Anecdotal, but I have never read a game review in my life that was from a journalist. It’s always been in forums, and lately some small youtubers. I want to hear from normal gamers, not people getting a paycheck for it.
I‘d rather read a well articulated opinion that is embedded into a rich cultural context than some rambling from strangers. I know the former is hard to find (Eurogamer and RPS are good, but suffer from layoffs, too). The latter I only skim through to find things I might find distracting that were omitted by others.
Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.
Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.
I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.
Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.
Embargoes exist to prevent that race. Your fighting game problem has been solved by assigning fighting game reviews to the “fighting game guy” on hand, which is why you’ll see the same byline on games in the same genre from major outlets.
I’ve actually just renewed my subscription to PC Gamer, I read it on my tablet. A large part of that decision was to just help keep it alive because I feel it’s important.
Future Publishing can get fucked though.
For all of the reasons everyone’s saying here that the quality has gone. When the only revenue for an organisation is adverts and data it tends to head downhill pretty quickly.
I actively borrow content from the internet but willingly cough up the money for things that i get good use out of. There’s no way you can visit the pc gamer website without an ad blocker, so i pay a little bit quarterly and sit with a magazine instead.
I also have box sets of tv series that I’ve never opened, i just bought them because I enjoyed the pirated version so much.
I’ll listen to music on Spotify or whatever but then go to the artist website and get some merch.
There’s a lot of content that deserves to be paid for and supported.
I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?
The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.
I would have thought my judgement of the quality of the content I’m willing to pay for would have been implicit.
For further context, for what it’s worth, I’m a British guy in my late 40’s who plays single player offline games. I don’t use or follow anyone from twitch, discord, or YouTube, mostly due to a lack of both time and inclination.
“The current Early Access version also falls short in terms of content volume.We are deeply disappointed by the former leadership’s conduct, and above all, we feel a profound sense of betrayal by their failure to honor the trust placed in them by our fans.”
This statement seems manipulative to me. As a Subnautica fan, I have always been interested in quality of content, not how fast it gets created. I can wait for a good game. Krafton is trying to disguise their own profit-driven expectations as if they came from me and others like me, deceptively using us as pawns in guilt-laden psychological warfare against the people who have been developing the game.
In a nutshell, interpolated frames are basically just extra generated frames that go between the frames outputted by the video game itself. They’re used to combat things like motion blur, and to make animations look smoother.
Right? “We made a mediocre game that doesn’t deliver on the promises we made. Pls give good review now”
That being said, I have not read the Steam reviews, but it could be that they are getting bombed, but the situation described in the article is just people not liking the game for valid reasons
I went and read a good chunk of negative steam reviews for it. And yeah, the vast majority of the negative ones are about mechanics, or performance, and seem perfectly legitimate. A lot that basically even say, "I don't recommend now but seems like it will be good once they cook for a bit."
I did see a couple made super recently that were basically negative reviewing because of this dude's statements, but not many.
And funny how the only reviews I could imagine being considered review bomb-y seem to only have happened because of his whining about being review bombed.
Mostly it looks like the game's recent "The Breach" update was legitimately poorly received by the playerbase, the studio head decided, "No, it's the children who are wrong."
Ugh, this discussion happens every time this topic comes up. There’s nothing about the phrase “review bombing” that implies the reviews are somehow illegitimate. It just means a large number of negative reviews in a short time.
While it mentions malice in the first few words, I would argue many of their examples are not malicious, including the one given about the first known use of the phrase:
One of the first appearances of the term “review bomb” was in a 2008 Ars Technica article by Ben Kuchera describing the effect in regards to Spore, in which users left negative reviews on Amazon citing the game’s perceived lackluster gameplay and digital rights management system.
based on this article I’d say it has more to do with the organized nature of reviews. It even says:
Review bombing is a similar practice to vote brigading.
What other purpose for reviews is there than signaling to others whether or not they should buy the game?
Do you think the negative reviews for No Rest For The Wicked don’t have the intention of making it not sell as well? And if not, why do you think players leave them?
Related: I got PS+ for my birthday and saw they had Indiana Jones in the catalog and downloaded it without really looking. I thought it was the new one; it was a PS2 game. lol
Most games that are long are artificially so, with padded out content and grinding to advance. Short excellent games sell well. Huge expensive messes don’t.
Just like movies, large blockbuster, high budget content can sell well but does risk sacrificing its soul and purpose. Occasionally one is both excellent technically, artistically and fun too.
Or you can have smaller games with a more specific purpose which won’t sell as well. Some low budget games are bad. Some high budget games are bad. Neither is a mark of quality, they are just different ways of making games with different outcomes and purposes.
Games need to turn a profit to be visible, so they should be looking at what’s the optimum way to spend their budget and make sales.
As gamers, we should be rewarding good games, and avoiding microtransactions and all the upsells. I don’t buy any cosmetics or additional content (unless it’s a continuation of the game that makes sense as another chapter). I want to avoid that side of gaming as it doesn’t lead to good games. I pay full price at launch for my favourite game series, but not extra content. Other games I purchase later on sale.
I have a very feminist outlook on things, but I enjoy some problematic things. I know it’s not very progressive of me, but it is what it is. I acknowledge they are problematic.
Which is just to say, I don’t like this. I understand, but I’m not a fan.
Not even then. I think the thing that’s easy to forget about shareholders is they’re not doing this because they’re evil and get off on watching people suffer. They’re doing it because their own personal inadequacies are so vast that the only way they can cope with life is by trying to fill that enormous emotional hole with money. As a result, even when every other person on the planet has been crushed and ground into paste, and just one person with this mindset finally owns everything… it still won’t be enough for them. They will still be left with that unfillable emotional hole. They will still be empty inside.
Just want to remind everyone that PalWorld is a really good game. Its still getting major updates and has an insane amount of high quality content to explore.
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