You know some of these people going "how could they give it a 9 or a 10?" are the same people that attacked and harassed anyone that gave it a score lower than a 9 before it came out lol

Just a thought, maybe some reviewers aren't fans of getting death threats for giving unreleased games a "horrible" 7/10 score, so they just spike the score slightly in order to avoid that.

There are bad reviewers, of course, but honestly, I can't say for sure I would be an impartial reviewer if I knew I could get doxxed and harrased for giving something a 7/10 -- I'd just give it an 8 and be done with it.

  • Poop [none/use name]
    2·
    4 years ago

    gam*rs are so triggered by numbers that they turned 7/10 into "average", 10/10 into "good", and 5/10 into "dogshit." It's so ridiculous that they care that much.

    • buh [she/her]
      1·
      4 years ago

      My hypothesis on this is that it’s because g*mers start reading game reviews when they’re still in school, where 70% is “acceptable but barely” 80% is “good but not great” and 90% is “great”, which informs their perception of review scores

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Which is, itself, fucking insane. Just get the game at release and review it.

        Oh, wait. You can't. Because everyone will have forgotten this game exists in a month. If you don't have access to the demos, you can't get your review to print during the ad blitz, and you won't have an audience that gives a shit about your review because they'll be on to the next shiny thing.

    • Awoo [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      7/10 into “average”, 10/10 into “good”, and 5/10 into “dogshit.” It’s so ridiculous that they care that much.

      I have never seen this as a problem. It stands to reason that people will always pre-screen the content they play and TRY to only play things that are at worst 7/10 in their pre-screen. Because of this you can generally assume that companies will TRY not to release anything that doesn't hit a 7/10.

      As a result you get 7/10 being the rough standard for "average".

      I would agree with 5/10 being the average if everyone's consumption of media and the industry's output were completely random. However it skews higher because it is not random, people pre-screen the content they consume because they have limited hours in a day to play games and want to play the games that they already think they're going to enjoy beforehand.

      You see the same thing in anime reviewing over on mal/anilist too. People skew to 7/10 as their average because they're actively avoiding anything that they think will be below that in their pre-judgement of what they might want to watch next.