Rating Inflation
I found an interesting post on Joystiq a few days ago. The post is about a meta-review of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. It raises a few interesting points regarding "rating inflation" as it pertains to video games.
Now, of course nobody wants to release a game only to find afterwards that the reviewers think that the game is mediocre, or less than mediocre. Not only does it hurt developers' egos, but it hurts sales. With games costing millions, or even tens of millions of dollars to make, mistakes aren't taken lightly. Surely developers should not mind if their games are reported to be better than they actually are... right? After all, there will always be people bashing the games no matter how good they are, on forums, comments sections, and e-mailing lists that reach all types of people. To have a group of reviewers, who at least appear to be objective, rating games a bit too highly seems only to balance out unreasonable criticism and to make the overall picture a bit more fair, but is this really the right thing to do?
Surely reviewers have strong incentives to rate games more highly than they "should" from a standpoint of objectivity. For one thing, interviews with big names in the industry can sell websites, magazines, or any other means of distributing reviews (and advertisements). Who is going to want to sit down for an interview with someone who just rated the game they worked on as being anything less than "good", or "worth buying"? Also, there is a more subtle motive for reviewers to inflate game ratings. By supporting the growth of the industry (sales) as a whole, they serve to only increase their own sales in the process. It makes good business sense on a number of levels.
Is this really good for the industry as a whole, however? Surely we all want to hear the honest, realistic criticism, that could allow us to make our games better in the future. If games were rated more realistically, maybe more jaded gamers would be more interested in actually listening to what people have to say about video games. I know that I have personally let several magazine subscriptions lapse after deciding that they existed solely to oversell games to suggestible consumers. Thusly, they have eroded their own sales and also, to some extent, the sales of others in the video game industry. They even sent me four free issues afterwards to try to convince me to change my mind. However, I will only resubscribe to said publications when they finally decide that not every sequel released each year is a must buy.
Of course, I am still buying games. I just hope that I am not missing out on some great but less advertised titles that are buried in a pile of over-hyping game reviews in a magazine somewhere.
Now, of course nobody wants to release a game only to find afterwards that the reviewers think that the game is mediocre, or less than mediocre. Not only does it hurt developers' egos, but it hurts sales. With games costing millions, or even tens of millions of dollars to make, mistakes aren't taken lightly. Surely developers should not mind if their games are reported to be better than they actually are... right? After all, there will always be people bashing the games no matter how good they are, on forums, comments sections, and e-mailing lists that reach all types of people. To have a group of reviewers, who at least appear to be objective, rating games a bit too highly seems only to balance out unreasonable criticism and to make the overall picture a bit more fair, but is this really the right thing to do?
Surely reviewers have strong incentives to rate games more highly than they "should" from a standpoint of objectivity. For one thing, interviews with big names in the industry can sell websites, magazines, or any other means of distributing reviews (and advertisements). Who is going to want to sit down for an interview with someone who just rated the game they worked on as being anything less than "good", or "worth buying"? Also, there is a more subtle motive for reviewers to inflate game ratings. By supporting the growth of the industry (sales) as a whole, they serve to only increase their own sales in the process. It makes good business sense on a number of levels.
Is this really good for the industry as a whole, however? Surely we all want to hear the honest, realistic criticism, that could allow us to make our games better in the future. If games were rated more realistically, maybe more jaded gamers would be more interested in actually listening to what people have to say about video games. I know that I have personally let several magazine subscriptions lapse after deciding that they existed solely to oversell games to suggestible consumers. Thusly, they have eroded their own sales and also, to some extent, the sales of others in the video game industry. They even sent me four free issues afterwards to try to convince me to change my mind. However, I will only resubscribe to said publications when they finally decide that not every sequel released each year is a must buy.
Of course, I am still buying games. I just hope that I am not missing out on some great but less advertised titles that are buried in a pile of over-hyping game reviews in a magazine somewhere.
Note: views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's and are not necessarily those of Wolverine Soft.
Written by Richard Alvarez about 4 years ago