JWeinCom said:
Lol. I actually looked into review scores and their comparison to MC scores as part of an unrelated post about the review system in general that I never wound up posting. So I had like a 5 month head start. I believe when they were looking for new writers they mentioned their review scores being lower than the MC average as a point of pride, so their applicants are more likely to score things negatively. So, they just sort of have more negative slant by design, although not against any particular company. I think that's a bad policy in general, but not my website. |
Well actually, in a bid to salvage a sliver of my ego, I've just done some further math and will point out that...
1) You missed the Death Stranding review, which is the single most extreme case (-42 compared to MC!). Replacing the score for God of War (the oldest Sony title on your list) with Death Stranding's changes the average VGC score for the last 10 Sony-published and PlayStation-exclusive games from -11.1% compared to Metacritic averages to -14.9 instead, which indeed suggests Sony titles fare worse than Nintendo titles in the scoring overall these days on VGC, though granted not by a landslide margin.
...AND...
2) While 10 is a nice, round number that it's understandable to go with, the issue I've perceived here of is new, as in confined to the last two years or so, seeming to have begun at right around the time that Jim Ryan became President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment in April of 2019. As such, an applicable metric would exclude games released in 2018 like God of War, Detroit: Become Human, and the first Spider-Man, as I didn't see the treatment of Sony games here as being generally unfair before 2019. I also wasn't mentally including third-party releases like Persona 5 Royal, but only first-party titles. If we make these changes, the marginal difference expands quite a bit further in Nintendo's favor. Nintendo's average remains unchanged at -11.2 compared to Metacritic averages because no Nintendo games you listed are thus eliminated (indicating that Nintendo games are more often reviewed by VGC in the first place) while Sony's becomes -20.1 compared to MC scores, indicating that a fairly large and clear scoring discrepancy favoring Nintendo has indeed emerged in the last couple years, be it intentional or otherwise. So I'm not crazy after all!
I'll add that I think the main reason I've perceived the gap to super massive has to do with the fact that my favorites among these have been titles that fared the worst relative to say their average scored on Metacritic.
Returnal: -21
The Last of Us Part II: -23
Death Stranding: -42
Whereas, in contrast, I didn't even read some of the more negative reviews afforded to Nintendo games. So on top of what I've just pointed out, just the psychology resulting from this finite exposure has also been a factor in my mind magnifying and inflating the reality, making it seem even more extreme than it actually is.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 06 July 2021
