| naruball said: It's always nice to disagree with people like you, since you always have argument and elaborate on your views. But here's what I've experienced. Games like the Witcher 2 for £2 on steam (Or Skyrim for less than a 10er). Whether this game launches for £2 or £40, it does not affect my purchase at all. When I was about to by the game I looked at it's meta and it was X. Then I looked at an indie game which looked mediocre at best and had a slighter lower meta. In my opinion, there should have been a huge difference between the two. Because at the end of the day, I'm not paying £40, but £2, yet the indie game gets praised and a higher score than it deserves for its low price, but its price ends up being higher than the witcher's (at that moment or even forever). If I'm about to choose between the witcher and the indie at that moment, the fact that the witcher costs £2 is not reflected in any reviews. How is that fair for the game? And despite being a gamer, I won't go through all the reviews to see if they mention something about the price, which they won't since it had the standard price. Thus the score becomes misleading. It's similar to games which have online moes that work fine for reviewers and terrible for the average gamer. A game starts with awful online and gets a bad score and when the problems are fixed, it still has the stigma of a bad game. Or a game is great at first and terrible later on and someone about to buy GT5 for example would get the wrong impression by reviews. That's why the review should focus more on things that don't change, such as gameplay, storyline, campaign etc. Price always changes, so how come indie games get inflated scores, when a few months down the line AAA (or close to that) games cost the same, a bit more or even less? |
I kinda get where you're coming from with this (and I agree that the review system is broken in terms of games that start out horribly but get patched to improve - they're never re-reviewed so their score will always stay the same); but equally not taking it into account at all because there might be a Steam sale down the line is giving the people who are intending to buy it day 1 nothing to go on in regards to the value they're getting.
By the way, if we're talking about prices, then I'm not sure why you're suggesting that indie games don't get discounted. They get price slashed all the time on Steam/PSN/XBL, just like retail games do. The difference is the used game market where you can pick up last year's AAA exclusive for pennies. And I don't really know how to factor that into this argument, to be honest :P
