Review scores versus game quality *spawn

[Jupiter]

Perfect or best-rated games are rarely controversial but are made to please everyone. They are often conventional, easy to consume and brought down to a fast-food level. They confirm our gaming habits. There is no experience of strangeness, they dare little and they confirm our narrative and aesthetic conventions.

That's why rating averages are irrelevant to me. I prefer to rely on the opinions of selected people or my own experience. Best games are characterized by the fact that they do something unprecedented and new. They take gaming to a new level. But in many perfect rated games originality is lacking. This does not mean that the games are bad they are often well made and it's often worth playing them. But nothing extraordinary that takes video games further.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I don't agree with that. There are lots, or certainly a noteworthy number, of highly rated games that aren't popular or commercial successes. ICO was 90% on Metacritic, incredible, and unpopular, not in the slightest bit created to appease the masses.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I wasn’t aware there was a weighting bias. I thought it was just an average.

This is Metacritic's own take on why they weight, but you'll see no more transparency about which sites they weight higher. There are other scoring conversions that go on as well, e.g. Metacritic use a 0-100 scoring scale but many review sights do not. Eurogamers conclusions for example are an example of how they poorly convert a Eurogamer review, where according to Metacritic, Eurogamer hand out quite a lot of 100 scoring games.