Why are steam reviews so different from literally everywhere else?

>8.0: Game is garbage but I still want schwag.

based

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this
fuck video game "journalism"

based

what about all the games that did go below 70?

>people who play gsg since 2007
>a random dude who probably only played games casually until 6 months ago when he got hired

Most of the reviewer hate comes from the lack of understanding that if you are someone who really cares about videogames those reviews aren't for you, they are for the average joe who buy 4 games in a year and probably don't put even 5 hours in half of them

because the reviews are from real paying consumers, not fucking paid shills

>paying
lad......................................................................................................................

That IGN review of Jurassic World Evolution was one of the most pathetic things I've seen from journalism.

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Go on.

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Basically this. Not to mention context and person reviewing the game do matter. Would I put any stock to a Dwarf Fortress review coming from someone who plays only multiplayer shooters, for example? Of course not.

journos review the actual game
steam user review dramas or unrelated shit

cause anyone can write literally anything they want in Steam reviews

You are comparing user reviews to game journos reviews.
No one gives a fuck about game journos. Try looking at the userscore on metacritic. It is a lot closer.

They are from people who paid for the game.

Aren't those negatives pretty fucking major, though?

>game is not fun or engaging
>7.5

youtube.com/watch?v=XqykgSTaX7k
A quick rundown would be
>I hate the management aspect of this game.
>There are too many species of dinosaurs
>I don't like how the dinosaurs break out sometimes cause it makes it hard.
>claims the dinosaurs die within 30 minutes when they stop dying that early if you get any higher than 60% of a genome and/or with gene modifications.
4.8/10 and we'll give see of theives a 7/10

>itt op is a brainlet

Newfag OP thinks IGN has any value. Nothing to see here.

>>Not exactly engaging and fun
.0

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>too many dinosaurs

Maybe he had an irrational fear of dinosaurs and was forced to review this game by his boss?

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>cuts out the user reviews
>4.8

People are tarded. Most games should be in the 45-60 range +/-2 since that would be the actual average. Thing is when you give people a scale 1-10 or 1-100 or 0-5 you basically never go below 5, or 50, or 3. Steam gives a reviewer a binary choice and a huge posting space.

You've also got to look at the communities. I don't post on metacritic, and I don't use metacritic. Nobody I know posts, reviews, or uses metacritic. Everyone I know has a Steam account, nobody I know reviews games on Steam. So who is doing it, what population of the world is dedicating enough time to write up a review for the community uncompensated. Who is sitting down and formatting a 10,000 essay on every game they play?

Review bombing is also a consideration. I think it should be on record that a publisher made a community-evident fuckup, but I don't think it should permanently mar the record of the game (sometimes shit does get fixed). Especially when it isn't necessarily impactful to gameplay.

When reviews try to sell a niche game as mainstream.

I forgot he doesn't even mention that the 3 different factions you appease can go buttfuck retarded and open your fence gates or turn off the power or make a lot of dinosaurs sick if you don't pander to them enough. Even though they are supposed to be helping you with the parks. You don't even have the ability to fire them after they've done that. It's a genuine problem with the game but I guess he never made it that far.

>Not fun
>Gives it an 8

The state

>Everyone I know has a Steam account, nobody I know reviews games on Steam. So who is doing it, what population of the world is dedicating enough time to write up a review for the community uncompensated. Who is sitting down and formatting a 10,000 essay on every game they play?
people who need an outlet I imagine. either that or you shitpost on mongolian image boards. at least your steam review is permanent and can be mocked openly.

I doubt it can top that one Rock Band 4 "preview."

It's the western school grading system taking it's toll(I don't know how grading works in Europe but I assume the same). In school anything below an 80 is considered bad so after 15ish years of being told this it's programmed into us to also grade things this way.

I don't know anything about this game but, in general, critic reviews are way more useful to me than audience reviews. They are not always perfect but critics are people who make money by being as objective and accurate as possible - if they aren't, they lose their audience. The audience, on the other hand, and ESPECIALLY in video games compared to movies, can be very fickle. This is because the typical audience for video games is younger, and thus more fickle, than typical movie audiences. Audiences will review bomb things for reasons that are entirely unrelated to the game itself.

Like I say, critics are not always perfect - sometimes you will get the odd review that you think is a little unfair, or perhaps too lenient. But if you look at the scores of a few different outlets then you can get a good sense of whether the game is good.

Furthermore, if you watch a review, you don't necessarily need to take what the reviewer is saying at face value. You can see for yourself in the video footage what the gameplay looks like and you can decide for yourself that it looks interesting, even if the reviewer doesn't like it.

But you guys are probably young teenagers which is why you think it's so "le epic XD" to whinge about reviewers. I know you're trying to gain cool points on the internet, but this website is anonymous. Nobody even knows who you are on this site. So stop trying so hard to fit in, it's pathetic.

>It's the western school grading system taking it's toll(I don't know how grading works in Europe but I assume the same).

1 to 5, and 2 is minimum pass grade. Actually means only getting a 1 flunks you. Somewhere these are reversed.

>formatting a 10,000 essay on every game they play?
Most steam reviews are 1 to 3 paragraphs. It's not that crazy. Places usually send you a mail asking if you''l rate the game and most board people do. You make it sound like there's a grand conspiracy at play.

>needing misinformed or disingenuous reviews
>when you can literally look up raw gameplay online for yourself

Problem is only fools fall for these reviews. Anyone who's even remotely in the know with the hobby or state of things in the industry can make up his own mind based on what he sees.

>Most games should be in the 45-60 range +/-2 since that would be the actual average.

Why? That's only the average if you decide to define it as the average, and transform the actual frequency into a normal function. There's no special reason the average "should" be pegged to 5/10.

Most people rating something aren't thinking "into what percentile of the theoretical frequency curve of all possible game qualities does this fall?", they're thinking "about how much, intuitively, does it feel like this gets right versus how much it gets wrong?". Under that metric, 50% is a pretty bad score - it's a game where any given design decision is just as likely to be terrible as it is to be good. Most game studios try to make good games, so it makes perfect sense that "average" falls around 7/10 - a game with roughly twice as much good stuff as bad stuff, one in which there's still a very noticeable amount of imperfections and poor decisions, but which the positives also outweigh those to a reasonable (2:1-ish) degree.

you have to buy the game to review it on steam, which sets a high bar for review bombing

>That's only the average if you decide to define it as the average, and transform the actual frequency into a normal function. There's no special reason the average "should" be pegged to 5/10.

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>They are not always perfect but critics are people who make money by being as objective and accurate as possible

Either bait or you're just a fucking moron if you think modern critics try to be objective

>Classic paradox launch
Its a negative then

Do you understand what "average" means? It doesn't just mean "the number in the middle".

Game studios try to make good games, so it makes sense that quality would skew negatively (ie. more "basically good" games than "basically awful" games"), so if you want 5/10 to be the average, you have to arbitrarily transform the actual frequency distribution into a normal distribution.

The sad part is that Metacritic could easily remedy this, but going through their catalogue it seems like they're blindly aggregating scores instead of offsetting them to average.

Interesting point, though, I never thought of it like that. I figured it was just people having a hard time detracting points from their experience.

No, I'm just questioning who is taking time out of their day to write up, then format a 10,000 word review. Regardless of what most people do, there are those who choose to invest a disproportionately lengthy period of time into the system for some (you)'s and some thumbsup.png.

Because removing it from context a 5/10 score or a 10/10 score mean 50th percentile and 99.9th percentile. Sure if you do some aggregate mental math and figure 7-9 is the actual range, and 8 is average you know the game is then rated as average only when receiving an 8. What is the point of that system when it's /10? And what about the reviewer's mental math when they're placed into a 1-5 system? Certainly they do something to counter the floor effect?

It's using standard mathematical procedures to quantify quality, but the people using them have such poor numeracy that they award everything higher than average ratings which confounds every other review in turn, and makes it increasingly difficult to understand what's what.

>"Classic Paradox launch" (aka unfinished game with hundreds of dollars of DLC not included) listed as a pro
>Says the game is neither engaging nor fun, yet rates it "7.5; Good."

What dipshit site did this come from?

>player reviews
>""""Journalist"""" reviews
One of those are paid publicity or played by people that barelly understand the diference between RPG and RTS.

because journalism and gamer doesn't coexist. To be a gamer you usually have to spend a lot of your free times on game and to be a journalist, even a hirable one, you need to spend a lot of your free time writing. Both take up a good amount of time.

What happens is that game journalists stopped hiring just anybody as it became more profitable and it attracted the lesser journalists who couldn't make it in the real workplaces. So now you suddenly have people who doesn't even play games that much or at all but are decent to fake it due to their writing skills and actual people who play games wont get hired because they usually have no background to write anything. And nobody is gonna get a journo degree to write about bing bing wahoos.

That's not true, sometimes the reviewers get hold of a mediocre game for which the publishers failed to purchase advertising with them, and then the gloves come off.

That's more like occasionally throwing games under a bus to maintain some idea of "street cred" that they're not complete sellouts.

>Many Expenses Spared
>Reviewed by Dan Stapleton
I don't know, it seems pretty honest right there.
This is a review with many expenses spared.

>Because removing it from context a 5/10 score or a 10/10 score mean 50th percentile and 99.9th percentile.

Based on... what? Nobody ever claimed that's what it means, you're just saying that's what it SHOULD mean. I'd say the natural response to seeing "5/10" isn't "oh, it's in the 50th percentile across a theoretical frequency distribution of the total population of all game qualities", it's "oh, so about half of it is good and half of it isn't" - the definition of mediocre, not worth spending your time on. Conversely, as we reach 70% and beyond, we're starting to see games with a significant amount more going for them than going against them, which therefore can reasonably compete for your time and money in a crowded marketplace. That's the "average" a 7/10-it's-okay game achieves - around the minimum ratio of good : bad to be potentially worth your time, but not enough beyond that to truly stand out.

Tomayto, tomahto.

everyone else is paid shills? Post user score.

The thing is that Evolution was bad for diffeent reasons, the variety of dinos is good. But the game is crap because it's a dinosaur management game, not a dinosaur PARK management game. The park management aspect is as barebones as can be and yes, the dionosaurs breaking out IS shit, when they can roam into a different part of their pen and suddenly they go into a sperg rage because their satisfaction parameters are no longer met and this causes them to instantly charge the fucking walls. Which might as well be fucking cosmetic because they can't hold fucking anything in.

Also carnivores going on unending murder sprees if any herbivores are put in the same pen, no matter how hungry they are or if their is other easily available food, they will go straight on a rampage, killing them all or getting killed in the process.

FUCK Evolution makes me angry, I had been wanting a follow up to Genesis for years.

Probability? 50% percentile? It'd be retarded to take a cumulative data set and normalize it as you're suggesting. It invalidates the majority of the number range on the basis that it goes unused. You may as well just integrate a 0-3 scale or pass/fail scale. I don't disagree with using those, but to use a scale like 1-5 or 1-10 and only use a handful of higher end values is absurd. You're defeating the universality of numbers by suggesting reading it like that.

For Imperator, just watch Rimmy's video on it. It's really good.

youtu.be/HwnJ_2uW7Zg

People are pissed at Paradox for ignoring their feedback for years over the mana issue. People who play /gsg/ games as their main games will be able to offer a better opinion than a games journo who has to play a giant grab bag of shit and never gets really deep into any of them. IGN gives every WoW expansion an 8 or 9 because they play it for 10-20 hours and move on.

>It'd be retarded to take a cumulative data set and normalize it as you're suggesting.
Uh, you're the one normalizing it. You're transforming a naturally negatively skewed FDF into a normal function with an average of 5/10.

>It invalidates the majority of the number range on the basis that it goes unused
And... who cares? Are number ranges rationed? Do we have to make the very most efficient use of every number from 1-10, because just think of all the poor starving African children who don't even have a 1-5 numbering scale?

If there aren't enough points in the most used portion of your grading curve for the granularity you want... just add more fucking points. It doesn't matter even the tiniest bit that that you aren't using the bottom half very much. That's what negative skew MEANS.

> You're defeating the universality of numbers by suggesting reading it like that.
How? If anything, you are, when you say that 5/10 doesn't actually mean 50% good, it means halfway along a theoretical imaginary frequency curve.