Monday, June 4, 2007

An average of 75%

Friend of mine (mcc over on the Platformers board) whipped this up with about five minutes work over at Gamerankings and one of those fancy Apple Mac machines that let you make graphs and put colors in graphs and make out with cute Asian girls who represent USB technology.



What you're looking at are game review scores for every console made since the Dreamcast back in 1999.  And while it's hard to tell what line from which console, that's not the important bit here that's not what I want to  talk about, it's the numbers themselves that intrest me.  

First, how game reviewers go about this sort of thing.  The vast, vast majority of game review sites and magazines use a 10 point scale to hand out their reviews. As logic would have it, the higher on the scale the better the game.  You see (or should see, rather) very few tens handed out (perhaps one or two a year per source), 8-9 would represent exceptional games that should not be missed if circumstances allow, 5 is (as you'd expect) average, anything below that generally not worth your time unless you're either desperate or an aficionado of the genre or developer.

Now, here's the important bit.  Five should represent the average.  As the industry average, most games- if not the vast majority- should fall somwhere close to five.  But they don't.  In fact, relatively few fives are being handed out, at least in comparison to scores further up the chain.  Certianly there are fewer fives awarded than eights, eight being a notch away from a "must play" title.

So what's happening here?  The cynic in me would suggest that this is a clear indication that game scores are being bought.  But there are other explinations-- game reviewers being game fans themselves, they're more liable to like all games and be more prone to handing out an eight as a matter of course.  

You can't have a system where the vast majority of anything is "above average"  Average should be just that - the average.  But the implication here is that most games are exceptional gaming experiences, and that simply can't work.  Not only does that fly in the logic of the word average, it's also a befuddling thing to say to anyone who actually spends money on videogames- we know full well there are very few games out there actually worth spending money on.

What we have here is clear evidence that the review system, as it stands, simply cannot be trusted.  This may not be an issue to most hardcore gamers, being the sort that can easily find sources of trusted opinions via messageboards and blogs, but for the layperson, the mainstream buyer that represents where most game buys are coming from, the review system is all they have- and it's failing them.

Edit:  mcc Mac'ed up a couple more graphs that are even more telling.  First:



Note how very few games exist around the 50% mark.  Compare that to the mid 80's onward to about 93 or so, when the graph trais off at 97-  There are at least as many games receiving 85-95  as there are 50-55%, if not more!

This last he created is quite damning.



Text his, not mine.  There is no way the current review system can be said to be functional!  None!

1 comment:

Mark Bradshaw said...

Hello, everyone at Bitcreature! I'm no longer updating my Blogger site, but you can catch my current updates under the name "Mark Bradshaw" at http://nitrobeard.com/, where we also think game review scores are silly!