After all, what is the point in making games people will enjoy if the reviewers will hate them and no one will buy games that the reviewers hate irrespective of their actual worth or potential? The outcome overall is that games will sometimes cater to what developers believe will get them a good review score instead of what fans will like. An even worse case than that is when someone starts an argument with another because the latter likes or dislikes something that a reviewer has given a negative judgment to, and the former does not have an opinion of their own but is making judgments based on what the reviewer said. In some of the more worse cases, this leads to people Praising Shows They Don't Watch or Complaining About Shows They Don't Watch. Not to mention, some reviewers often have a Bias Steamroller, which can also cause them to take points off of a work merely because they have certain pet peeves, or add points because they like the franchise. Oftentimes, reviewers will become rather jaded and tend to be a tad cold towards works that they don't particularly love years down the road. This mentality often hurts some works when people believe a reviewer's word to be law. Unfortunately, many seem to see reviews as the only means to obtain their information, even though far more objective outlets exist, many of which can not be bought like professional reviewers can. This is the reason for the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" - which wasn't supposed to mean "awesome game" so much as "playable game" and "Nintendo has licensed this game to be sold" (the first and second generations also had games that were not licensed by Atari, which was part of the problem as they never had to go through quality control - quality here meaning "playable"). This leads to many upset consumers who had to guess whether a game was any good and quickly became frustrated to discover they just put a lot of cash down for a Porting Disaster or imitation of an arcade game they thought they liked. One of the big problems of first and second generation video games was the general absence of any detailed information about games. What the critic finds to be So Okay, It's Average, you might find awesome because it is practically tailored to your tastes and desires in a game and the polar opposite happens as well, often leading to Hype Backlash, Critical Dissonance and It's Popular, Now It Sucks! situations.Ĭulturally speaking, this deference has existed for awhile, as aftershocks from The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. It's worth mentioning that reviews are not without biases. Another reason, perhaps, is that video games as a medium demand more time and attention from us than most other entertainment forms, so most of us need to be discriminatory in the games we play. However, over-reliance on reviews is just as common in areas where software piracy is ubiquitous. On the surface, one could say there's some logic behind all this - after all, purchasing a $60 game is a far riskier endeavor than buying a $15-20 book or a $10 movie ticket, so it makes sense that many people might look to something, even if it is a bad source. Naturally, this causes them to often have different tastes than ordinary gamers, and enjoying the product is at best only a small part of their rating and at worst isn't even considered. Worse still, professional reviewers are often just people with a job, and usually view gaming as a burden in order to complete their jobs, instead of a genuine hobby. Not to mention that reviewers are not exactly always trustworthy. Of course, while there's nothing wrong in placing some stock in the opinions of others, review scores shouldn't be regarded as authoritative, simply because reviewers are, like everyone else, human beings with their own personal tastes and preferences. In fact, review scores are just as likely to be used as personal opinions in Console Wars debates or to argue which of the newest killer apps is the best. Only second to news, reviews of the newest games are the main attraction of most gaming sites and magazines. The Cinema Snob on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), Brows Held Highįor whatever reason, gamers tend to, on the whole, place more stock in professional reviews of works than fans of any other medium.
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