I should come out and say that, unlike my previous poll, this won't be influencing a potential upcoming review. Still, I wanted to pose this question to gauge how the general audience would feel in seeing multiple reviews of the same game by different people.
Here's the scenario:
I was vaguely interested in reviewing Ghostwire: Tokyo (XS) for VGChartz, but the PS5 version was handled by Thomas last year. In my mind, I think there's some value in re-reviewing it; not to step on Thomas' toes (as I respect his POV), but rather in re-assessing what state it's in now. Because Ghostwire: Tokyo of '22 isn't quite the same game after the Spider's Thread update. We've done this under different circumstances for Death Stranding. Despite being sprinkled with some tired "you just don't get it" vibes, I thought Issa's expansive evaluation on the Director's Cut was a nice treat for interested viewers who may want to upgrade. Nothing within that text moves my opinion of the original, but I respect it nonetheless. That's my rough assessment of those two examples, but I wonder how everyone else thinks.
I think there are two strands to consider...
#1 - Professionalism
I get we're talking about fun & games. I'm not trying to artificially elevate this situation to wild degrees, but I think the typical audience would expect some semblance of resolution when a review is posted. How can anyone make heads or tails of a site if reviews for certain games vary so wildly? Does it perhaps sully the whole process in seeing a score buffet, rather than one selected person saying their piece and that's the final note? Maybe just keeping things simple & clean is a hidden benefit, even if it results in less content.
#2 - Consumer Interests
Given the industry's new standard of evolving a game post-release, why not catalog that with "updated" reviews as well? Maybe huge technical issues and such have been cleaned out since its initial release and now reviewing a different version can act as a means of addressing those concerns for potentially-interested buyers. As long as the new review clearly indicates that this is evaluating the 1.x version and isn't trying to course-correct how someone else felt, perhaps readers might be interested to know about its new state. Perhaps more updated information is the way to go - when done carefully.
What do you think?
