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The State of The Gaming and Review Industry

John Day

Member
Blame yourselves. We gamers are passionate and eat hype for breakfast everyday.

Every major release goes the same way, some more or less, but almost the same way.

If on the fence, wait. Can’t wait? It’s on you if jump in. After you get bitten once, speak with your wallet next time. Learn to not hinge entirely on the opinions of others, you know what you like, not Derp Derplander from XXX site.

Many of us here have been at this for years, come on. We all know hype is a bitch.

I say this as someone who is currently loving my time with this game.

“Dev X has to learn, we must tell ‘em!!” They ain’t gonna learn shit, game is selling hotcakes. Same was with The Witcher 3, almost play by play. You may not remember though.

The plight of the Day 1 gamer, this is.
 
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- First "reviews" were not allowed to talk about console performance or image quality, the day before the game went live
Oh, no, it's even worse than that...no reviewers, not a single one, had access to the console version pre-release. If you wanted a review copy it was on PC. If you wanted to review the console version you bought it and waited for launch day just like everyone else.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Blame yourselves. We gamers are passionate and eat hype for breakfast everyday.

Every major release goes the same way, some more or less, but almost the same way.

If on the fence, wait. Can’t wait? It’s on you if jump in. After you get bitten once, speak with your wallet next time. Learn to not hinge entirely on the opinions of others, you know what you like, not Derp Derplander from XXX site.

Many of us here have been at this for years, come on. We all know hype is a bitch.

I say this as someone who is currently loving my time with this game.

“Dev X has to learn, we must tell ‘em!!” They ain’t gonna learn shit, game is selling hotcakes. Same was with The Witcher 3, almost play by play. You may not remember though.

The plight of the Day 1 gamer, this is.
Well said. Some reason gaming has this urge to splurge you don't get elsewhere.

But I don't think gamers are going to change much. When you got a customer base willing to:

- Pre-order games years in advance on something that doesn't even have a concrete release date
- For a product part of an industry known for bullshots
- For a game coming from a dev that does big bullshots itself (that awesome Witcher 3 promo video of Geralt walking into a village and theres a shitload of stuff going which even a maxed out PC didn't replicate)
- And the game showed almost nothing for 8 years and zero videos on base systems (I think all footage was on PC rigs?)

How or why should any studio change when 2077 looks like it'll selling 10 million copies in the first month? CDR already bragged they had 8 million pre-orders alone.

And all of that was achieved based on my above bullet points.
 

Ktotheroc

Neo Member
Ya. I dont know when it started to really skew to that 6-10 review scale, but I'd say around 20 years ago(?). It really went hand and hand when every household got the internet.

For those of you who didn't read video game and PC game mags in the 80s and 90s (and that included the early issues of EGM), games could get skewered with 3s, 4s, 5s. PC Gamer was probably the harshest. Every issue had at least a couple games getting under 30%. They had a 1-100% range and I remember games getting grilled with 12% and 18%.

You don't see this anymore.

I would say about late 2000s to early 2010s, around the same time as the decline and death of G4TV. I feel like this coincides with the one guy getting fired from Gamespot over a Kane & Lynch review where he rated it negatively, while they were placing ads on the site (2007). CODs, Maddens, and the like could routinely get 9/10s and 10/10s at that time. Before that, you could count on most reviews to be reliable. Once gaming companies saw how easy it was to influence scores (IGN especially), they started doing what they've perfected now.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
This is what Death Stranding and Cyberpunk both have in common:

  • Developer ass-sniffing prior to release
  • Cringeworthy dude-bro marketing
  • Extreme focus on celebraties
  • Underwhelming review scores

DS was bug-free and ran near flawlessly at its target day #1.

It also was genuinely trying to do something different and interesting, not just be more of the same thing.
 

iorek21

Member
It’s funny because review score works in most cases: Avengers, Anthem, Fallout 76, RDR2, God of War etc.

But in some divisive cases such as Days Gone, TLOU2, Ghost of Tsushima and now CP2077, scores doesn’t seem to harmonize with the overall buzz those games got.

Don’t really know what to think of this
 
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The industry is shit, and the 'journalists' are either bought and paid for, or they're political activists with an axe to grind.

Never preorder, and only make an informed decision after getting the impressions of somebody who's integrity you trust.
 
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Umbral

Member
Anyone who bought it on previous gen consoles deserves zero sympathy. You deserve to have wasted your money.
 
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Umbral

Member
Pathetic point of view.
Nope. You earned it if you were foolish enough to think it would not run like shit on PS4/XO. They should have never released a previous gen version, but there’s always marks out there to have their money swiped.
 

Kerlurk

Banned
 
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ExpandKong

Banned
Used to be there was a movement demanding more accountability in games journalism.

Nope. You earned it if you were foolish enough to think it would not run like shit on PS4/XO. They should have never released a previous gen version, but there’s always marks out there to have their money swiped.

Nah man that’s still a bit too harsh
 

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
I think its pretty arrogant to think that a reviews for the PC version will be applicable for the console versions.
 

Kerlurk

Banned
 
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Umbral

Member
Used to be there was a movement demanding more accountability in games journalism.



Nah man that’s still a bit too harsh
The game probably needed a few more months in the oven, but the signs were all there that the previous gen versions were going to be very bad. I wasn’t knee-deep in the hype and I figured that out. People were even making jokes about it running poorly on PS4/XO before release. I don’t think CDPR should have even made those versions at all. Did those buyers need more red flags?

I haven’t been keeping up, but to me it appears all the public pressure for CDPR to not delay again caused them to make a very bad decision. I say delay until it‘s great, but people are impatient sometimes, myself included. It should have been PC first then PS5/XSX later, if needed, or delay it until you can release all three at once.

Edit: Just to be clear, I haven’t bought the game and will not buy it until the actual PS5 patch releases.
 
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Fake

Member
Like in this case, unless you have information it's not valid for this game.

Read the reviews. It's not being given low scores because of controversy, it's because it runs horribly on base consoles.

Why do you think base console copies were not given to the gaming press? Because they knew it was crap.

I talking about the score, like the OP suggest.

And I read every review just to make sure the score match up. I already make strong critics against some reviews even the game having a decent score.

Take Crash Team Racing for example. I'm a CTR fan since PS1 and fanboys are quite happy with the score IGN gave, but there are so many inconsistences on that review I can't accept. Just who read will know.

Reviewers are a big problem now. Sometimes they agree with 'gamers' and use their critic as a form of promoving and gains views, on the other hand when reviews and players don't have the same take about a game, reviewers take a defensive position and call for help for being attack, call gamers 'gamez', use twitter to defend themself, etc...

Thats 'why' you will see reviewers being snowflakes about TLOUS2, but now they will agree with Cyberpunk user score and will make tons of videos about.
 

Puncheur

Member
The whole video games 'journalism' racket is a joke. It's a closed shop full of NDA agreements and is dependent on privileged access that can be withdrawn for unfavourable coverage.
The Cyberpunk situation shows how shameless it all is. Any journalist/critic worthy of that title would've refused to comply with the restrictions. Using pre-set footage to front your review is a new low point.
The industry needs to take a hard look at itself and say no to publishers review restrictions/NDAs and the rest of the BS. I've got my favoured solo youtubers I can rely on.
 

Kerlurk

Banned
Nice to see that they have apologized for their behavior and are now providing refunds for those that want it.

 
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