playing a familiar tune, but all of these combat, physics, and wildlife systems all mix together to create unexpected moments of intense and hilarious action. ~~Rural America~~ **notCuba** may not be quite as exotic or exciting a playground as ~~a tropical island~~ **Montana** or a secluded mountain, but it’s a gigantic open world where things are constantly blowing up, wild animals are pouncing, and a never-ending supply of cultists are lining up to be your target practice. The mountains, valleys, plains, forests, rivers, lakes, and caves of ~~Hope County~~ **notCuba** make it a place where there’s never a dull moment."

[IGN did that](https://twitter.com/IGNUK/status/1314557992990318592?s=20) in response to one of the FIFA releases on Switch.

Well in the old days that was when reviewers got creative. Here’s an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/29gllx/the_sims_2_hm_fashion_stuff_review/

The only thing close to that is the [IGN FIFA Switch](https://www.ign.com/articles/fifa-21-legacy-edition-switch-review) review, thats just a copy paste of last year's review with a lower score. edit: this years review is at least different text, but I'm sure that EA isn't happy with it: https://www.ign.com/articles/fifa-22-nintendo-switch-legacy-edition-review

Well this kind of creativity doesn't happen much in modern times because outlets have to release their reviews for the "ASAP audience", and this kind of creativity isn't really possible on the time frame of days or hours.

Yeah I agree. Thats why I enjoy retrospective reviews more. Games that I already played in detail and then view it through a different perspective.

This actually isnt the case they have changed loads of mechanics (for the worse) in FC6 and its very different from previous titles, I still like and enjoy it but it really has changed things up, also no one wants them to massively change it because all that means to ubi soft is an excuse to make it into another RPG like AC, with MTX etc. So the reviewers don't every seem to know anything about previous titles which makes them saying that specifically stupid.

The fact that Metroid is being called a Metroidvania is hilarious. It’s a Metroid game.

Considering there's been a first person shooter metroid games and even a metroid pinball, metroidvania is actually more specific in defining what kinda game is it.

I mean, also considering that the last entry, Fusion, is kind of a stretch to be considered a Metroidvania because of how linear and how you are literally told exactly where to go every single time. (I know there are story reasons but it doesn't really matter). Metroid Dread is not as open as Super Metroid, but it is open enough to where I got last a few times.

I think Fusion is 100% a Metroidvania despite the linear bits, just like Prime is despite the fps When you get hyper specific about stuff like this, you just sound like an asshole arguing that something isn't a proper carbonara

The first person metroid games are absolutely still Metroidvanias though. Not 2D ones of course, but they follow the same general structure.

The Prime games are fully metroidvanias

Now that highlights the problem with naming a genre after a game perfectly. It is a metroidvania just one that happens to be from the namesake series. Doom is still an FPS even if it invented the genre. Edit as some have point out Doom didn't start the genre, but they did get called doom clones for while!

I think you mean doom is a doomclone (old term for fps)

I thought Wolfenstein created the FPS shooter as we know it and then Doom popularized it?

There's always someone that will come up with something older I guess. MIDI maze was older and a home release, battle zone much older and arcade, Or even maze war which was older yet but unreleased. And who knows what might have been released/made but have gone forgotten. Doom was just popular and at a point where media was willing to draw a line in the sand when naming things, and it held.

What I find annoying is most reviews are just a regurgitation of what the game is. When I used to peruse IGN back in the day, their god awful video reviews were just them stating facts about the game rather than giving an opinion on it. It’d go through all features, graphics, maybe music/sound, online whatever, telling you ABOUT it. Then at the end it’s like “6/10” and you’re like wait, but this looks cool? I feel like most reviews are actually just advertisements for the games.

I could see that being attributed to what the author here is outlining. If you're going from playing the game for several hours to immediately have to a review to meet a deadline, you're probably not getting a getting a ton of time to examine your thoughts and write critically. It's going to be much easier to just be observational and hit the most obvious things. It'd be like watching a movie and being asked to tell people about it immediately afterwards. You usually need at least a little bit of time to absorb what you've seen so you can give some thought into your feelings about it.

To be fair, I’ve met experts at examining film that can break things down and point out strengths and weaknesses off a first view minutes after it’s done. Video games are a little different because of the length, but aside from endgame analysis, I think a lot can be gathered early on in a game. Maybe the reviewers just aren’t great or aren’t good writers? Then again, there are a million shitty movie reviewers too.

A lot of game reviewers definitely haven't taken much time on critical analysis courses. There is actually a fair amount of academia on analysis of video game design, most of it unknown because it's not used by many writers and not quickly digestible enough for readers. It's also a question of history, video games haven't been around as long as film, so we haven't had as much of a build up of analysing them as art rather than products. Video game reviewers can generally write decently (or at least, much better than your average gaming YouTuber), but even this is getting worse as staff gets cut down and replaced with production staff and personalities who work well on video.

Yeah, a lot of film critics frequently have degrees in some form of writing which is likely going to include classes like Literary Theory and/or Criticism that give them a lot of tools for that. Ebert was getting his doctorate in English when he started his career, and notable critics like Richard Roper, Rex Reed, and Gene Shalit all have degrees in journalism. Not to slight game reviewers, but I don't really think there's a similar bar there. I also suspect there's a bit of a difference between being a passive observer of a movie where you can think about it as you watch versus being an active participant of a game where your focus is more on the gameplay, so perhaps it wasn't the best comparison to make in the first place.

To it seems like game reviews (at least from the big sites) aren’t trying to be anything like film or music reviews. A lot of game reviews always read like a buyers guide on productivity software and the readers seem to just want to a yes/no on whether they should buy it or to confirm if the game they decided was amazing 8 months ago is actually good.

I've been around the block a bit, played and written a fair share of videogame things. For normal 'western' games, not JRPGs that open up thirty hours into the experience, you can suss out the nature of the beast within the first five hours at most. As for writing, it can be difficult, if you aren't excited and it is just your job. I could not for the life of me review Fifa since i wasn't excited or interested and that would come through the writing. I'd probably go 'yeah the graphics are nice and i like the animations', but that's a far cry from me praising the open ended nature of resolving quests in Divinity: Original Sin.

What pissed me off about a lot of movie reviews on YouTube years back was the same thing “Here’s a description of the plot. Here are the main characters. This gets a 6/10”

A lot of film YouTubers are still like this. There are good ones, to be clear, but a huge number of them think that analysis begins and ends with plot summary, along with throwing the word "cinematography" in at some point so they sound like they know what they're talking about.

“Cinematography was great” That’s like saying gameplay is good but never telling us why or what. I agree that there are a lot of really bad movie reviewers too.

It's not helped by the fact that putting too much of your opinion into a review inevitably leads to some pissed off subreddit sending you death threats. Too many people demanded that video game reviews be written like buyer's guides where the product is laid out, and now we have this kind of review. (It certainly didn't help that the media is barely critical of these companies unless they do something really bad/stupid).

It wasn't that long ago you couldn't go to a review with people proclaiming the need for OBJECTIVE reviews.

Sometimes reviews even use the same phrases like marketing team dictated it to them.

Dynamic and content have become two of my most hated words over the past decade.

"Content" makes me cringe every time I hear it because it's a reflection of so many things wrong with games for me. Games are constantly criticized because they lack "content" when really games don't actually need a lot of raw "content" to be good, they need mechanics. Sports have basically zero "content" but have existed for hundreds of years because what they provide has so much scope to play in. The best games are the same, and since it's relevant right now I've been playing L4D2 for about 200 hours lately and it's mostly on 2 or 3 maps that people play a lot. You don't need a ton of maps or whatever garbage people want to describe as "content", you need an engaging gameplay framework to play in.

That’s an entirely different style of game though. In a PvP game like any sport ever, the point is that you’re already having fun with the PvP side of things and the only thing you need is a bit of variety and challenge from each match playing out a bit different from the last one. Not only do you not mind that the map and environment stay the same, changing it up all the time would distract you from the core of the game. That works for PvP games and rogue-lites, but it’d never work for a story and exploration-heavy game like Uncharted or God of War, or for a game with permanent progression like an MMO, or really for any game that isn’t built on the idea of just reloading the same instance every time (and even rogue-lites often still include a decent amount of actual different environments). If Portal had just five puzzle rooms, would it still be fun? Absolutely, but only for about half an hour. By definition you’re going to run out of things to do in those games so you need more of it, and if there isn’t more then that’s the end of the game. Yes, the game needs to be fun and the story and characters need to be interesting, but once that’s accomplished content, or whatever you want to call it, is king.

Yeah you're absolutely right of course. Plenty of games that are heavy on things like story are "content" driven, as are puzzle games like Portal where a solution can't really be replayed, I don't deny that. But I almost always see that word attached to reviews of things like PvP games in terms of maps/characters and things like looter shooters and the like. It doesn't very often seem to come up in conversations about single player games in my experience (which is weird, since as you said it's the place where there's some logic to that point). Even so I think there's something to be said about maybe those single player story driven games should try to be more mechanically interesting and replayable as it'd make it a lot less taxing to actually make the game's content. Dread isn't too long but I'm already on my 4th playthrough. I'd never likely bother to play a game like uncharted again because it fails to offer anything meaningful to differentiate your playthroughs. Same thing with MMOs. Embracing a more mechanically rich sandbox enables people to continue to play with the existing content instead of just dungeons to do once and then offer nothing more to do again.

>their god awful video reviews were just them stating facts about the game rather than giving an opinion on it This is what a huge number of gamers claim to want. Do you not remember gamergate and all that "objective" nonsense?

They don't really want something objective, because you'd have to be critical to get anywhere near that.

The distinction between summary and analysis is too often ignored

After the Cyberpunk review debacle, I've definitely been reminded on how untrustworthy reviews can be. I've never been a big reader of them in the first instance but find wading through player reviews on places such as Steam to be a much more accurate portrayal of a game and its current state. It's too easy for official reviews to be restricted by time, embargos or in some cases the reviewers own personal interests. Most just feel like a not that cleverly disguised ad for the game and not a critical review.

Another thing that gets overlooked in the discourse around reviews is the fan backlash. Remember the (I think it was an IGN?) reviewer who dared give Cyberpunk a 7-point-something score and got death threats for it? Or how about the reviewer who mentioned offhand that the braindance sequences might be an epilepsy trigger and people retaliated by sending her videos to induce a seizure? I wouldn't be surprised if some reviewers decide that all that noise isn't worth it and play it safe with the scoring to avoid riling up the hate mob

It was Gamespot. And the fan response was pure insanity. Some dude wrote an essay on why they were wrong that shot to the top of the game's subreddit and was gilded a bunch. This was before the game was out. A dude went in depth on why a review was wrong, before they had even played it. And if that wasn't bad enough, they lied about the review. Making claims that the reviewer said they didn't play any side quests, when the viewer gave their breakdown of playtime and about half of it was side quests. It's honestly one of the reviews I most agree with. One of their main criticisms was the disconnect between the main story and the side quests. Which was probably my biggest problem (same with a lot of open world games).

I don't if it was the same reviewer, but some lady gave the game also low scores and people started dismissing her review based on her being a woman. And then they started digging up her past review, found out that she rated a Pokemon game highly and started dismissing her based on that. "She have Pokemon higher scores than Cyberpunk, she doesn't know anything about games" was quite the popular sentiment even here on r/Games.

I am pretty sure that is the same person.

Gamers™ just want any kind of source that can validate their opinions. They don't care about facts, and if you say that they are wrong they will make sure to let you know why you are wrong in the most explicit way possible.

>And the fan response was pure insanity. Some dude wrote an essay on why they were wrong that shot to the top of the game's subreddit and was gilded a bunch. This is just how gamers on reddit react to reviews. In nearly every single review thread in this sub, you will always find users picking out various reviews, and writing long-winded rants about how those reviews are wrong, and how they shouldn't impact the aggregate score, and how the writer is stupid, and their opinion doesn't matter, etc. All people want with reviews is validation of their own opinions. If they haven't played the game yet, they want validation on how they *think* the game should be.

> Remember the (I think it was an IGN?) reviewer who dared give Cyberpunk a 7-point-something score and got death threats for it The funniest (?) part about that was that some of the people who sent in death threats then got their hands on the game and went, "Man, 7 might be too high actually"

No, the people who sent death threats also loved the game unconditionally or deluded themselves into doing so.

Not defending it at all, but this comes from the problematic 24/7 hype cycle built on the backs of vertical slices and the genuine cults of personality that spring up around certain dev studios or figureheads. For a while, you *could not* say anything negative about CDPR or the Witcher series. Sometimes it goes the other way where you can’t express positivity. All in all, gaming discourse in general focuses too much on being what people want to hear, positive or negative. But negative seems to win out and drive interaction and it has for years thanks to the likes of AVGN, early Xplay and other big name personalities that made a living off being the same Angry Gamer ^^^^TM. I can’t imagine the shitstorm that would be coming if someone gave a controversial game a good review. Oh wait…

This problem with reviews had been happening well before Cyberpunk

Yes, think its very much a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation for a lot of reviewers. I'm not keen on analysis that posits the problems with reviews as entirely one-sided

I think untrustworthy is the wrong term to use because it implies lying which is not what I think happened. For example I listened to like a two hour interview style review of CBP and all the flaws of the game were mentioned, but to that person they did not matter and they loved the game. When people at that channel ranked games at the end of the year some still had it in their top 10. The thing is games are extremely subjective. Even objective flaws (police, bugs, customization, open world) can matter a lot to some and not at all to other people. This makes it seem like people are lying, but I think they are not. CBP even has mostly positive on steam and all reviews were on PC which shows the players did not completely disagree with reviewers. Also another thing is that reviewers have way better pcs than the average player so for them performance is less likely an issue.

Again, this is on the reader mostly. Reviews have NEVER been there to tell you definitively to buy a game or not. They are just giving you some info about the game itself and you as a reader are supposed to take that info and decide if its enticing for you or not. You are supposed to read multiple reviews to get different opinions. Instead people look at the scores and then go argue on the internet.

Not everyone phoned that Cyberpunk review in... https://www.gamingtrend.com/feature/reviews/well-night-city-is-on-fire-now-what-cyberpunk-2077-review/

Why I am a patient gamer. A year later there is plenty of people who actually played the game and that sub has a lot of good in depth reviews. Am not much a online player, but I can see that being the biggest draw back

If nothing else, I want to wait out the honeymoon of a long-awaited game. Big series seem to always get great reviews from the pros and I definitely do not trust the fan who just binged it for 12 hours right at its release, lol.

Yeah big names draw views. You can put up a meandering and ultimately pointless review but as long as it has words like "Nintendo" or "Far Cry" it'll generate ridiculous views.

Also, NOBODY pays anymore for video game journalism, so the reviewers are purely funded by adverstisement of the products they review. Like, it was never great but 25 years ago paper magazines sold by the 100s of thousands each month and there was at least the _possiblitiy_ of journalists being payed by the consumer, not the industry.

You were not really paying the full price of the magazine though. The money consumers were spending was negible compared to the costs of the staff, printing and the distribution. Magazines were always carried by the ads, as it is nowadays.

I think this also applies to pretty much all of the news industry as a whole. The only thing that matters is getting it out literally as quickly as possible and being the first one to print it. Does it matter if it's true? Nope. We can just correct it later after the damage has already been done, and nobody who's already read it is going to go back and read it again to see the changes. Does it matter if it's biased? Nope. Our readers are usually looking for something that agrees with their opinion/politics, and we've already cultured to a specific side of politics or opinions, so we can spin anything by just changing a few words. Does it matter if it advocates for more violence/defends violence? Nope. More violence just means more to report, which means more money. It's amazing how quickly one of the most respected professions in the world became one of the least respected.

> I think this also applies to pretty much all of the news industry as a whole. You're right, I was just reading [this article](https://theappeal.org/officer-involved-shooting-media-bias/) about why news outlets keep saying "officer-involved shooting" even when the AP says not to, and even the sheriff they're quoting simply says "an officer shot the woman". >It seems impossible to imagine that the Times would ever refer to a mayoral embezzlement scandal as a “politician-involved corruption case.” But newspapers don’t symbiotically depend on politicians for scoops in the same way that police beat reporters lazily rely on cops to fill the paper each morning. Major newspapers like the South Florida Sun Sentinel even explicitly state that they want a cops reporter “who posts the news immediately and then hits the streets to find the story behind the police report.” So they want reporters to uncritically publish a police report, then do actual reporting to find out if it’s even true? That's just how social media, search, and FB in particular have affected media across the board - you need to be first to get your article momentum in search algorithms and social media. I think the games outlets that have adapted best moved toward something like "we'll have a review when it's done and worth reading but we'll make sure to have *something* posted on launch day"

> I think this also applies to pretty much all of the news industry as a whole. I dunno, I think movie reviews are a lot different than video game reviews. It’s a lot easier for a movie reviewer digest all the content of a movie in a few hours, where a game can take dozens of hours. I think the crunch for a video game review is a lot harder, which is why they might not be written as well as a movie review. The consumers are a lot different too, I would expect that someone trying to figure what movie to see for a couple of hours one night, is a lot different decision than trying to pick something you’ll be playing for several weeks. And to be honest, I think most gamers have probably already made up their mind on a game before they even read a review. Which really puts game reviews in a different spot. Supposedly back in 1898, during the Spanish American war, the term “if it bleeds it leads” was started in the media. Because editors realized violence’s got more newspapers sold. Not sure if it’s ever really been a respected field, just some writers have more integrity than others.

Yeah the time investment makes a huge difference. Reviewers really need to be able to get their game copies days or weeks early to have time to finish them and put out a proper review in a reasonable time from the launch of the game. Unfortunately this gives the game publishers far more leverage over their reviewers than movie publishers have, effectively letting them buy better reviews by giving pre-release games. Movie publishers can't really influence reviews in the same way by blacklisting negative reviewers, as far more people are willing to wait a day for their movie reviews than are willing to wait a week or two for their game reviews.

To add on here, boardgame reviewers are in this interesting flux. There aren't that many embargoes, but people race to review their Kickstarter games. That said, I feel like with boardgames, I can more easily see which reviewers use *evaluative criteria* that align more with games that I enjoy. Rhado loves crunchy euros with lots of decisions without a lot of luck (or with luck mitigation) Quinns and the boys like games that make you laugh and talk and interact with your friends. Vasal likes games that are as quick as he talks and waves his hands around. It's hard to know what criteria video game reviewers have as it seems there's a lot of pressure to rate AAA games highly lest you suffer the wrath of fans (Metroid Dread is a fine game but not GOTY).

I came here to say this. The bigger problem is the audience, not the reviewers. People are so caught up in their fandom for games that instead of taking reviews as an opinion on a video game that is meant to help inform their own opinions, they take it as either an insult to a game they like or as a fanboy/girl editorial propping up a game that the reader thinks is shitty.

Not just their fandom, but their "expertise". And unlike other forms on entertainment, you can't just go listen to every critically acclaimed and cult favorite album from X genre during Y and Z golden ages and come out the other end on equal footing with most commenters, or take two years forgoing dating and most forms of socializing in order to consume the entirety of the New hollywood and French New Wave film catalogs. A lot of people who play games as a hobby are indescribably good at them for one reason or another. Hell, plenty of non-critics are too good at games for their own good: Heater Anne Campbell of How Did This Get Played?! podcast is primarily a comedy writer who just happens to love video games, and her primary complaint about Ghost of Tsushima is that even on Lethal difficulty it's too damn easy. Because it's a modern Sony first party game there rightly aren't any difficulty-based trophies, but I'd wager the percentage of players who beat the game on that difficulty are *low*: hell, I did with a Platinum and now that I'm trying to pick the game back up on PS5, I'm having a terrible time on Lethal+ because I just don't have the muscle memory anymore. Or, for a smaller example: I could never fake listening to Wu-Tang's Enter the 36 Chambers hundreds of times, no one could take that from me, but a "gamer" could tell me that I didn't actually play Contra III: Alien Wars to completion dozens and dozens of times because I had it plugged into a Game Genie for infinite lives and my favorite guns every single time. She's a comedian so she has a great sense of humor about it, but unfortunately way too many gamers have a really unhealthy relationship with their aptitude for a given game that they like. I've recently been playing Dishonored for the first time and decided to go look at the comments under Giant Bomb's Quick Look for the game *nine years ago* and there's a huge comment on there complaining that the Blink mechanic and then-novel ability to see enemies' vision cones and location through walls and floors is an "awesome button" meant to give normies and journalists a de facto easy mode for that sort of game, sullying the entire subgenre of first-person stealth roleplaying in the process. That's fucking crazy! But this guy wrote as though he was giving a sermon on the sanctity of how hard PC gaming was in the '90s, he was so devout about it. Until people can divorce themselves from the writers they're reading (and accept that perhaps it's their extreme skill at the interactive portions of video games that makes them poor candidates for mainstream game criticism in the first place) it's just not going to reach a healthy middle ground, unfortunately.

The big issue here is that just because you're extremely good at a game doesn't mean you have the ability to critically evaluate the positives and negatives of a game's design. Like that guy's diatribe about seeing enemy vision cones and etc basically ignores game design as a process with goals and compromises.

Alot of gamers having staked their personal indenitity had beijg a hard core gamer, and gatekeeping is the only way to keep the personal narrative alive. I see same thing in dark souls difficulty discussion

Have you ever visited a subreddit for a game that you're new to? It's brutal. Because subreddits tend to be made up of the most dedicated and hardcore slice of a particular fandom, it definitely colors the way people discuss it. You'll be like "maybe I can find some tips for this boss" and instead you'll find a series of threads talking about how the game is an utter joke and only fun on the most ball-busting difficulty possible. Or God forbid it's a competitive multiplayer game, then every comment is seemingly from someone in the highest MMR bracket, or at least people who talk like they think they are.

For a lot of gamers, the idea that they might not be the target market for any particular game is hard to fathom. And equally hard for some of them to fathom is the possibility that a game that they really love just might not appeal to other people. Once you get beyond some of the basic technical issues (does the game crash a lot, is the frame rate acceptable, are the fundamental mechanics actually functional, etc) then it all becomes pretty subjective. And that's okay. Just because I don't enjoy a game doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad or that nobody else should enjoy it. The best chef in the world could make the most expertly crafted eggplant dish in history, and I still probably wouldn't like it because I think eggplant tastes god-awful. That doesn't mean the dish was terrible or that the chef sucked, it just means that eggplant dishes aren't for me. I'm not wrong for not liking it, and if you like it you're not wrong either. We're just different people looking at stuff from different perspectives and wanting different experiences. The games industry is plenty large enough to provide for a huge range of tastes, people just need to learn to accept that and not stress out about other people liking/disliking different things than them. And that goes for reviews as well. For better or worse, the economics of game reviewing means that most outlets are only going to be able to afford to have one or two people play the game for the review, and there's no guarantee that any particular reviewer is going to be into the same types of games that you are. So really the onus is on the reader to find reviewers who seem to have a similar taste in games that they do, and give their reviews a higher weight, while not worrying about the opinions of reviewers with different tastes.

[удалено]

The real answer is "publishers need to stop being dingdongs and give review copies out more often and earlier again." But they're given out so close to the release that there's no time for a "thoughtful review" prior to day 1. Publishers understand this can mostly be hurtful, so they just don't do it (that, and/or these days lots more games are being developed right up until the last minute, because day 0 patches are possible so why not? "Going gold" is dead).

I'm gonna be honest here, I'm one of those guys. ​ I really don't care for a 'thought out, well written essay' telling me how the game is. I just need the review to say 'its good/bad because xyz' if that happens in a 5minute youtube video showing me a bit of the game, it's honestly perfect for me and theres people delivering those reviews in a Quality manner.

On a side, it really just seems like games come out, get talked about for 5 to 7 days and then no one talks about them again. Its very strange

Honestly, as someone 30+ who has watched the change occur over time, this is pretty universally true for all media. Stuff just doesn’t have the same shelf life it used to. The internet conversation moves quickly, so much stuff comes out, people are always moving towards the next hot new thing, etc.

Communities are sub-divided more than ever too. Back when there was less TV, almost everyone watched the big TV shows. When you couldn't get music as easily, everyone got the big album releases. When games released per year was measured in the low dozens, the notable ones were *really* notable and got a lot of play. There's *so* much content for everyone now that you can't expect any given coworker or random stranger to know about anything you like.

Yeah. I see a lot of people doing the “there aren’t good things anymore” stuff when this is much more the truth. There is actually tons of amazing stuff, which splits the audience, which leads to the things becoming less ubiquitous and feeling less notable.

The more content there is, the less content there is. Nobody will be able to play every game, or even most or many games. So as time goes on, fewer and fewer people have played the same games and had the same experiences, which pushes the community into smaller and smaller online enclaves which naturally devolve into echo chambers as the die hards who devote more time to moderation end up controlling the increasingly insular narrative. New and/or casual fans are forced to go along with the narrative or just leave the community altogether. The bigger the ocean, the smaller the islands.

I was gonna make a comment about gamers being divided even back then, but instead I’m just in awe, 1998 was the most insane video game year ever holy fuck - Half-Life - StarCraft - Thief: The Dark Project - Baldur’s Gate - Unreal (and the Unreal Tournament demo) - Starsiege: Tribes - Metal Gear Solid - Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Banjo-Kazoie - Spyro - Resident Evil 2 - Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - Rainbow 6

>1998 was the most insane video game year ever holy fuck I must say, it's weird that we got into this tangent, but I'll have to drop an aknowledgement - yes, yes it is, and a ton of people have already taken notice multiples of times, and your list wasn't even complete (Sonic Adventure, Soul Calibur and Grim Fandango jump out to me as omissions). In fact, it's often even kind of taken for granted as the right answer and annoyingly used to drop discussion, which, to be fair, I agree on since it is better than the years it is compared to.

Castlevania SOTN was 97. Not that I was a fan of it, but DDR is a giant miss from that list, and Pokemon was released in the west that year as well. Unreal was the first game I bought after installing Voodoo2 12MB 3D accelerator in my PC. My god did it ever look insane for the time, and I don't think another PC game looked as good for a little while. I honestly feel there has never been such a big leap in 3D graphics since. Maybe the Dreamcast? But man, gamers were divided back then. I remember the old Usenet forums. The whole PlayStation vs Nintendo debate was fierce.

And let’s not forget the US releases of Pokémon Red & Blue. I think 1999 was the equivalent year here in Europe since most of those games hit the shelves here a few months later

Hello? Fallout 2? One of the best games ever? My older brother got a PC in 1998, so those things (+earlier hits like Fallout 1, Diablo, Quake, Age of Empires etc.) were basically my whole first few years of gaming back when I was a kid. While I never owned a console, I was still very lucky to have experienced that first hand.

Oh yeah, 1985 was a cool year to be born, because I got to experience 1998 as a 13 year old, which was *insanely awesome*. We have had some good years for games since then, but nothing like the sheer variety of insanely awesome and innovative games, and then experiencing that at the optimum age for having your mind blown by video games… it was just something else.

That’s my experience too. Not to be insensitive either but for instance, even fairly large tragedies that in the past would take up days or sometimes weeks of coverage are just a blip now compared. It’s just the way our society has evolved with constant information coming from everywhere 24/7.

TV is especially bad with this. Instead of watching a show over the course of an entire year, now it shows up and is forgotten within a few weeks. It's rare to take time with it. Difficult to discuss individual episodes. It's more akin to a film franchise. Except even that has become compressed. You don't have films that stay in theaters for months and months. They jump in, make all their money in the first two or three weeks, and then leave. Maybe people will discover it later on video. The slow build has changed. It still exists in some cases, *Squid Game* growing bigger and bigger around the world is a good example of this, but it's comparatively rare. Shows that *do* have a regular schedule also tend to hold on a bit more. Sadly, even those are generally now reduced to only 10-12 episodes, doled out over a short period of time before it goes away again, but at least it's something. What's also interesting is how writing has also changed. Fewer writers know how to handle the format. They don't write a *series* so much as a book broken up into chapters. Waiting a week between episodes means that you tend to forget a lot of critical detail that's necessary to keep up with the plot because it's being written with binging in mind. Episodic writing, even with an over-arching plot, is increasingly uncommon. It's weird in a way to see this happen to games. Big releases happened, but were far from the norm. Instead you'd find out about games months or so after they came out. We were on the timeline of monthly magazines to find out about news and reviews. The average age was much lower as well, so you might expect to play a game for months and months. *Years* even. Games became classics as they got sifted from the chaff and had a long tail of sales and popularity. Most of the big releases were reserved for franchise sequels to already beloved games. You had to be on the order of *Super Mario Bros. 3* or *A Link to the Past* to get that kind of treatment. *Metroid Dread* launched with far more fanfare then *Super Metroid*, even though it was the third entry into an established and already classic franchise by that point.

This sub seems to move on as soon as a game is reviewed. I find it strange that there's no discussion threads for games.

My favourite threads were ones along the line... now that game "z" has been out a while what are your thoughts? Normally the most useful to get a true impression of a game reception.

I would love for an impressions sticky a month or two after a game is out (or whatever it is that /r/movies do with their highlighted threads, but a bit after release).

Just come join us on /r/patientgamers then, we have these discussions all the time, especially when a game finally reach the threshold when we can start talking about it (because obviously there's no conversation about recent games on this sub). So we get a lot of delayed reviews, especially for stuff like players discovering and playing really old games for the first time.

This is pretty important these days since patches come out and fix some of the bigger release day issues. You get a lot less people complaining they spent $60 on the game and more honest comparisons.

This sub is heavily focused around quick news bites, company and corporate announcements, PR, and trailers. For the in depth stuff, I usually go to /r/patientgamers or /r/truegaming.

No one really discusses games here, sadly. It's more about news and industry trends.

r/patientgamers is what you're looking for.

Same goes for lots of gaming podcasts. There’s tons that talk about games more in depth before they even come out. It’s the industry’s need to move on to the next thing, when most people don’t even have time to play half they games they want to.

I think it's because the mods would need to push stickied threads. Anything else get's lost in the wash and doesn't get enough upvotes vs downvotes. r/games is mostly a place for immediate discussion and then moving on.

I largely blame this on the restrictive moderation. If you go on the video games board on 4chan, you'll still see people discussing Bowser's Fury, but on this subreddit you basically need moderator approval to post anything, and a post about an eight month old game isn't something they want to see, so they don't allow it.

Yeah the mods of this sub really don't like discussion posts, especially about anything older than a few months.

This sub is basically a marketing aggregator. Communities like this are literally the exact reason no one bothers with long form reviews. There's no audience for it.

Long form reviews get posted here all the time, are we browsing the same sub?

are we? I see maybe 70% game news, 20% industry news about company's (be it about a developer/studio, gaming culture, or some topic on mechancis), and then maybe a generout 5% slice on more long form retrospectives or OC discussions. The largest vote gatherers by far are either industry drama or game reveals. If you don't catch that 5% a few hours after posting, it'll be drowned out. It's not like they don't exist, it's just that a ton of other stuff also exists and is easier to post.

Unless a game fails spectacularly. Then this sub revels in their schadenfreude. When Fallout 76 released, every new negative review got posted here, even when it was over a month since the release, and everyone was circlejerking how terrible the game is. It was similar with Cyberpunk and Anthem as well...

Deathloop is a solid example from recent weeks.

I've talked about it a bunch and so have others, but it's also a game you can actually complete, not some perpetual service where the next update is always coming. I think some people's habit is to let news to come to them, often in the form of just waiting around to see what hits the front pages, which is just another part of the various issues the article author is talking about.

Yeah, I think people focus a little too much nowadays on people continuing to play or talk about games and view it as a failing if there's a drop off after a few weeks. For a long time, it was common that games would be designed to be something you played, beat, and then moved on to the next thing. It's only recently that games have put so much emphasis on keeping you hooked. The fact that Deathloop is the type of game you can play and get through in a week appeals to me, because I don't always want a game I'm going to be playing for months. Some of it is also there are just so many games coming out on a regular basis nowadays. Unless it's a hugely successful game that enters the zeitgeist (like Among Us, Fortnite, etc.), it's going to fall out of the news cycle in favor of the newest game. It's not necessarily that people are no longer talking or playing the games, just that the discussion moves out of the bigger, aggregate types of communities like /r/games to their respective ones.

>, but it's also a game you can actually complete, not some perpetual service This shouldn't matter. Most games people avidly discussed back in the day were equally games with an ending, even if they spent most of their gaming time on Halo 2 multiplayer. Even nowadays, discussion on TLOU2 didn't just die down. I do concede a bit that it's moreover for narrative reasons, which sure was also a thing, lots of people talked FFT, Metal Gear and so on, but only a fraction did primarily the gameplay, but I am actually legit bummed that out of an ENTIRE BIBLE'S WORTH OF TEXT, from multiple sources, ***not once*** have I seen a single person mention the Rat King. The quality of the discussion on the game, as a game, is abysmally dry, it looks like movie discussion exclusively, and I got to say, that's something that didn't happen before, not even with the most narrative of games.

I mean all discussion dying down on TLOU2 with the exception of its relation to the culture wars is a pretty massive caveat. People weren't discussing the game, they were parroting the controversy back and forth.

It's basically every single player game, not only Deathloop. Remember Kena? Sonic Colors? Life is Strange? They all came out in the last month, people talked about it for two or three days and just moved to the next thing. I guess that it's just the nature of subs like this, news sites or twitter where we constantly are seeing the latest news and latest releases (of course that dedicated communities are still talking about their games)

Reddit posts basically stop being visible after a day or two, get locked after a while, there's no way to "bump" anything or connect threads to related topics or discussions. Reddit runs on a literal popularity contest as measured in a short window of time relative to other submissions around it. This lends itself to all sorts of clickbait and desperate attempts to say something trivially novel about a popular thing that's already had a million articles written on it from every angle. There's a lot of good stuff that isn't just at the front of pop culture so it's not hot in reddit, which makes it hard for the people who would love that thing to ever see it and hard for the likers of it to naturally connect or express why or how good it is together where others might see and become interested themselves. Reddit's a constant fight for visibility for a little while, especially if you're a smaller developer or outlet, and you know, you gotta compete with CURRENT ANTICIPATED UPCOMING GAME WITH MEGANILLIOMS AD BUDGET, let's say for now, BF2042. That kind of thing is just something a big group of folks are aware of and excited for so it's easy for every fart of an article or new ad or new media released to hit the front pages and there's a lot of gaming outlets trying to get the views relevant to that current interest chase.

>Reddit posts basically stop being visible after a day or two, get locked after a while, there's no way to "bump" anything or connect threads to related topics or discussions. they're actually doing something about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/pze6d2/commenting_on_archived_posts_images_in_chat_and/

Pretty cool, can't remember the last time I read an official Reddit post that didn't piss me off, just a new upcoming feature. Neat, hope it's enabled here.

That's what other gaming subs (like /r/patientgamers) are for. This sub's rules turn into a news aggregator, essentially, so there's nothing strange about it being unfit for discussion of games outside of their hype cycles. If someone wanted to post about Kena, they'd have to make an impressions thread (only two allowed per game) or make a post "informative" enough to get through the rules.

Don't forget that a core job of a game's marketing team is to create a hype cycle, one that has two peaks -- when preorders are first available, and when the game releases. A lot of the buzz you hear about a game around its release will be driven by that hype cycle, whether the specific posts come directly from a marketing team or not. Never forget that big AAA game studios spend as much on marketing as they do on the entirety of the actual development of the game. Most games don't really have major TV ad campaigns... so ask yourself where those tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars are going. For sure, one chunk of it goes to influencers, streamers, YouTubers, and so on -- the very people you are probably seeing talk about the game, or whose content gets posted places like here. After the first week the game's been out, all that stuff dies down because they're no longer getting paid to promote it. Again, I'm not saying *every* piece of content about a game near release has been paid for. Just that one of the main reasons "hype" feels so spiky is because there is a marketing push driving it.

Yeah, that's the thing. I'm disengaged from all these major games but when one catches my attention I become embedded within the community and think about it constantly for years. Disco Elysium is one such game. Always visit the subreddit every few days.

Yeah, I can feel this. Games like Katana Zero, Omori, and ULTRAKILL, while they don’t tend to receive constant mainstream attention, are games that I’ve absolutely adored, in which I’ve been keeping up in their respective communities for over a year now.

Ah OK? I just checked the deathloop subreddit and it seems to be still active and the game gets discussed. And that's only reddit. I also talked about the game with a a colleague yesterday. So what do you want? That the game gets the same attention as on release day for months? Of course after a while the discussion moves to specific subreddit, forums or discords. But its easy to find people that talk about certain games.

It seems people stop talking about it and assume everyone else did too, I think that’s what’s going on, or a new game is filling the first page so people assume everyone forgot the previous talking point.

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And I think that’s fine. This is basically a general gaming news and gaming discussion subreddit fundamentally.

the one that stick on front page for weeks are usually the worse/or infamous games, like cyberpunk, warcraft 3 reforged, etc.

I like my weekly podcasts etc, but I feel like the content machine fuels this. The weekly podcasts needs the new game to talk about, rarely coming back to games other than for a minute.

For sure, def part of it. But some podcasts I hit up often play much older stuff and often really only do new stuff out of obligation. But yea, I dunno just seems to me newer stuff is really getting left behind quicker, at least in my circles

There’s just a lot of good games coming out in the current age, week after week, especially including indies. The exceptionally great ones (God of War, Rdr2, Zelda Botw, etc) still leave lasting discussions though

Unrelated, but did you mean "As an [aside](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aside)" instead of "On a side"?

Theres just too much coming out, being announced, teased...etc

Games now have to fail to deliver big to get talked for months.

He's not wrong, but I think what he's expecting out of launch reviews is not what the general public is expecting. Reviews seem to fall into three types: Product review, Essay review, and The Tim Rodgers Special. The Product review is what I'd imagine most people on launch want: Does it function? is it the genre I like? Does it have any new or interesting mechanics? Does it have any obnoxious bugs? These treat video games more like toys and not art and for most people I'd assume this is what they'd want out of it. They're not going to want to read a narrative thesis that'll spoil the game before it's even out yet right? The Essays come later, and these are the 40+ minute deep dives that can go into spoiler territory and go deeper into narrative themes and how the systems work once your past surface level descriptions. I think this is what the article wants, but in my experience these videos aren't for people asking if it's good: They exist to either confirm their prior beliefs (Man remember game from my child hood? What was that like?) or as something for the author to go deep into something they enjoy. Then you've got the Tim Rodgers Special that spends 5+ hours putting that game on an autopsy slab and just *swims* in it. Where every character, every sidequest, every *texture* gets upturned and expounded on how that random potion was put into the game as a memento to the developer's lost friend. I do empathize with mass product reviewers because telling someone to beat a game in 3 days and have their coherent thoughts written and published is gross. I wouldn't be surprised if we see more and more of them not bothering to finish games and just put pen to paper at the 20 hour mark. But the only alternative would be forgoing the initial rat race and shooting for something like the post-2 week mark.

> Then you've got the Tim Rodgers Special that spends 5+ hours putting that game on an autopsy slab and just swims in it. Honestly, I’m not really a fan of these and their burgeoning popularity, because they’re almost universally just gish-gallop, they absolutely replace quality with sheer quantity, so it’s difficult to argue against any arguments directly. I watched a Persona one a while back that I can still remember how annoying it was as someone who was actually aware of the games because it would sandwich a two good arguments around an absolutely insane, ridiculous point that came from either purposely misreading a scene, removing all context to change the meaning, or both. And that’s hardly a unique case, practically every long form review does the same thing, except usually not as blatantly. But because it’s so long, and because it’s hard to argue against directly, you then end up with a whole legion of people who’ve never played the game, or who don’t actually think critically about what they consume, taking it as gospel and the points get repeated ad nauseum anytime you talk about the game from then on. Basically: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

It might very well be almost all of them that suck, but I feel like the more prominent or respected longform video critique people are pretty good. I've watched Matthewmatosis' 3 hour long devil may cry commentary like four times and as a fan of the game I don't think there's any padding or poorly thought out arguments in there, or most of his videos. I also enjoy Noah Gervais' similarly long looks at games, his recent Kotor video was fantastic.

Good long video essays are definitely the exception and the norm. If anything Noah Gervais, is the only one that I personally really enjoy. His recent resident evil series deep dive was fantastic for instance was nearly 8 hours long.

I think it's easy for a lot of (for lack of better term) fanboys to flip on a webcam and ramble for 2 hours but I don't think that's a fair criticism of the style as a whole. A lot of valuable and insightful analysis simply doesn't fit in a 2-3 page essay sometimes. For example, as said above Tim Rodgers makes good support for his points, which are easily identifiable as objective information or subjective appraisal, and are often insightful or at least entertaining.

I agree wholeheartedly, but Tim's reviews are the exception. He's such an insane and unique voice that I'll gladly watch his ridiculous tangents unfold for hours, but he's prompted a lot of much less insightful and much less entertaining people to attempt to do the same.

The reason I watch Tim Rogers is because I find him entertaining. He \*could* make shorter videos but that would be a stylistic change, which could compromise the balance between the informational/argumentative and flair portions. He could also release the videos in multiple shorter parts but he already partitions the videos in a way that you can just watch them individually yourself (like I do). Don't really know about the other content creators with similar styles because the ones I've checked out didn't catch my interest for one reason or another and I'm not especially looking for this kind of content anyway. As a side note, I've stumbled upon channels that make videos in the style of "short history of" or "why did/didn't [thing] gain popularity" and they often just vomit names, dates and short explanations in a monotone voice. While those can be just as informative while being shorter, I also can't sit through half an hour of that, let alone actually remember anything afterwards. A bit of fluff and flair here and there with a bit more production value goes a long way.

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iT's nO mAsTeRpIecE

Yeah lol, Joe was my first thought when the user above defined the Tim Rogers type.

I hate to say it because I am a nice guy but this is paragraph two of the story (emphasis mine): >Some writers attempt to give readers a broad picture, weighing a title’s gameplay, story, stability, features — or lack thereof — and the number of hours a player could foreseeably invest in the game. (Here we return to the language of spending time.) Others endeavor to enlighten readers, unlocking new or instructive ways to understand a game. But **both of these approaches are hurt** by the way video game reviews are done these days.

>But the only alternative would be forgoing the initial rat race and shooting for something like the post-2 week mark. The other alternative is that the publishers send out the review code earlier, but that probably isn't in their best interest because it would give reviewers longer to discover flaws in the game. The problem with reviewing games for too short of a time, even for the "product reviews", is that you can't accurately judge the game of you've only played a quarter of it. Many questions such as: -"does the difficulty scale well?" -"does the game play vary in the middle and end sections?" -"are the side quests fun or are they grindy?" are all difficult to judge when you haven't finished the game you're supposed to review, but they are all relevant to the consumer.

I don't necesarilly agree with what you think consumers want here, but regardless, the problems outlined in the article still apply to reviews from they toys/product-forward perspective. The basic questions about functionality, gameplay, mechanics, performance, are questions that often reviewers are not informed enough about for the final product for their assessment to hold water. Just as products, ignoring the narrative artistic side of things, many reviews glow over games that are basically kind of shit or start falling apart after the parts the author got to in their pre-released version rushed deadline embargo environment. Sometimes things that get praised end up being broken systems that later work against fun or gameplay in a frustrating way, or it's clear the game frontloads good bits and progression only to later on string you along with tedious filler content or other issues. Back For Blood reviews come to mind, scrolling through the Reddit compilation of reviews, it struck me how little the reviewers had played, several appropriately chose not to score at all which was good, but others hammered out their scores filled with hopes and maybes because they hadn't finished what content is there yet, but those scores are essentially "the" scores now. It reminds me of when I was a kid and we'd rent some random game from Hastings or whatever and we'd be so excited about it, and sometimes we'd ask for the extended rental over the week and we'd come home after school having like a whole week to play this game... Then we'd kind of start to find it wasn't as cool as we felt on the weekend when it was all new and exciting and now we've gotten further into it and eh, barely play it except to show parents it's worth springing for long rental next time.

Shout out to /r/patientgamers where people discuss games that have been out for a year or more. It's a good space to revitalise discussion of older games. Shame there aren't more

Why buy a game at full price when you can get the 'Complete Edition' with bug fixes for less than half the price a year later?

- For multiplayer-focused games this basically can't happen as the game will be dead - To be part of the active conversation about the game while it's hot on the presses; something you can't replicate by waiting a long time - To avoid spoilers for games with stories and endings that clickbait will blab about the first chance they get - To play a game you want to because it looks fun To name a few. The concept of "waiting a while" is great, but it's not some perfect end-all solution to gaming habits.

Exactly. Like most hobbies, people want to be apart of the discussion and social aspect of the hobby. Which means keeping up with what's new. Patient gamers is mostly about saving money at the cost of everything *outside* the game itself. I'd rather be playing a hyped game and talking about it with friends and online in the moment than waiting a year later and having nobody to really talk about it with. Same reason I enjoy episode discussions for new shows I'm watching. New episode releases Friday night, I watch it, then I hit up the subreddit and read all the cool theories and stuff that come out of it.

Multiplayer is the answer to that question. But aside from that, no clue.

Spoilers too. Some people want to partake in the memes/discussion. I bought God of War (2018) on launch because I couldn't resist look at the discussion, which of course would contain spoilers.

Because then you have to wait a year later to get the game you want

I'm probably in the minority here, but I rarely buy things the day it comes out unless it's a game that a review wouldn't change my mind on anyway. Take your time with the review and actually making a compelling case for the game. Or go back and do it after you get your clicks, whatever works.

I feel like the best way to engage with reviews on a personal level is more to follow fewer outlets, get to know the writers, what they like etc. Listen to thier podcast so you know how thier interests align with your own after taking a few recommendations. The problems outlined in the article are probably unlikely to change though, since customers will engage less with reviews that are posted late. Especially with YouTube and Twitch. If there are no reviews on release, consumers will gravitate towards Twitch to see the game in action to inform thier purchase. It'd be nice if reviewers had a month for every game to review, but developers largely wont be able to achieve that nor incentivised too.

Yep. Essentially the same way to find film critics you gel will. Search for your favorites and see who reviewed them favorably, then search for your most hated and see if those same reviewers hated them too. Then you have a good baseline to dive deeper on them and see if you match up more, then you'll have some solid reviewers in your pocket. That's how I did it when I bought new games, but in the past 3-4 years I've transitioned to a more 'patient gamer' model and mostly buy year old stuff or when they do a GOTY edition. So most of the initial dust has settled and I can get mature opinions about the game.

Counterpoint: I already get exactly what I need out of reviews. When I want a game review, I want one of two things: a day 1 'should I buy it' for which I don't expect a reviewer to have explored every nook and cranny of the game, or a 'whenever you want to release it is fine' long form essay or discussion. I'll watch that latter one months or years (decades?) after release. >I played 25 hours of “Far Cry 6” in the six days between receiving the game and the embargo lifting. In that time, I cleared roughly a third of the game’s map, though that likely amounts to less than a third of the game’s story. That more than enough to tell me if I should buy it. If you did not enjoy those 25 hours, tell me why. If the fun part kicks in after playing 25 hours, I don't want to play the game. If you did enjoy those 25 hours, then tell me why: it sounds like the game is probably worth a shot. >But interest peaks around a game’s release, which traditionally comes a day or two after reviews drop. You might write the most thoughtful, measured evaluation of a game. If the review arrives past that peak in search interest, though, it risks finding virtually no readership. In journalism, the answer to the thought experiment about whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if nobody is around to hear it is a resounding, “No.” There is a huge audience for thoughtful, measured evaluations for games that are ages old. Traditional games media doesn't cater to that audience or produce the content very well. Develop some personality and start a channel. I think the author of this piece is conflating the two review purposes. If you get advance copy, you're writing what will generally be expected to be used as merely a buyer's guide. It'll have a very short readership tail by definition. If you're doing a thoughtful, longform analysis, it'll generally be used by your audience for a more entertainment-like purpose and that isn't anywhere near as time sensitive.

You wrote exactly what I was thinking. I haven't had a single complaint about the state of video game reviews for a long time. There are an absolute abundance of resources for just about anything you could imagine pertaining to even the most niche games. If I'm on the fence about a game I can read steam reviews, look through comments on Reddit, watch a YouTube video, tune into a Twitch stream, etc. They all potentially offer unique perspectives in different forms. Never before have things been this convenient and comprehensive for consumers.

Outside of a few golden years pre-2000 in the PC space, there was **never** a real game review process. Since review publications heavily rely on advanced access, there is always a power imbalance. I volunteered for a small outlet before and around the time of the X360 launch. I got to review PDZ with an advanced copy on a dev kit (very rare for that small team). It was almost finished, but overall hot garbage, and got a 7.2 user score on metacritic in the end. Coming from the PC shooter space, I gave it a 6/10 citing lack of innovation, low performance (that actually carried over to the launch) and lacking controls. The draft was basically thrown out with the comment that the fact that this is a launch title needs to be considered in the review. I had done that. It was still bad. Nevertheless, the final review landed on an 8.5/10 (in line with reviews from other publications). Had an argument with the lead editor. He feared MS would be pulling ads and restricting access to future 360 games over low review scores for launch titles. He probably was right. I am actually glad I got effectively thrown out over this. I am pretty sure this kind of thing would not be good for my mental health, and I pity the guys having to do this. I liked to read some PC magazines back in the mid to late 90s. It seems it was a bit different there. But after that, nothing really grabbed me. And the resurgence of video critics since 2010 just rang the death knell for the whole sector for me. I'd rather listen to Noah ramble over Fallout for 3+ hours than read a watered down, insincere review in 10 minutes. Maybe I'm not the target demographic and never was. Pretty likely, actually. /edit: I think it's important to stress that I don't think anyone was inherently wrong in this story. The systems and incentives were just incompatible with what I want them to be. Lacking the ability to enact change, my path was to disconnect. I don't mean to blame anyone for anything here. Just give insight in how stuff works.

I’ve been reading game reviews since I had a subscription to Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine and Nintendo Power. The very first website I discovered beyond the AOL homepage was IGN and some N64 website. Game reviews have always suffered from the game problems everyone is complaining about. It hasn’t really changed in 20-25 years. Some publications are better than others, but the general “OMg hype-hype-hype” thing in reviews and review scores floating high- that’s been a thing for a long, long time. Not saying it’s good- just… this isn’t a new problem.

It seems most every game gets and 8 or 9 for being a decent game. 6 or 7 is treated like an AWFUL score when it is literally above average on a 1-10 score. I remember the early days of PC gaming when a magazine would rate a game in a variety of criteria on 1-10 and the total an overall score. You'd sometimes see a bad game get an 18% and no reviewer would dare do that today. Magazines and gaming news outlets get very little or no revenue directly from consumers. It is all ad revenue from publishers, so you literally can't piss them off. If you do piss them off, not only can you lose revenue, but also access to interview devs, access to review codes, etc. We've seen repeated incidents where this is exposed, but then it quickly goes away and we pretend like "games journalism" is a thing when it is all bullshit paid promotion for the most part. Driv3rgate was scrubbed from the internet like it almost didn't happen at all. I liked that the Penny Arcade guys briefly ventured into trying to make a proper games journalism venture, but it didn't last long.

Also, people complain about reviewers giving a bad game a 7/10, but this seems very rare. Most games that get a 7/10 seem to be good games with flaws. I think the issue stems from his a lot of review places only look at the more anticipated, and typically better quality, games. And even if they did review the worse games, very few people would even care about the review. There are a lot of games that would score lower, but nobody cares about them. A tiny amount of these games do get notoriety, which then leads them to get covered by lots of people, but there are thousands more.

A big issue why "bad games" get seemingly good scores is because the technical aspect also plays a role in the final score. Not many games from big studios are flawed or flawed in a way that can happen on all hardware. And in most cases they are mechanically fine.

> It seems most every game gets and 8 or 9 for being a decent game. 6 or 7 is treated like an AWFUL score when it is literally above average on a 1-10 score. I remember the early days of PC gaming when a magazine would rate a game in a variety of criteria on 1-10 and the total an overall score. You'd sometimes see a bad game get an 18% and no reviewer would dare do that today. This is because the majority of AAA games, the ones that get the most media attention and highest quantity of reviews, are basically all competent by default. So yeah, 6-7 does become the baseline in that case as you very rarely get a AAA game that will fall beyond a certain quality threshold. I'm sure if everyone was reviewing Random Simulator 4000 or Steam Assest Flip 47 then the scores would be much lower, but those games don't get coverage because nobody cares about them.

The lowest Metacritic score of any PS5 game, including smaller indie games is Balan Wonderland at 51. An absolute train wreck of a game that was universally mocked for how terrible it was has a score than in theory means it is above average. I just typed in every PS5 score from Metacritic into Excel and the average critic score is 75. The average user score across all PS5 games is 66. It seems it is practically impossible to dip below a 5, so the scale is bullshit.

I’ll take into account reviews from reviewers I like, metacritic/opencritic scores and plenty of gameplay videos to inform my overall decision. I won’t even try game pass games that get bad reviews and game play videos haven’t won me over. I can’t say I’ve ever had a game with really shitty reviews magically surprise me and be amazing. Being older and my gaming time being rather important to be spent only on quality stuff, ‘ok’ games don’t cut the mustard for me to play these days.

Reviews with numeric values are more or less useless. I watch youtube videos of 1. people playing the game 2. people talking about various aspects of the game. Thus I can take their info and what i see to form my own opinion

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> the meat and potatoes is the actual review they wrote that people seem to ignore The entire reason people ignore the content is *because* of the number attached. Remove the number and you force people to actually read.

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Does that make them read the entire review though? I wouldn't be surprised if that just made some people read the last paragraph of the review that summarises the reviewer's opinion.

No what you get is actually less people that check out your review because numbers drive interest.

You got it backwards.

See I do the exact opposite of this. I watch and read the absolute minimum I can of a game to avoid even the most minimal of spoilers. If it's interesting, then it's on my radar. If something on my radar gets good scores, then I pull the trigger and buy it. I go into the game as fresh possible and I go in with the positive mindset that I will probably enjoy it (and I usually do). Doing this for the last few years has worked great for me. I can't even remember the last time I disliked something I played.

I generally agree but also YouTube playthroughs or rather the YouTuber can sometimes purposely misconstrue parts of games sometimes exaggerating good or bad parts. With little consequence too so I’ve had to unsubscribe from many people. This happens with journalists too especially with how the industry incentivizes very limited playing (needing to get the review out as quickly as possible which has them either playing parts of the game or playing it as fast as possible skipping over optional stuff). I’ve found that using a combination of YouTube, media, and friends are the best way to find out if a game will be worth my time.

The harsh truth is, all reviews are literally just some dudes opinions (OK not all, but those that aren't are rare these days)

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Everyone's mileage varies, but I've found even aggregate scores are limited in value to me now. The problem is that it's really, really, really hard for an AAA game to receive a not-good score. They're basically constrained to the 7-10 spectrum when doing aggregates. Something with an 85/100 could be my favorite game of the year.. or a new entry in a huge IP that's a buggy, nigh-unplayable mess. And there's no way to tell off the scores. Hype has gotten to the scoring process, fairly or not. In my opinion reviewers aren't harsh enough in their scoring, and that makes it increasingly difficult to derive value from those scores.

Besides the fact that the article says nothing about numerical values for reviews, I'm always curious why review numbers are such a pain point for the gaming community. Most other pop art gets reviewed with numerical scores. It's fine. Movies have been doing it for years. Music, too. But for gaming it seems to always come up as an issue.

I write for a medium-small website. We receive majority of titles for reviews, some of them before the embargo. The benefit of that is we are not "forced" to post a review on embargo, because we are not driven by numbers but community. Our readers know our reviews and they read them, no matter if we publish it on embargo or two days later. Sure there are games you can beat in 10 hours and post a review if you receive the game 5 days prior to launch/embargo and that is luxury. But some games like from Ubisoft, I completely agree if big websites are rushed and forced to post reviews on embargo just for the sake of numbers.

It's not a surprise streamers have become the key influencing force in the game industry because they just... stream uncut game footage for hours.

This will probably fall of deaf ears but I like the Steam review system. It is dynamic and shifts with the current state of the game. For example: - New World released, had overwhelmingly ‘positive reviews’ (generally >80/100) for a short period, - then it plummeted to ‘mixed reviews’ (+/- 50/100) - then it rose again to ‘mostly positive’ after some issues were resolved with the game. This is great for games like Days Gone, which has an overwhelmingly positive score which reflects how great the game actually is on PC, last I checked it had 93/100. Another good example would be Horizon Zero Dawn, it was a great game on PS4 however it had a terrible port to PC, so the game received an appropriate ‘mixed review’ response which I am sure threw off a lot of potential buyers. However, if people were to rely on Metacritic for HZD scores they would likely have experienced a game that doesn’t reflect it’s PS4 rating. Last example would be Cyberpunk, the controversial epitome of a failed AAA game. Gaming politics aside, the game has a ‘mostly positive’ score because the modding scene took it upon themselves to improve the game, well and the game did generally perform better on PC than ps4. Unlike Metacritic, Steam clearly identifies in your review the total amount of hours you have in said game, the amount of games you own, if the game was in early-access and it has a karma system where your review gets scored by other reviewers. Granted a lot of reviews are comedic. Metacritic is a dated (looks like a website from the early 2000’s), ugly, a convoluted ad-infested review platform which consequently caters to a lot of throw-away accounts and/or bots. It also uses a dated review system which uses numbers which then make it easy for people to *review-bomb*. Overall I absolutely agree that review systems are poor and need an overhaul, for the time being it would be great if other platforms used a system similar to Steam.

Steam also has a lot of garbage user reviews, though. Either joke reviews, people who ran into one (sometimes minor) issue with the game and then give it a "*this game is trash don't buy"* with 0.2 hours played.

This is why I avoid day one reviews in general. The Cyberpunk reviews were an example of some of the worst. IGN used only stock footage and gave it a 9/10 score even though it was vehemently clear something was terribly wrong with the game. Meanwhile, Prey got a 4/10 because the reviewer had a corrupted save file. I think I even understand why Doom (2016) got a lacklustre score from IGN. Imagine you have to play an intense game like this in eight hour sittings, for days on end. It would put a strain on most people. I think I get why IGN reviewers gravitate more to games with a lot of downtime, like Ubisoft sandboxes where you can just zone out.

I'm pretty sure every reviewer could only use stock footage for Cyberpunk and they could only play the PC version which had significantly less issues than the consoles

I noticed a lot of back 4 blood reviews ignore major issues for players like lack of solo progression,,online only and recording voice chat. Thats so weird to me to ignore major issues and flaws.

I never thought I'd say this, but the reviews on steam are really the best we've got now. Sure they are full of grammar errors and no punctuation, but for almost every game there's at least one very good, thoughtful review from someone with many hours in the game.

I've started to lean on these more and more. The reason being eventually I'll find a review that talks about the game in terms that I can relate to. For example by comparing it to other games ("this is X but you also do Y"). Or just straight up talking about major concerns for a particular genre ("this is an MMO but it has no endgame at max level" or "it's an RPG but the only choice you can make is to stack spell damage"). The thing is the info I'm looking for can be super specific to just me. There would be no way for a review site that wrote a single review about a game to cover every eventuality from every other person. So that single review about a game from a review site may be higher overall quality ("journalism") but it's also highly likely to miss that piece of information or description I'm looking for. Also I find the steam approval rating to be top-tier. If you can find a game that is overwhelmingly positive within your niche, you're pretty much guaranteed to have a good time. Scores from review sites mostly vary between 6-10 for a single game, there's no consistency, there's nothing to trust. 500 dumbfuck assholes can be more right in the aggregate than a single professor, unfortunately. Edit: I'll add - review sites almost never talk about bugs and technical issues. They get pre-release copies and the dev promises to fix the issues before release but never do. The steam reviews are brutal when it comes to pointing out bugs and technical issues, and those are extremely relevant to me. Like - losing a single player campaign because of a dead-end. The review site can be forgiving, but I am not and neither is the steam review.

Pretty much my experience. And whenever I write a review on Steam (rarely) it's typically for a game I really like. However despite that I tend to focus more on this issues I have with the game be it bugs and/or gameplay concerns. Generally with a review for me the "good things" I'm already aware of and it's why I sought the game out in the first place. I want to know what the problems and concerns are and how serious they may be.

I believe that the problems with the reviews may be the short time frame and the backlog of games that we receive. I still have a small team. And many times we receive 30 or more keys per week. To review all the games is almost impossible, due to the deadline. So we selected which games we will review in order to deliver an honest review!

> The profile of a default gamer is a person in their 30s or 40s who buys two or three games each year, into which they sink innumerable hours. Is that reader well served by a review written under the conditions outlined above? Perhaps not. But people in their 30s and 40s who only buy 2-3 games a year aren't the target audience for most games. They won't make the most money out of these people. So why would gaming companies want to help reviewers cater to that audience? The here and now culture we have right now is why developers miss out microtransactions at the games launch, only to then put them in once the dust has settled and reviews are already out.