11 February, 2008

That's Entertainment

I've been wondering if I should adopt the new scoring system EGM / 1UP is using. No more numbers. Just school grades of A through F (minus E, of course). Probably not. For EGM it was important. As Ubisoft and others kept pulling advertising dollars over "low" scores, as mentioned in the last few paragraphs of this post. You see, EGM was the only magazine that actually gave an average game a 5. Everyone else gives average games 7s, to keep their advertisers happy. There's even running joke that IGN reviewers have never heard of numbers below six.

I'm guessing the score aggregators will equate EGM's new scores to numeric equivalents (say 70 for a C-, 75 for a C, and 79 for a C+) and suddenly the publishers will be happy again, but EGM doesn't have to feel like they're selling out because they still get to give average games an average score in the magazine. It's a clever way to attempt to avoid the aggregator problem.

But if other outlets start using it (and you could argue they already are), aggregators may start putting up the letter grades, which will piss off the publishers all over again. At the end of the day, publishers like Ubisoft want you to believe their games are triple A while putting in B or C levels of time and money. They'll lie to accomplish this goal. Lies are free, after all. They'll lie to aggregators and use money to browbeat reviewers to lie for them.

I'm guessing this makes gaming slightly worse than movies and slightly better than music on the overall corruption scale. Meh. That's entertainment.

2 comments:

Carlo said...

Hi Blain, found your blog through a random internet search and am enjoying it!

Yeah, I'm happy that EGM/GFW/1Up are actually trying to do something about the issue of inflated scores. I'm not sure that it's really going to have an effect, though.

It's not just advertiser pressure that pushes up scores - it's also people's expectations based on a competitive game market. 5/10 may be average and 7/10 may be good - but scores like that are still a death knell to titles that are competing with all the 8s and 9s out there. There doesn't necessarily have to be score inflation for gamers to naturally reset the bar for titles that they're interested in to a higher standard, given the limited amount of money most of us have to spend on games.

Still, it's definitely annoying that advertisers, developers, and fans balk every time a game gets a score lower than a 7.5! Lets hope that the Ziff initiative changes the perspective of people looking at these scores - maybe a B will soften the blow?

Blain Newport said...

Welcome carlo. I took a peek over at the blog you and some other gamers work on. Good stuff.

I think we're both die hard cynics on the potential of "fixing" the situation. Where money's involved, morals erode.

And yes, you are definitely right that gamers assume that games they're hyped about deserve high scores based entirely on effective marketing. Those people are idiots. Also, fans sometimes write tons of angry letters to whichever review site posts lowest scores for their favorite games. Those people are idiots with no lives.

Actually, they're internet #&$%wads. :)

And yeah, I only get a subscription when it comes with something else, but I enjoyed Nintendo Power as well.