Are review scores stupid?

[gigantor21]

I don't think the problem is with having a scoring system.

Go on Rotten Tomatoes and look at different sets of reviews for each movie. Just among the stuff out now, there are films with average ratings of 3/10 or 5/10 across 60+ reviews; the worst rated movies have average scores of 1.1/10. At IMDB, among the top 250 movies ranked by registered users, only 3 movies out of the thousands and thousands featured on the site have ratings of 9.0 or above and only 50 have 8.5 or above. Meanwhile, the bottom 100 has reviews as low as 1.5/10.

Yet as you said, gamers immediately grab the pitchforks and the Molotov cocktails when a big release gets less than an 8 or something.

I think the main problem here is that the critics, players, developers and publishers are wedded way too closely to the reviews, which creates an invisible wall that pushes too many games into the 8 and 9 ranges while blocking ratings below 7--especially for big releases. You can't have a situation like the Transformers franchise, to where critics can beat the movie mercilessly and each one still pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars anyway.

The ideal situation would have games rated in the 6's be seen as decent or average...but people are FAR too invested game scores for that to happen anytime soon. Just goes to show that for all the advances, and games like Modern Warfare pulling in $1 billion in a few weeks, games are still on very shaky ground.