GameSpot Changing Review Scores
- Scribbled on June 24th, 2007 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Industry News, Press Release, Reviews
GameStooge head honcho Derrick Schomer hates review scores. So does Silicon Knights dev Denis Dyack. But the rest of the world cares about them, and GameSpot has announced that they would be changing their reviews from 0 to 10 with increments of .1 to 0 to 10 with increments of .5, and giving specific awards and demerits.
That’s right, they’re going halvsies. The reason they’re simplifying?
You’re busy. You don’t have time to stare at one game that got a 5.2 and another that got a 5.3 and puzzle out what the big difference is. You probably don’t want to refer back to our increasingly-long document that discusses precisely how GameSpot scores games. And you don’t always have time to look over every single word we write in a review. We’ll, we’re not going to change the way we write our full reviews, but that’s OK. We forgive you. In fact, you could say that we’re rewarding you with a new scoring system that is designed to give you more information about a game’s quality up front, to help you quickly decide if a game interests you or not. If that top-level information interests you, then our full review will answer that all-important question…
“Should I buy this game or not?”
Good idea? Bad idea? Do you even care? Let us know.
June 24th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
For the most part, don’t care. It does, however, sound like a more realistic system. The old system tried to be more scientific than you can be about things that are as etherial and vague as game quality. It’s like trying to rate movies and deciding between a score of 4.2 stars and 4.3 – I don’t think there’s an movie reviewer stupid enough to try to be that accurate.
Even their new system of breaking it down to 0.5 scores is kind of pushing it, in terms of how accurate you can realistically be about how good a game is. Can you REALLY tell the difference between a 7.5 game and a 7.0?
Game rating should be less about trying to ‘rate’ the game and more about telling you whether it’s worth buying. As such, my favorite rating system is the one used by Games for Windows magazine. Instead of actually trying to rate the game on a score of 1-10, they pick a description of how they feel about the game, then use that to assign a number (just because people seem to insist on numbers in their ratings…) It’s a game that’s OK, but will only appeal to fans of the genre? It’s a 6. Fun enough to appeal outside of the narrow bounds of ‘genre fans’, but not really a blockbuster? It’s an 8. Very nearly a blockbuster game, but with issues that would prevent it from achieving that potential? It’s a 9.
June 24th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
[...] [Via Gamestooge] [...]
June 24th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
That’s why I implemented a 5 star scoring system. It’s the best way for a movie or game to be rated.
I mean, it’s hard to discern the difference between a 7.0 and 7.5 score, but people KNOW the diffeence between 3 stars and 3.5 stars, and the diff between 3.5 and 4, for instance.
June 24th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
My system is the best system. Why, because its either buy, rent, or don’t waste your time.