Negative Reviews - As Bad as Piracy?

Now, if you excuse a snowclone, Notch spoke about "lost sales" bullshit lately. And you know what? He's completely right. The publishers are making up new excuses about why their shitty games don't sell, but fail to see the obvious: that THEIR GAMES ARE SHITTY! I mean, seriously. Even if the game isn't bad, they'll pull something that turns people off: moronic DRM scheme (Ubisoft) or bullshit lockout of game content already on the disc and in the code, but disabled just so they can fleece you for extra $10 (EA and Capcom). Atari already threatened someone with lawsuit because of a bad game review, why do I get a strange feeling someone's gonna get that "bright" idea again?!

No.

Reviews are made by a third party which shouldn't have money being slipped into their pockets by the makers. Reviews are also just a service for potential customers to read and see if they really would enjoy the product.

Also, Zero Punctuation, a nice change in attitude compared to the constant pandering and heeding to fans' opinions.

edited 2nd Mar '11 9:35:19 AM by Usht

inb4 "Game Rentals - As Bad as Piracy?", "Playing At A Friends House - As Bad as Piracy?" and "Shoplifting - As Bad as Piracy?" snowclones...

INB 4 IGN vs Beat Em Ups

Snowclones - As bad as piracy?

No, but it's still a bad idea.

On a serious note, though, there are obviously predictable effects of a biased reviewer (or a whole reviewing team) pushing its opinionated conclusions onto the readers, some of which may not be in on the bias. One of the biggest Russian game review sites, AG.RU is legendary in its biases, for example =)

Everyone has a bias though, if the review articulates a real reason for a game to be bad it doesn't really matter if that person has a bias.

But what if the person has a bias against a whole genre? Zero Punctuation goes as far as to admit that yes, Yahtzee is prejudiced in some regards and he can't help it.

I think it was Jeremy Clarkson in one of his books who talked about a car he could not stand, but the sun was shining, the roads were empty and he was in driving heaven. There's also going to be some situational bias like this, like a reviewer getting screwed by the Random Number God and then declaring the game too difficult.

Hence, aggregate sites such as Metacritic.

If the review is objective and honestly trying to avoid being biased, but it ends up slamming a game, then you have to question how effective your play-testers were. But yeah, a subjective and biased review could end up hurting sales unfairly.

Flip side, a review could hype up a game too much and the general populace, once they get their hands on it goes "WTH is this crap? I thought this was suposed to be a good game!"

I wonder if Consumer Reports should get into reviewing games - that would be interesting, wouldn't it? (I have heard that even they have bias, though - no idea how much.)

really there's no way to fully remove bias from reviews, if your good and know to look for it you can sometimes screen it out. But that is the best part about meta-critic like sites that give overall averages based on many peoples reviews, the larger the sample size the more likely it is for all the various reviewers bias' to even out.

Agreed. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that not only is there no way to remove bias, people shouldn't expect reviews to be without bias. Reviews of any kind are one half opinion, one half fact, simply because they have the dual purpose of presenting a critic's opinion of the game and educating the reader about the game/movie/book/whatnot at hand.

The line between a good critic and a bad critic is how things are couched; a bad critic will have decided beforehand to minimize the parts of the game that disagree with their thesis while maximizing the parts that help them. A good critic will attempt to give problems of equal size the same weight.

But as to the central idea of the thread, nobody's really claiming that sales lost to bad reviews are equal to sales lost to piracy (although I'll be honest, I don't remember Atari suing anybody for a bad review. Anyone have a link?). Notch is just pointing out a basic flaw in the argument.

There ya go.

Making Terrible Mortal Kombat Sequels: As Bad As Piracy?

IMO, a lot of companies need to accept that just because you make something, doesn't mean it will sell. And making a game that large numbers of players will beat in a couple days and then immediately sell to a used game store? Means *you* failed.

Thanks. ^^ I think I do vaguely recall that happening, now that I read about it.

edited 2nd Mar '11 2:56:23 PM by CactuarJoe

First, these similar topics should NOT suggest that Piracy is bad. Piracy in itself, especially in gaming, isn't bad at all

If distribution networks fail to deliver, where else can games hope to travel? Piracy

If people don't have enough to pay spare for the games they wish to have, where can games be to have themselves bought? Piracy

If, simply, game stores don't have such games, where else can you get the games which you want but you couldn't have on proper game stores otherwise? Piracy

Back on topic, negative reviews can be worse than piracy. It's not much of a stretch seeing reviews are often on internet and placed in commercialized sites, where gamers converge to browse for tips, FAQ, topics and whatnot, where the reviews are read almost immediately, making fast impact on sales. The problem is, not everyone is the same kind of gamer

Talking about piracy- As bad as piracy?

edited 2nd Mar '11 3:12:21 PM by maxwellelvis

Piracy in itself, especially in gaming, isn't bad at all

Hahahahahahaohwaityou'reserious.

Yes, there are legitimate reasons to pirate, such as if your country hasn't been distributed the game.

But that doesn't mean all piracy is okay.

edited 2nd Mar '11 3:15:06 PM by Scardoll

Laugh at him harder, then.

^x2 (*cough* You noticed his location right? He has a bit more of an excuse than most of us do to pirate. *cough*)

...Oh.

I'm sorry, Cassie. That was a stupid assumption to make on my part.

Hey, I can symphatize with Cassie.

That country's currency value is pretty crappy; those guys have to pay three times the amount your average American normally would (many games are imported, some from neighboring Singapore). To make matters worse, distros would occasionally jack up prices at brick and mortar stores to earn a bit on their side. Even brand new games on Steam tend to hover at the 40-60 USD range, which is pretty damn pricey for something without a case and supplementary materials.

It's really telling when an original copy of Starcraft II sells at over RM 200 at a local gaming store. Nobody in their right mind would want to buy a game this expensive, unless they're really loaded.

RM 200 huh? That's a surprise. I haven't bought any new AAA titles for a long time, only New Era reprints which are less than RM 30 or thereabouts. I can sort of guess that they convert from USD to local to avoid people reverse importing a cheaper foreign version but I thought the region locking on Blizzard's MP architecture was a big enough deterrent.