Everything Everywhere Once A Week (5/12/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. This week is less about news and more about, well, all things Zelda. Most people who are reading this, or would be reading this, are probably out actually playing the game. I’ve only been playing it for something like eight hours, so I’m nowhere close to doing a review on it. But this seems like it would be a good time instead to talk about a related subject: how do game reviews work?

Review Revue

This past week, video game website IGN kind of stepped into it when they released a video on social media explaining the average score of 7 for most reviews. The video implied that games not reviewed by IGN were likely not worth reviewing in that they’re probably not very good to begin with — something that a lot of developers who don’t get their games reviewed by IGN took issue with. The tweet was taken down, but not before it was saved and shared with less-than-glowing reviews itself.

On its face, though, the statement is not entirely incorrect. It’s way, way too general and seems to take a weird amount of pride in reviewing through omission, but finite resources are absolutely the driving factor when it comes to what gets reviewed and what doesn’t. And those resources can’t always be dedicated toward “what is the best actual game” because the literal best game could come out tomorrow and still not be reviewed on a major site if no one cares to read about it. Kind of an “if a tree falls in the forest” scenario.

A reviewer might play a game, champion it for a review, predict that the game’s about to break out big and thus it’s worth the time to do it. But independent discovery for reviewers is also pretty rare. Certainly not impossible, but rare. It’s also just exceedingly unlikely to roll out that way, you’re far more likely to find actual asset-swapped garbage that way than the next big thing.

But I think it’s important before we go any further to clarify the role that traffic plays with reviews, which is to say, it doesn’t really. Now the big sites with the big games, like say an IGN or a GameSpot with a Zelda review or something, those will be heavily visited pages with many people at least going to scroll to the bottom and check the score. But for most everyone else? They almost don’t matter. Even reviews way outside the mean don’t do appreciably better or worse than usual. For the vast majority of outlets, reviews are more about creating a personality for the site and engaging in criticism than making money.

Which is why just throwing more resources at reviewing more things is just not going to happen. So things get picked and chosen depending on a variety of factors and it creates what looks like homogeneity to the consumer — which it is, but unintentionally. Turns out that disparate audiences are still usually only served by one kind of thrust.

But that also brings us to scores! I go back and forth on scores personally. I think they can aid self-reflection in criticism, otherwise you sometimes risk trying to balance a review between good and bad factors without being decisive on it. But it’s also true that they undermine all the words above it to an extent. People do look primarily at the scores as a, pardon the repetition, method of scorekeeping for games and that sucks. It sucks for the writer who wrote a whole lot of words that get ignored for numerical summaries, it sucks for the reader who doesn’t actually gain anything from this experience, and it sucks for the discourse on the games.

On the other hand, every review editor for a major site I know also insists scores are necessary. Some of those virtues are ones I mentioned before, but it’s also very hard to get people to engage with a review without a score at all. Like, yes, a plurality of people will just ignore the text of a review to look at the score and either fist-pump or shake their fist in anger, but people are much more likely to be on that page and possibly read the review than not if there is a score bringing them there.

I am of the belief that you should be relatively outlet agnostic when it comes to game reviews. Find the people that you tend to agree with and stick with them. The byline is far more important to knowing whether a review will speak to your opinions than the header. But also I’m increasingly wondering if a day-one review driven by an embargo really matters.

Well, let me be clear, it obviously still matters. People love treating them like sports and attention is driven to the people that write them. I’m more wondering if the day 20 or the day 60 criticism is more important. I guess that likely depends on the audience and what they want and by and large they want the initial sense of quality, but I’d honestly rather find out what someone thinks of Tears of the Kingdom in two months than I am interested in knowing what someone thought about it the day before release.