1up gave Shadowrun a multiplayer only 60 dollar game 8.0 in their review.
Sam Kennedy posts in his blog that the price of the game effected its perception:
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=8299344&publicUserId=4561231
If the same standards were being applied, then Shadowrun would have recieved a 9.0 review if it was priced cheaper.
The problem with this whole thing is where do you draw the line? Are Wii games like Brain Age being scored lower cause of their price?
Is every review now going to say 'this is a good value' versus 'this game is not worth the price of admission'?
Further, 1up mentions how this is key for downloadable games. But so far all downloadable games have been small affairs. Warhawk is the first big game being released as a downloadable game on any console.
What about in the future, when games with single and multiplayer are released as downloadable games (likely the Team Ico game will be), are they going to have to be cheaper automatically because they are downloadable?
The point is logical, but bringing a price debate into game reviews is not permissable if it is only applying to some games and not others. What about full games being released as downloadable games?
Surely Warhawk's situations' comparison to tiny downloadable titles for 5-10 dollars is illegitimate.
It doesn't show bias against something, it shows a flawed reasoning because you cannot bring up price for some games and not others in your scores. Beyond that, how do you regulate score drops with pricing? 1 point per 10 dollars?
You can see why this whole thing of 'I'll drop the score 1 point if the game is more than 30 dollars' is pretty arbitrary and a mess really.
Where do we go from here? In the future more and more bigger games are going to be downloadable. Especially Sony games, Wipeout HD, LittleBigPlanet and GT 5 Prologue are all going to be downloadable.
Are all these games going to have a price roof set by the reviewers to give them the scores they deserve because of quality?
Thanks to Blacksaber for the sig!
