7/10: The Review Problem

I don’t think anyone believes that there are actual cash bribes being given to video game reviewers for favorable scores, but it’s pretty obvious that the scoring system employed by many of the big sites is less than perfect and more-often-than-not skewed toward big titles with massive marketing budgets (these people still have to buy advertising, remember!). These issues and many others are covered in a new editorial called “7/10: The Review Problem” on CVG, and that makes it well worth a read:

Ever since games like Gears of War and Bioshock proved that a 90-plus Metacritic rating could have such a huge impact on the sales of a game, internal review-benchmarks suddenly became far more important. It’s remarkably common these days to see publishers hiring experienced games journalists to write mock-reviews of the product a long time before the game is sent out to media – if these initial judgements suggest that the game isn’t likely to score well, this usually impacts the entire marketing campaign.

Games that have previously seen a decent amount of buzz will suddenly cease to exist, with publishers attempting to cut their losses by slashing advertising and PR budgets at the very last minute.

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If you’re one of the people who’ve been devastated by a ‘rogue’ publication damaging the score of your favourite game, then I’ve got an important message for you: That game’s publishers bloody love you. Seriously – they can’t get enough of you. I guarantee that you’ve caused at least six people in marketing to get up out of their chair and do a funny little dance on the table.

For all these years, they thought the only people who’d care about these numbers was them – after all, they’re the guys that actually often get paid a cash-bonus for achieving a Metacritic score. Obviously they’ll be slightly bemused about why you do care, but they’re utterly thrilled that you do.

The biggest issue? None of these problems are going to go away anytime soon – they’ll likely only get worse.