I know you were talking about another part of the article, but you had a similarly uncited reason for the shrinking games media work force. I don’t care if you don’t like VGC, but I really don’t see a time when the writing was better, and I wanted to see what you were expecting.
Also, they may not have hard quotas there but the writers are paid to make articles and content to fill the site (it is like how best buy did not do commission vs future shop but where both the same company and fired those that did not make sales regardless).
The incentives are very different when the writers own the company and are largely paid by monthly subscribers.
There is also a big “citation needed” part that should have set off a editor.
How would you have cited “declining quality of writing” as an inciting factor? How would you measure it? And why did it just become a problem in the past few years rather than any of the problems that are listed in the article?
I gotta say, I don’t see it. I did start reading the NY Times toward the end of the election cycle, but it seems to me that hardly a day goes by without showing the awful things Israel’s doing; Bret Stephens has his own opinions, but they’re in the opinion column. Of what I’ve seen, I think they reported Biden’s administration accurately, and if that fucked him over, it’s not really their job to withhold that. That’s how I see it, anyway.
I don’t know if they couldn’t figure it out or if they intended it this way, but I like the look. The 3D environments look like the bottom-most layer of an old-fashioned cartoon, where it’s painted and clearly not going to move.
That’s often a matter of resources. Staff sizes are only getting smaller at these outlets, and there are more games released each year than ever before; and they’re trending toward being longer on top of that. Being able to get multiple people to review a single game is a luxury, one that Digital Foundry can afford when they just need to benchmark a typical scene in the game.
Reviews will typically mention which version they were, but in general, there are very few differences between them these days, unlike back in the 6th gen or early 7th gen. Games like Cyberpunk are outliers.
Starfield is not a bad game. In a lot of ways, it’s a very good one. My biggest complaints with it, personally, are all the ways that it should have been modernized but refused to, falling back on what worked over a decade before it came out without turning an eye toward its contemporaries and the improvements they’ve made to the same formula. I find Steam reviews to be a valuable data point among plenty of other data points, but user reviews being that much lower than the critic average doesn’t mean the critic score is a problem.
For an example of a game where critics reviewed it less favorably than the user score, see Mad Max or Days Gone, which might be explained as games where the initial sales weren’t strong, and people who found it later, often at a discounted price, were pleasantly surprised compared to its reputation. There’s also the likes of SkillUp’s review of Ghost of Yotei. That game has largely reviewed very well by other outlets, but he found his review to be out of sync with his audience. If you’re a reviewer who plays dozens of games per year, your opinion of a formulaic open world game might be very different from someone who plays 3 games per year and hasn’t gotten sick of it. Both are valid points of view.
Dragon Age was last year. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, and Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves are all great. Avowed kind of counts, and I’d recommend that one, too. I didn’t like Hades, but Hades fans sure are enjoying Hades II. And maybe I’ll get to Hollow Knight: Silksong before the end of the year, which people seem to largely be into.
It’s a symbiotic relationship that advances goals for each, but no, they’re not paid ads, and it’s been debunked over and over again. Some game reviews higher than someone feels it should, and they conclude it only could have been paid off, but it wasn’t. Here are a few things that do happen that influence review scores though:
Publishers know which outlets review their games well, and they prioritize giving advance copies to those outlets and not others; this is why you’ll see the average score drop by a few points after the game’s official release.
The person on staff who liked the last game in the series, or other games in the same genre, tends to keep reviewing them, because they enjoy the work more, and that review better serves the overall audience. This can explain why a genre-defying game like Death Stranding reviews in the low 80s, but then the sequel is reviewed by people who tended to appreciate the first game, and the sequel reviews higher.
Publishers know which version of their game is best, and they’ll send review copies of that version. That means they send the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 when the console version is broken, and they send the console version when the PC optimization sucks.
When a game is online-only, publishers like to host on-site, curated review sessions with optimal network conditions in a space where all the reviewers definitely have someone to play with. Review outlets have become skeptical of reviewing games this way, and you’ll more often see “reviews in progress” of games where they want the servers to “settle” first. I was surprised to see MS Flight Simulator 2024 actually held to account over its broken online infrastructure, as you’re correct that, historically, they’re not held accountable, but that’s because of this change that review outlets have made in how they cover games like this.