Has it ever occured to Sup Forums that journalists aren't paid to dish out good scores but merely developed more superficial tastes and criterias over time as they have to play many games to completion in short windows?
You'll never grow frustrated with shallow game mechanics and short playtimes when all you want is a simple, smooth experience to get on with your work. The result is that they judge games on their simplest, most accessible mechanics as well as their polish and streamlining. Short, linear and polished games with no replayability like the Uncharted series will get the gold while weird, unusual, and hard to master games like The Armored Cores won't be judged fairly. This seems to me more plausible, in most cases, than paid reviewers.
I'm sure it does happen though, just not as often as it may appear. The reverse is also true, some games deep games do get judged fairly, mainly due to increasing recognition and slight streamlining down the way (Civ games, Souls series, The Witcher, etc).
>TL;DR: reviewers aren't paid to review shallow games well, they're just conditioned to like them more over time
the problem is modern reviewers arent good at videogames
In the 90s they were better (even though modern reviewers find that idea horrible), videogames were reviewed like cars by people who better than average at videogames, not by English Majors who somehow ended up getting a job as a reviewer because connections or luck.
Dylan Davis
Dan Hsu, former EIC for EGM confirmed that paid reviews do exist. Why was Shoe so fucking based?
Joshua Martinez
It's occurred to me that games journalists are basically all shit.
Justin Nguyen
I didn't say they weren't real, just not that widespread. The real money and audience is moving away from specialized sites to youtube folks. Yet we see no shift in scores, quite the contrary. What we should see is a rise of ethics in traditional journalism as they have no reason to be shills, no end in sight though.
Isaiah Price
I think reviewers want videogames to be respected as an artform, and they think the best way for that to happen is to have games be as similar as possible to movies or acclaimed HBO/Netflix tv shows.
Luis Murphy
Has it ever occured to YOU that maybe these people who went so far as to get a JOB in videogames just love games a little too much, and throw high scores out to literally everything that isn't unplayable shit?
Caleb Wood
What's worse is companies are catering to their tastes rather than their actual customers. Hell d44m is designed for streamers and speed runners. The Ds3 review copies were made less difficult so that reviewers could actually finish them.
David Kelly
No, given the fact that lots of reviewers are just people with english degrees that needed work.
Aiden Wright
With mainstream reviewers facing so much competition from both major groups and lately bloggers, their key advantage is securing press releases and exclusive interviews and previews. The only way to really obtain these are by being friendly with the publisher and having a history of being generous with them. I don't think any of them are stupid enough to literally grease the palms of reviewers, but they definitely would ask for a proven fan of the series or genre to review it to maintain their relationship. Lately they don't need to do such an effort with game reviewers mostly being English lit majors who aren't that great with video games or understanding their nuances.
Benjamin Murphy
I am surprised at the fact that out of all the media of entertainment, video games reviewers are always the ones with the poorest taste and consistently wrong with their scores.
Jack Smith
>their key advantage is securing press releases and exclusive interviews and previews Is that really still the case though? We see an increasing amount of streamers getting early copies and getting invited to events. The marketing teams go where the audience is, and that's shifting, no matter how good the relationships can be.
Dominic Reyes
It's both really.
But if you think big AAA money has no affect on reviews you are a Grade A retard.
Jackson Gray
Implying that video games are something that you should practice or show interest in goes directly against the new way of thinking that reviews in general seem to have. It's like how we get people that don't know anything about film to review movies now.
Justin Green
Believe me movie reviews are full of shitters of a different type too. You observe the same kind of dumb people giving good reviews because the film talked about a "brave" subject. Boring, badly written films get praised for the most subjective and inane reasons as well. Not to mention reviewers who have actual beef with directors.
Actually the only kind of review I trust are the technical ones. You can hardly be "subjective" on that.
Brandon Miller
See
Gavin Wright
>game reviewers love shallow games then why hasnt Starfox Zero or Quantum Break gotten good reviews?
Carter Cook
Star Foxes controls are shit, and the game plays too much like the 64 game. And since all journalists want this "Pushing the medium foward" game design and gameplay from the 90s is super duper terrible.
Quantum Break could just be a bad game. I heard the shooting in that was poor. But I dunno
Jason Ortiz
However shallow it is, it's still has to be fun to do. Starfox Zero is actual garbage made interaction. Quantum Break is sub-par gunplay cut with a low-budget show that SyFy rejected.
Jacob Lewis
who cares, critics are irrelevant since the internet
Grayson Wilson
Star Fox Zero has very difficult controls (at least for some people) Polygon didnt give a review to the game because the reviewer didnt beat it.
Indie Youtubers and big time bloggers do get invites, but I'm certain the publishers know who they are sending them to. Reminds me of the MGSV review bootcamps where they invited Youtubers who they knew would fanboy the shit out of MGS and gave them 40 hours to review a game that could easily take 70-80 to complete. Not surprisingly, it ended with them saying how incredible MGSV was.
Ryan Miller
Then it would be the other way around more likely, I've played games since I was 10 and now I'm really fucking cynical towards modern games because I know just how many better games there are out there.
Christian Wood
You were too old when you started. You'll never really understand them properly.
