Through the rating of authoritative websites to quickly distinguish the quality of a game has become one of the most priority means for players, some websites and even some magazines will break down a game into many aspects of evaluation, if a game on the screen performance of 8/10, or 9/10 points, obviously, this indicator will attract those who like the texture of the blockbuster.
But Alex Nichiporchik, CEO of TinyBuild, took a deep dive into the correlation between ratings and the true quality of the game at gamesindustry, arguing that the ratings given by reviewers don't always represent the true quality of the game, and offered several practical suggestions for addressing the adverse effects of the situation.
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The game is becoming an experience
When we launched Hello Neighbor, a big game company gave it a 4 out of 10. Admittedly, there are some bugs in the game, and we spent a lot of time fixing them. Note, however, that rating a game similar to Hello Neighbor is a bit like reviewing Fortnite.
For Hello Neighbor, this sense of experience began with the release of our first playable alpha. Once, we accidentally forgot to turn off the system control terminal, which opened up the game backend to the community, which allowed people to understand what they were doing and what they were in the process, which in itself constituted an experience - seeing the scene behind the scenes, the model, and how the final form of the game was formed, and playing in the development mode of the game became part of the game experience itself.
Younger players don't care much about reviews
It's important to differentiate between different generations of players. Like me, people over thirty who grew up below the ratings have limited time, which means that ratings will take into account specific audience factors. However, the younger generation, who have not experienced the era of button phones and grew up on the Internet, constitute the largest gaming community in the world at present.
When did this transition from finished product to experience occur? I think this happened to the first generation of Minecraft gamers, as 12-year-olds born in the early 2010s, who started playing a lot of nascent games that were published and marketed in a non-traditional way.
Show yourself early to get ahead of the curve
To be truly successful in the moment, development teams need to put their games on display early. This behavior is not intended to evade ratings, but is intended to help potential users understand if they really want to play the game. Once they start building their own gaming community, they will also give feedback and actively join the community on different media sites, as well as play and test, and the active Discord will drive the popularity of the game.
During this time, you only need to do one thing: be honest and transparent, because this is not about the product itself, but about the experience that the game creates is related to the community.
The game is not so "static"
Games always need patches and updates, but these "little moves" pale in comparison to the big innovations that are common now. Even if it is not in the EA stage, a large number of games will still make major modifications or content updates, which will make the original ratings lose their timeliness to a certain extent, but the problem is that there is almost no channel to re-score the game, which leads to the initial rating of the game, even if it is untrue, people will inevitably notice them when opening the M station.
The problem with real-time service games is even more pronounced. Just look at Warframe's reviews of the M site, most of which were written in 2013, and you'll see that the game described in these reviews is completely different from what the current game looks like. Although it is interesting to read, people often see the rating first, and if the rating has a wrong judgment about the current state of the game, then it is obvious that it has lost its original meaning.
In the case of TinyBuild, Hello Neighbor wasn't particularly well received by the media when it first went public, and I don't deny that bugs and other technical issues were part of the reason for this, but after hard work, we're proud of the excellent performance of our current work.
Given Hello Neighbor's good reviews on Steam, I think players approve of the game, but if people look at the initial reviews, they're likely to think that the game hasn't improved so far.
User reviews can provide more up-to-date information
While each system has its own issues, Steam separates recent comments from overall reviews and filters out comment bombing, helping other users get a clear picture of the information. All you have to do is look at No Man's Sky reviews to see the system's strengths, where positive reviews from users of the current game version eclipse the lower overall scores from the rough version earlier.
In addition, TinyBuild also observed that if the original PC version has a high user rating on Steam, it will most likely sell well when subsequent versions are available.
Given the unreliability of old ratings, we think people are judging whether a product is worth buying by following the latest reactions from Steam, Youtube, and other platforms. Of course, this is not to say that there are no problems with user ratings, in fact, rating bombing of M stations is common, and Steam must do something on its own platform to solve this problem, and several other websites have made improvements to this.
Each site needs to have its own rating criteria
Needless to say, all websites and magazines are different, but in order to facilitate the statistical integration of M stations, they use almost the same evaluation scale. The respected Edge magazine is praised for its rating criteria, 5 points of the game is on average, 6 points mean good, 7 points is excellent quality, very few games can get 9 or 10 points rating, but many other sites basically do not score below 70%, unless the game performance is not seen.
If you don't try to reconcile the above issues, this will become another important cause of scoring distortion. In addition, for readers who want to structure their own game ratings, they need to know why the work has received high scores on multiple websites or other media.
The conditions for review writing are illogical
This spring's hit "Elden Ring" illustrates this point. The vast majority of people will recognize it as a masterpiece, but the game has at least 100 hours of experience, how many people can play such a big game in a week? A high score may represent the quality of The Elden Ring's content, but is the objectivity biased by critics who often experience the entire work before the DL and rate it so highly? For the vast majority of games, it is crucial to digest the content slowly, and many games are best experienced for 1 to 2 hours at a time, and experienced in a monthly range.
Multiplayer is even more contradictory to the above view, and it is almost impossible for common reviews to have any knowledge of the upcoming game content. This is not so much a specific grading score question as a common commenting question, and even then, grading is still the most intuitive and impactful thing.
What can we do?
In the absence of any constructive suggestions, it would not be rude to list these views and criticize the situation.
I think there is a lot that can be done to improve the current situation. The first is to ban scoring in other ways, which has already been implemented on several large websites, such as Eurogamer and its explicit "Recommended" and "Essential" tabs, which may push people to read reviews more deeply.
Second, stay away from sites like M that try to reduce complex ideas to a single number. But most importantly, reviews need to keep up with the pace of game updates and improvements — while it's not reasonable to ask reviewers to rewrite the game's content, we can remind readers of the timeliness of the review's content by writing addenda at the top of the article, or we can specifically point out key innovations that differ from previous versions of the game, which will make the game and reviews more relevant in the age of streaming and video gameplay.
Comments and other long comments are still useful in the moment, and probably will always be. However, it should be noted that in the current era of rapid development of games, the initial rating and unreliable first impression cannot be a one-size-fits-all objective appreciation of the game as a whole.
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