Why do people hate low review scores?

[amp316]

Kantor said:

amp316 said:

Kantor said:

amp316 said:

Mummelmann said

Maybe that's what a 5/10 means according to the way that the system is set up, but it makes no sense.  I was a fairly good math student and know that 5 is exactly one half of ten and that should be average. Now I understand that problem that you, as a reviewer, have since a certain type of groundwork has been established.  You make a strong argument about why 5's shouldn't be handed out to an average game. 

The biggest problem though isn't that too many 7's are being handed out for average games though.  The biggest problem is that 9's are constantly being handed out for good ones.  A 9 should be saved for something special and not for every game worth buying.  

Pleases understand that I am talking about gaming reviews in general and I'm not talkng about the VGChartz reviewers.    

I agree that the overabundance of 9+ score from quite a few sites is a problem, but if you look at Metacritic (or GameRankings, which is better because it includes gamrReview) most titles, although they receive 9+ scores from IGN and such, end up in the high 80s exactly because so many reviewers are afraid of handing out 9s to everything, with the result that this becomes extremely overcrowded. I can't think of many games that average above 90 which don't really deserve it, but I can think of an enormous number of 87s, 88s and 89s which definitely don't deserve to score so high.

The 7 range needs to be used a lot more, and the 8 range a lot less.

You have a good point there.  It's almost as if some reviewers are afraid of giving a game with a high budget a score below an 8.  This is kind of going back to my point of the scores being inflated.  We might disagree about how inflated that they are, but we can agree that they are inflated.