Why do people hate low review scores?

[Kantor]

amp316 said:

Mummelmann said:
I don't know to be honest. I don't so much mind low scores as I do inflated high scores that are given in the face of glaring flaws and massive issues, as has become the norm of the 7th generation.
This gen is where I officially stopped reading reviews seriously at all.

I agree with this.  The problem is that the scores are far too high.  On a scale of one to ten, a 5.5 would be exactly average.  This is not the case for a video game reviewer.  If I see a game with a score of 5.5, then that means that he / she thought that it was a piece garbage.  I'm all for lower scores and when people are crying that a game that they think is great gets a 8.5, I find it to be ridiculous.

5/10 means "mediocre" rather than "average". Since games cost so much to make, those which do end up being made are usually at least decent, which is why we end up with the 7/10 score. Playing a mediocre game, a 5/10, will be a dull experience, but the game won't be completely broken. This would be considered a below-average game.

We could rejig the entire scale so that 5/10 reflected the new average, as in the scale that Edge uses, but that would cause enormous inconsistencies. A 7/10 from last week would be as good as a 5/10 from this week. If all gamers everywhere understood what was happening, and that 5/10 no longer meant "stay away", it might work, but I'm not inclined to trust a group of more than 100 million people (or even the majority of that group) to behave sensibly.

So, we remain with the system that we have, and pray that perhaps one person in ten actually reads the review rather than coming to a rash decision based on the score.