Why do we set ourselves up for failure?

I've been ignoring ratings since the 3 best games ever all came out within the past half year (IIRC Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy, & MGS4 all had near perfect scores from everyone), and seeing as how I didn't enjoy Halo 3 or SMG, I've been having this tendency to ignore game reviews.

EDIT: Also forgot GTA4, another game with near 10's across the board.

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Have we forgotten that there are many moderately good games out there?

When a person can only afford 2-3 games per year, why would they risk buying a moderately good game over a "Blockbuster, wow, amazing, best ever, must buy!" game?

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Original post by boolean Quote: Have we forgotten that there are many moderately good games out there? When a person can only afford 2-3 games per year, why would they risk buying a moderately good game over a "Blockbuster, wow, amazing, best ever, must buy!" game?

That's what I was going to say.


I've been saying this for years, the game industry is killing itself by charging so much for games. If games were cheaper, then maybe people would be more willing to buy games that aren't rated 100%, and be happy with the purchase.


But keep charging $60-70 per game, and you'd better believe I'm only going to buy the really damn good ones.


Another factor is the massive payola that goes on in the game review industry. The entire game review industry is based on not actually buying the games they review, but instead receiving them gratis from the publisher.

Give a game a bad review? No more free games for your company, you go out of business. This practice artificially inflates game scores to a point where no one really believes that 75-90% means it's actually a good game anymore.

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Original post by Mithrandir But keep charging $60-70 per game, and you'd better believe I'm only going to buy the really damn good ones.

That's only like two tanks of gasoline. [looksaround]

Ironically, many of the moderately good games are within the budget-bin prices of $20-40.

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Original post by frob Quote: Original post by Mithrandir But keep charging $60-70 per game, and you'd better believe I'm only going to buy the really damn good ones. That's only like two tanks of gasoline. [looksaround] Ironically, many of the moderately good games are within the budget-bin prices of $10-30.

And I wouldn't pay that much for gasoline if it wasn't required in the first place.


There's a huge difference in the motivation behind buying commodity items like gasoline/food/housing/etc, and luxury items like movies/music/games.

One, you need to survive. The other, not so much.

I definitely hear you on the price of games. Actually it's not the games so much for me, but the price of consoles. I usually wait until the console has been out for quite a while before getting the next console. I think paying $400+ for a piece of hardware that can only play games targetted for that console, of which I might own 10 games by the time the next system is out, is absurd. I understand why the consoles may need to be priced so high, but frankly, I'm not going to be paying that.

As for the games, I find $50 for a great game, $25-$35 for a decent game, and < $10 for a crappy game to be reasonable. I'm with you that when you start getting into the $60s and $70s, it starts to become that unless it's a game I expect to spend 100+ hours playing overall, it's not worth it, and again I wait until the price drops. That's why I don't have a Wii Fit right now. If games were cheaper, I'd have at least double the games. Same thing with the music industry. I'm very selective about the cds I buy. If the cds were half the price, I'd likely have 3x the cds.

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Original post by Rydinare If games were cheaper, I'd have at least double the games. Same thing with the music industry. I'm very selective about the cds I buy. If the cds were half the price, I'd likely have 3x the cds.

Isn't that true for any consumer of a commodity? If X were cheaper, consumer'd buy m * n X instead of n X. The thing is, there's a ceiling on how much X the consumer would buy, regardless of price. There is also a floor on the cost to produce X, so the sale price of X has to fit somewhere between that ceiling and that floor.

There are actually multiple factors here. For one, we need to kill the knee-jerk reaction to games under a certain number of gameplay hours as "too short." For another, we need to embrace variable pricing based on the value proposition, so an exquisitely crafted single-player experience that you're likely to only play once may cost $30 while a mediocre single-player experience married to an incredible multiplayer experience could cost $50 or $60, and so on. For a third, we need to lower the costs of production.

We also need for reviewers to stop babbling like frothing idiots on the hype train (which means reining in the marketroids)... but that's not likely to happen.

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Original post by frob Quote: Original post by Mithrandir But keep charging $60-70 per game, and you'd better believe I'm only going to buy the really damn good ones. That's only like two tanks of gasoline.

That's one tank of gasoline. The average tank size is 15 to 18 gallons. That's $60 to $72.

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Original post by Oluseyi Quote: Original post by Rydinare If games were cheaper, I'd have at least double the games. Same thing with the music industry. I'm very selective about the cds I buy. If the cds were half the price, I'd likely have 3x the cds. Isn't that true for any consumer of a commodity? If X were cheaper, consumer'd buy m * n X instead of n X. The thing is, there's a ceiling on how much X the consumer would buy, regardless of price. There is also a floor on the cost to produce X, so the sale price of X has to fit somewhere between that ceiling and that floor.

Yes, I definitely hear you on that. It's tough to say whether the game industry could make better profits by lowering their prices. As it is, I feel like the game industry pays 20-40% lower than other industries for 20-40% more work. Truthfully, as an end-user, if the price of the consoles weren't nearing the price of a low-end PC, I wouldn't have much issue with the prices the game industry charges. In the case of the music industry, based on the information that's out there, it certainly sounds like reducing the price may help on a few fronts, especially piracy. But that's a separate issue.

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Original post by frob Quote: Original post by Mithrandir But keep charging $60-70 per game, and you'd better believe I'm only going to buy the really damn good ones. That's only like two tanks of gasoline. [looksaround]

it's why we can't afford as many games per year

Since when are ratings anywhere near proportional to sales?

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Original post by Lazy Foo Since when are ratings anywhere near proportional to sales?

Fixed ;)

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Original post by frob Quote: Original post by Mithrandir But keep charging $60-70 per game, and you'd better believe I'm only going to buy the really damn good ones. That's only like two tanks of gasoline. [looksaround]

My last fill up was over $60, so, no, that's only like one tank of gasoline.

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Original post by Mithrandir Another factor is the massive payola that goes on in the game review industry. The entire game review industry is based on not actually buying the games they review, but instead receiving them gratis from the publisher. Give a game a bad review? No more free games for your company, you go out of business. This practice artificially inflates game scores to a point where no one really believes that 75-90% means it's actually a good game anymore.

The impression I got was the free games was just the icing. What really hurts is if a publisher decided to pull their advertising and/or rights to juicy insider info (previews, contacts with dev houses, fancy release parties etc.)

I stopped paying attention to most gaming review sites because they still don't seem to have evolved beyond the high school grading system, where a score seems to allocate half the marks for just having a finished game and anything decent gets 80%+ by default (unless a particular reviewer has a grudge, where a game might get 65% because they just don't like the genre). The result is a grading system that crams everything up the very top end of the scale, and you end up with madness like that lampooned by a recent Penny-Arcade strip.

The other problem with review sites is that they tend to be staffed by pretty hardcore gamers: you need to be really into games to want to review them for a living, and the sorts of people who frequent game sites tend to skew towards hardcore as well. Consequently there's more of a focus on the sorts of games and issues this hardcore market prefer, which inflates the impression of how well these types of games do in the market in general.

Still, Metacritic is useful as an amalgam of what current thought is about a game. It's really useful to see the spread of opinions and the variety of scores given to a particular game.

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Original post by MaulingMonkey Quote: Original post by frob Quote: Original post by Mithrandir But keep charging $60-70 per game, and you'd better believe I'm only going to buy the really damn good ones. That's only like two tanks of gasoline. [looksaround] My last fill up was over $60, so, no, that's only like one tank of gasoline.

It takes $45 to fill my tank (small tank; ~10 gallons), but I would imagine the average is over $60 at this point.

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Original post by boolean When a person can only afford 2-3 games per year, why would they risk buying a moderately good game over a "Blockbuster, wow, amazing, best ever, must buy!" game?

I buy my games generally half a year behind the curve. The only game that I spent more than $30 on has been Mass Effect, and that game was worth every penny.

I don't pay much attention to game reviews anymore. GameStop's "you can exchange used games up to a week after purchase" policy helps deal with bad games (like Ultimate Alliance, which I hated and exchanged).

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Original post by Mithrandir Another factor is the massive payola that goes on in the game review industry. The entire game review industry is based on not actually buying the games they review, but instead receiving them gratis from the publisher. Give a game a bad review? No more free games for your company, you go out of business. This practice artificially inflates game scores to a point where no one really believes that 75-90% means it's actually a good game anymore.

I can't beieve that's the case for any reviewing body which pays its reviewers, like paper magazines. The cost of a game is small compared to the time spent reviewing it.
The publisher can refuse to give you advance copies of the game of course.

My opinion of the games industry is that it's a minefield and a bit of hit-and-miss, in that what makes someone cream their pants may make someone else puke their guts up. That's precisely how I felt about Bioshock, people worldwide were hitting multiple orgasm just by the mention of the name while I was wanting to turn back time and get my £40 back for that utter garbage. I thought it was absolutely fucking horrible for n different reasons but that's for another time.

The main problem, as I've said, is trying to suit everyone. Games are a wide reaching medium and the term "game" itself is very broad; you can have a command line Guess the Number or you can have Gears of War 2 when it ships in November (hopefully), they're both defined as "games".

I think games being a "blockbuster" or "shovelware" is objective and a matter of personal opinion. I would define something like Halo as a "blockbuster" because it stands out on its own, but "shovelware" to me would be something like Madden 09 or Zelda:OhMyGodNotAgain which is the same as the one which came out three years ago, or anything substandard garbage shoehorned onto a system for the sake of it such as Call of Duty 3 on the Wii. That game wouldn't have even been acceptable as a Gamecube title let alone a Wii one, it was broken in every way possible.

I think a "blockbuster" only becomes so when the hype train gathers momemtum and the collective opinion of many people is that it's epic for whatever reason. As such, some of these games turn out to be disappointing (GTA IV, Haze, etc.) just because the hype train gathered more momentum than anything else on Earth and the fanboys got into a cold sweat. It forces you to expect more than what you're getting and I've always felt, with everything in life, if you build yourself up for disappointment it won't hit you as hard when the time inevitably comes. Also, if things do go your way, it makes you feel better :)

That said, I can't see the point in working in the games industry. Why slave and toil for two years for a bunch of little kids on a forum going "ZOMG IT SUX THEIR 2 BUZY COUNTING THERE $$$ TO MAKE A GOOD GAME THEY SUCK AT MAKING GAMES OMG", you launch your game into a saturated market and sell fuck all copies unless it's highly hyped, and the few copies you do sell are outweighed by the whole thing appearing on the torrents before it gets released because of some little so-and-so at the disc pressing plant thinks releasing it all onto the net is great fun.

I don't want to work in the games industry for those reasons, TBH. It's arguably harder to make a game than SQL SuperDuper Wizard 2010 with extra Enterprisey Bits for IT Professionals because of all the things you have to do like create all your assets, write your storyline, design the engine and core game code having bitched over DirectX vs OpenGL, fix the collision detection and physics, tighten up the graphics in Level 3, record all your sounds, perfect the gameplay, get all the mission triggers working, debug the netcode, make sure it runs properly on a wide variety of high-end PCs and like shit on others so the GPU manufacturers can make a fast buck, then run the gauntlet as the console Certification processes for the inevitable watered-down shoehorned console port dick on you for this and that. After that, the game will magically appear, pre-release, on the front page of The Pirate Bay. All this for lower pay, longer hours and higher levels of stress? No thanks, life is too short.

Games these days are still highly regarded by the fanboys and victims of hype, yet they're still being rushed out unfinished and broken. I remember a time as recently as the PS2 when games shipped in a finished state and weren't being patched through auto-updates as they are now.

(You may now have guessed that I don't particularly enjoy making games and I generally prefer the General Programming section of GameDev to the others)

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Original post by Lazy Foo Since when are ratings anywhere near proportional to sales?

And still most companies reward their employees with bonuses only in case the game hits a minimum average rating, regardless of the sales. Find the error...