| Conegamer said: No surprises here. Such sites should not be included in Metacritic though; particularly if there's evidence. |
That's true. But the problem becomes extremely hard to get away from due to the outlier reviews getting the most attention. Take a game that is widely reviewed at 7/10-8/10. Extreme fans of a series/platform/dev/whatever will point at the review or two that have it as a 10/10. Haters of the same will point at the one or two reviews that have it as a 3/10 or something way out of left field. So essentially those that are corrupt enough to post a completely bogus review can gain huge numbers of clicks, while more honest reviews get overlooked somewhat. This is obviously a very simplified view, and there ARE certainly exceptions to this, but I honestly believe that most 'extreme' outlier reviews are absolutely BS.
But speaking of exceptions, a difference of opinion in what a score means can explain some of them. For example, in modern metarcritic terms, a 5/10 is pure garbage. But someone might view a 5/10 as 'average'. If that person gives 5/10s to most standard fare titles, and very few 8/10 and above or very few 3/10 and below, then they are probably using the entire number scale effectively. Whereas someone who constantly throws out 8/10 and 9/10 scores for generic games might never ever even go below 6/10 in a rating and view that 6/10 as their harshest criticism for a broken game. I still think there are more clickbait bad ratings than there are honest interpretations of 'full-scale' reviewers.
