| starcraft said: Very well. We have (for better or worse) an established gaming media. There is almost nothing in the world that can be quantified as better than anything else except through popular opinion. And you can bring up all sorts of completely unrelated similes such as the one-time popular belief that the world was flat, we are talking about video games here. The popular opinion of the gaming media has established that there is currently a set number of "brilliant" games out there on each platform. This of course does not preclude there being a large number of "good" and "great" games on those platforms. There is. And the gaming media has highlighted them as well. Of course people such as yourself, and indeed myself, would be of the opinion that there are "AAA" games that have missed out on such a 90% designation. But our opinions in those cases would not be in the tangible majority. |
Your theory works off the assumption that the gaming media can be entirely objective in regards to many complicating factors. Certain genres get trashed very consistently through reviews, however. You see games that sell tens of millions not even crack 85 on the Metacritic ranking scale. The opinion of the masses being objective (which your theory requires as well) says this game must be one of the best made ever. In the end consumer opinion trumps critic opinion every time. This is why we get Transformers rather than Citizen Kane at the box office.
The gaming media is suffering from too much "in breeding" for lack of a better term. People who really loved the genres popular with gaming magazines flocked to be reviewers for them. As a result you get a hyper focus on a couple genre's, and a dismissal of others for entirely arbitrary reasons. This compromises the objectivity, and the value of it all in the end. Until we can see a direct correlation between people's buying habits, and game reviews then the entire system will remain suspect at best.
