Check out these graphs. If reviewers were reviewing properly, the center of that bell curve would be on the 5, not on the 7.
That's not true. You're assuming that the median and mean are identical.
Um, I know the difference between median and mean. What I'm saying is that on a 10 point scale, 5 represents an average game. Anything above 5 is an above average game, and anything below 5 is a below average game. It is obvious and well known that game reviewers on the 10 point scale give average games a score of 7. They're doing it wrong.
It looks like the **** has hit the fan for Gamespot's fans in the form of a massive boycott. Subscribers have cancelled their subscriptions, Kane and Lynch was given a 2.0 user rating, and more than 350 pages worth of comments have flooded onto its forums.
It looks like the **** has hit the fan for Gamespot's fans in the form of a massive boycott. Subscribers have cancelled their subscriptions,Kane and Lynchwas given a 2.0 user rating, and more than 350 pages worth of comments have flooded onto its forums.
It looks like the **** has hit the fan for Gamespot's fans in the form of a massive boycott. Subscribers have cancelled their subscriptions,Kane and Lynchwas given a 2.0 user rating, and more than 350 pages worth of comments have flooded onto its forums. Read the full story here.
We're very clear in our review policies that all reviews are vetted by the entire team before they go live - everything that goes up is the product of an entire team's output. Our freelancers are especially guilty of making snide comments, but those are always yanked before the review goes live, because everyone in the office reads these reviews and makes sure they're up to our standards before they get put up.
If there was a problem with his reviews, then it would've been a problem with the entire team. Firing him without telling anyone implies that anyone else on this team can be fired at the drop of a hat as well, because none of us are writing any differently or meaner or less professionally than we were two years ago before the management changed. I'm sure management wants to spin this as the G-Man being unprofessional to take away from the egg on their face that results after a ten-year employee gets locked out of his office and told to leave the premises and then no one communicates anything to us about it until the next day.
This management team has shown what they're willing to do. Jeff had ten years in and was fucking locked out of his office and told to leave the building.
What you might not be aware of is that GS is well known for appealing mostly to hardcore gamers. The mucky-mucks have been doing a lot of "brand research" over the last year or so and indicating that they want to reach out to more casual gamers. Our last executive editor, Greg Kasavin, left to go to EA, and he was replaced by a suit, Josh Larson, who had no editorial experience and was only involved on the business side of things. Over the last year there has been an increasing amount of pressure to allow the advertising teams to have more of a say in the editorial process; we've started having to give our sales team heads-ups when a game is getting a low score, for instance, so that they can let the advertisers know that before a review goes up. Other publishers have started giving us notes involving when our reviews can go up; if a game's getting a 9 or above, it can go up early; if not, it'll have to wait until after the game is on the shelves.
I was in the meeting where Josh Larson was trying to explain this firing and the guy had absolutely no response to any of the criticisms we were sending his way. He kept dodging the question, saying that there were "multiple instances of tone" in the reviews that he hadn't been happy about, but that wasn't Jeff's problem since we all vet every review. He also implied that "AAA" titles deserved more attention when they were being reviewed, which sounded to all of us that he was implying that they should get higher scores, especially since those titles are usually more highly advertised on our site.
I know that it's all about the money, and hey, I like money. I like advertising because it pays my salary. Unfortunately after Kasavin left the church-and-state separation between the sales teams and the editorial team has cracked, and with Jeff's firing I think it's clear that the management now has no interest at all in integrity and are instead looking for an editorial team that will be nicer to the advertisors.
When companies make games as downright contemptible as Kane and Lynch, they deserve to be called on it. I guess you'll have to go to Onion or a smaller site for objective reviews now, because everyone at GS now thinks that if they give a low score to a high-profile game, they'll be shitcanned. Everyone's fucking scared and we're all hoping to get Josh Larson removed from his position because no one trusts him anymore. If that doesn't happen then look for every game to be Game of the Year material at GameSpot.
The first point I want to address is my feeling on the 10 point rating scale. I basically look at it as a 5 point scale, that is the way reviewers use the scale anyway. Anything below a 5 is garbage, a 7 is as Scott has pointed out, average and so forth. 1-5 don't count...they may as well not be there, they are reserved for the worst of the worst.
The review score pretty much just prepares me for an idea of what the reviewer thinks of the game, not what I'll think...it lets me know how many grains of salt to take with each review. I place more trust in the aggregate reviews by the users and perhaps the sites like gamerankings but a solid article about the game is better than the aggregate scores as well.
I havent looked at gamespot articles in about 6 months or so, their reviews stopped being about the game and more about the categories the games fit into. Therefore the only thing I'm watching for is whether Eidos had a hand in this at all...I can't think of too many Eidos games I've enjoyed over the years but you can bet I'll be staying away from their crap if they had a hand in this shit storm.
Check out these graphs. If reviewers were reviewing properly, the center of that bell curve would be on the 5, not on the 7.
That's not true. You're assuming that the median and mean are identical.
Um, I know the difference between median and mean. What I'm saying is that on a 10 point scale, 5 represents an average game. Anything above 5 is an above average game, and anything below 5 is a below average game. It is obvious and well known that game reviewers on the 10 point scale give average games a score of 7. They're doing it wrong.
Sounds like they're rating games as though they were grading papers.
Sounds like they're rating games as though they were grading papers.
Precisely. I also think they should grade papers where 50 should be the average. 0-20 F, 21-40, D, 41-60, C, 61-80, B 81-100 A. It's a completely arbitrary scoring scale. You can change it to make more sense without hurting anything. My feelings about changing this scale are the same feelings I have why changing to metric makes more sense.
It is obvious and well known that game reviewers on the 10 point scale give average games a score of 7. They're doing it wrong.
This isn't proven, but from what we've seen lately it's looking more and more verifiable. Still, not every outlet has an explicit scale. One of Future's magazine's sent me their review template, and it's drastically different from a lot of other places.
Gamespot called a 6.0 "Fair" which is to say it's a competent game wrapped up in "Meh", which is about what K+L:DM looks like.
And I'm with you a little bit Apreche. Scales in the 7-9 range are generally the exact same. Well, 8 and 9 are typically the same score - it's either great, good or shit in my book. "Okay" might fit somewhere in there and the F,D,C,B,A scale is a pretty similar method of saying "Games that fall in the 0.0 - 4.5 games are ass." while 8.0 - 10.0 are about the same great quality. Ugh. I hate it all.
My take on the rating system is that most games which would fall below 50% do not get released or they are fixed enough to get a passing grade. Games do have deadlines so from time to time something might be rushed out the door broken. Then you have a 5.0 or below game.
I don't understand why we assign some arbitrary scale to games. I would much rather have a system where reviewers point out pros and cons to the game and gives a final recommendation on whether to buy it or not. That's all reviews are used for anyways, some metric to base a judgement on when it comes to purchasing the game.
That is a common practice among advertisers these days, so much so that in the UK it is now illegal to mislead the public by misquoting a review. Total Film (a film magazine) became a victim of this when they opened their review of a film (i cannot remember which one) with "Thrilling, tense and entertaining - 3 things that this film fails to deliver" or words to that effect. Guess what appeared on the poster?
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Read the full story here.
The review score pretty much just prepares me for an idea of what the reviewer thinks of the game, not what I'll think...it lets me know how many grains of salt to take with each review. I place more trust in the aggregate reviews by the users and perhaps the sites like gamerankings but a solid article about the game is better than the aggregate scores as well.
I havent looked at gamespot articles in about 6 months or so, their reviews stopped being about the game and more about the categories the games fit into. Therefore the only thing I'm watching for is whether Eidos had a hand in this at all...I can't think of too many Eidos games I've enjoyed over the years but you can bet I'll be staying away from their crap if they had a hand in this shit storm.
Well...that's my 2 cents.
Gamespot called a 6.0 "Fair" which is to say it's a competent game wrapped up in "Meh", which is about what K+L:DM looks like.
And I'm with you a little bit Apreche. Scales in the 7-9 range are generally the exact same. Well, 8 and 9 are typically the same score - it's either great, good or shit in my book. "Okay" might fit somewhere in there and the F,D,C,B,A scale is a pretty similar method of saying "Games that fall in the 0.0 - 4.5 games are ass." while 8.0 - 10.0 are about the same great quality. Ugh. I hate it all.
Also LOL at Cashwhore.
This is getting crazy.
They hit it dead-on.