Why do videogame critics exist...

Why do videogame critics exist? I understand that books and movies have those but videogames are interactive so why the fuck should i ever care about what some dipshit thinks about games like god hand or klonoa 2

The reason is that terrifyingly large portion of human population is (and I mean it literally and unironically) physically and psychologiccaly unable to think on their own. Note that I didn't exaggerate the least bit. There actually ARE people for whom independent thinking is fucking impossible. That's why manipulating humans is so fucking easy.

Hence there will always be opportunists trying to profit on that. Morally it's bad, but I can't say it's not clever.

Holy shit first post best post i was in an argument with my friend and really needed to copy and paste something quick thanks!

>it's ok if somebody tell me what book or movie is good
>it's somehow not ok if it's a game

protip: review is just a suggestion, you are welcome to make your own opinion

They are people who don't have the skill to be actual critics.

>Get a job.
>Have no time for vidya/ too tired. Can only finish 1 game a month if lucky.
>Don't know what's shit or not.
>Guy plays games for a living.
>Tell me what games are worth playing so I don't waste my time and money on dumb shit.

This. This is why good review outlets openly admit that their views are not objective fact on anything other than tech details (frame rate, resolution, sound clipping issues, complications with something like an eshop, etc.) Reviewers that are worth a damn encourage people to familiarize themselves with the viewpoint they hold, and suggest that observers use their opinions as a buying guide if the observer tends to agree with the opinions the reviewer tends to spout.

Finding a good reviewer for you is the same as trying to find a like-minded friend. You'll have to go through a few to find someone you see eye-to-eye with, but once you find one, and you properly familiarize yourself with where your views both differ and align, you will have found yourself a reviewer worth actually following.

This works in reverse as well. There's one or two reviewers I follow that I disagree with on 90% of games. So, I use them as reverse buyer's guides. If they tell me a game is crap I then look into it, and in those instances I often find games I'm genuinely interested in.

I get that riewers do fill that role of telling you which game sucks dick and which does not but then there are people raging a about a game getting a 9 instead of a 10 thats the type of shit iam talking about because we do take them too seriously
Also we gave community votes and steam reviews so why do sites like ign still exist?

Because most videogames are bad.

Curation.
Look it up.

I fail to see why interactivity changes anything. This would apply to critics for any medium.

>but then there are people raging a about a game getting a 9 instead of a 10
Those people are idiot fanboys, underages and morons who pre-ordered and now have buyers remorse but don't want to face the fact that they made a bad decision, so instead cry about how everyone else is wrong.

Why the fuck should I ever care about what some dipshit thinks about a book or movie?

>literally and unironically) physically
This is the part where you exaggerated.

> I can't say it's not clever.
It is not, since it is so common.
It is basic antisocial behavior, coming up with a way to leech off retards is no mental achievement.

>This would apply to critics for any medium

It does

Somehow that's exactly what it looks like - usually the "evil" (egotistic) solution is the smartest.

And no, it's not common. It works specifically because it's not common. If being smart and selfish enough to manipulate people for personal gain was common, it would be hard to manipulate people, since most of them would be manipulators themselves.

To weed out shit games. Or would you rather spend $60 on No Man's Sky just to see if it's any good?

I can tell that you're an intelligent nihilistic person with a wicked sense of humor.

You don't need to be some master manipulator psychopath to see a market for game reviews and fill it.

>because we do take them too seriously

there. stop taking this shit too seriously. problem solved.

...

This is either a clever joke or proof that he's right and I can't tell which.

For the same reason book and movie critics exist? They review said product, tlel you its quality in their opinion whether professional or not and you can decide usually from your opinion of that critic if you want to buy said product or not. Can't tell if people who act like it takes less skill or is less needed are trolling.

>watch gameplay for a game that interests you
>Buy if you liked it

It's not hard ppl, I don't get The need for reviews

You can't judge an entire game from a small gameplay video. Some people also don't like to get spoiled, so they refuse to watch any kind of gameplay and prefer reading reviews that will give them the general idea of what the game will be like.

There are really decent review magazines out there (physical ones), but falling for online reviews and all those metacritics and whatnots is what makes a complete retard imo.

I marathoned all of one punch man earlier this week, not even all that into anime but that shit was pretty fun

Its not an issue they exist. It is just most of their audience have been playing games longer then the critics themselves

So what major game review company do you run? Because clearly you saw a market for at the very beginning and got in on the ground floor, right?

I know what I like but video game developers fail to produce consistent games. The Assassin's Creed series used to be my favorite but after AC2 the quality started dropping in different ways with every entry until every AC game released now is unplayable garbage. Even then I used to just buy concurrent games in my favorite series assuming they would be up to snuff with the original only to be disappointed (Fallout 4, Resident Evil 5+6, Every Fable release after the original) by the fact that developers fail to understand what makes their game fun. If I am interested in a game now I will read a review to see what it’s like before purchasing it. All reviews are subjective and focus on the reviewer’s opinion of a game but a good reviewer will still give you information about the game that you can use to make an informed decision.

A good critic teaches you a theory and a philosophy, so the idea is, when someone reviews a game, you should be learning about ALL games, and it gives you better perspective for how games exist in relation to each other, so that you can learn practical lessons AND get more enjoyment out of games.

"BUT SUBJECTIVITY!" All opinions are subjective, facts are just the strongest opinions, and so forth.

Skill is a means to understanding. Even a monkey can figure out how to press switches and pull levers without understanding what the machine actually does.

Being good at the games doesn't do you a damn thing if you don't have any perspective for what games are, or a solid foundation for why you play them.

With this in mind, you should still look at reviews, just multiple ones to hear a range of praise and complaint so you can make your own decision.

Watching (the first episode of) an LPer who has similar tastes as you is the endgame

>You can't judge an entire game from a small gameplay video

Of course not, but you can get The general Idea, at least for me that's enough.

The problem with reviews is that you're going by someone else's opinion, maybe a certain mechanic that the reviewer think is bad May have been fun for you.

This is me.

The problem is that modern games suffer from a "first few hours" problem. The first maybe 5 or so hours are exciting but it gets repetitive and boring after that. A short gameplay video won't necessarily represent the entirety of the game.

I disagree with you, but I get what you mean. I have some games that got mediocre reviews, but had mechanics that were just my thing and I was able to really enjoy. That's why you look at multiple reviews and see what several people's opinions are to give you an idea if a game is for you. Reading a single opinion or basing your decision off of an arbitrary metacritic number is a horrible idea. Gameplay videos can help, but it isn't useful for conveying if the story sucks, controls are actually really awkward, the campaign is short, multiplayer is poorly implemented, etc.

If the first five hours can deliver more of an impact than the game which can be played for three-hundred hours, then it's not really a problem.

This is the problem that confounds the e-Sports crowd, because it doesn't really matter if a game can be played for thousands of hours when I can play some other game that may not have the same level of integrity, but wins out, because of a fundamentally superior concept, graphics, mechanics, etc.

Why is it implausible that someone watches a gameplay video, then researches a few reviews to see if "too repetitive" is a common complaint?

The example that drove my response was Fallout 4 pretty much, with the infamous "deathclaw power armor minigun in the first ten minutes." And then the rest of the game is a shallow joke that is a dissapointment to the original core Bethesda crowd.

I agree with you, my point was that focusing on gameplay videos only is insufficient. It seemed to me that the argument was that gameplay videos alone were sufficient.

Fallout 4 also continues the glorious legacy of Bethesda's Chuck E. Cheese mannequins, which is a big cockblock right there unto itself. It's an eighth-gen game that looks like a bad seventh-gen game. It certainly doesn't take a ton of time to figure that out, and it really does limit the impact the game can have.

If Fallout 4 had simply been "Skyrim with guns" in the same way that Fallout 3 was "Oblivion with guns" it would have been perfectly fine. Instead they did as all developers seem to be doing nowadays and released an incomplete game that requires 4 DLC releases to be complete. Bethesda in my opinion is no longer a trustworthy company, and with the recent "reviewers don't get advance copies" policy I am led to believe that they fully intend to release incomplete games and padding their profits with DLC releases.

BUT my point is, watching the first few hours of Fallout 4 looks like an exciting game, but I was done with it after like 10 hours or so, and by done with it I don't mean having beat it I mean I experienced everything interesting that the game had to offer when every other Bethesda game gave me multiple hundreds of hours and several playthroughs that kept me fully engaged.