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Forums - Gaming Discussion - POLL: Is it more beneficial or detrimental for sites to release multiple reviews of the same game?

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Is it better or worse for sites to release multiple reviews of the same game?

Better 14 63.64%
 
Worse 8 36.36%
 
Total:22

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?



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I think multiple reviews are good because different gamers have different perspectives. And different tastes. And different experiences. And different skill levels. All of those things influence ones opinion of a game that they're playing. So the more perspectives that I can see about a game that I am considering, the better I will likely be able to understand it and determine whether it will likely appeal to me.



Multiple reviews are good but I feel like thats what Metacritic is for. To compile a bunch of different opinions.

No need for individual sites to have multiple reviewers review a game.



tag:"reviews only matter for the real hardcore gamer"

Definitely beneficial. When a new or updated version of a game releases, I want an accurate assessment of that version at the time it's coming out because that's when critic reviews are most useful. Dragon Quest XI was already a very good JRPG, but when the delayed Switch version released with significant improvements over the original release, the reviews and scores for that version reflected those improvements and no doubt enticed at least a few consumers to double-dip. Same concept with Persona 5 Royal.

As for the idea that reviews should be updated over time to match the modern era of post-release development cycles, I think it not only would be setting a bad precedent to encourage the release of more unfinished games, but it's also completely unnecessary; once a game has been publicly available and playable for months or years, there'll be more than enough ongoing player feedback to reflect the current state of the game, so critic reviews become increasingly irrelevant by that point.

On a side-note: The recent release of Ghostwire Tokyo on Xbox for some reason has a much higher metascore than the PS5 version, albeit with barely over a dozen reviews, even though that version has been proven to actually play worse. Seems like the reviewers were just as lazy as the devs in this case.



Yes.

People have preferences and want to know aspects of the specific platform that they are playing on - that means performance (FPS/resolution), any bugs for the specific version, downgrades/etc


Mentioning the pros and cons if any under the same review would be okay.


For a website I think the best scenario would be for multiple people to play different versions (and not have one person play all versions).

Or bunch all opinions together to make a unified piece.

Games nowadays are tougher to review them unless you wait a year or so - due to patches, DLC updates, etc.



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VAMatt said:

I think multiple reviews are good because different gamers have different perspectives. And different tastes. And different experiences. And different skill levels. All of those things influence ones opinion of a game that they're playing. So the more perspectives that I can see about a game that I am considering, the better I will likely be able to understand it and determine whether it will likely appeal to me.

But do you think what you're describing is fitting for one individual game site to provide (i.e. a non-aggregate hub).  Because I think it'd get confusing to see a laissez-faire approach to reviewing where 4 different VGChartz writers could have wildly disparate opinions on the same game.  You could say IGN does that now, but I think delineating between nationalities (IGN, IGN Italy, etc.) is a different case that hardly any other site can financially achieve.

Last edited by coolbeans - on 26 April 2023

coolbeans said:
VAMatt said:

I think multiple reviews are good because different gamers have different perspectives. And different tastes. And different experiences. And different skill levels. All of those things influence ones opinion of a game that they're playing. So the more perspectives that I can see about a game that I am considering, the better I will likely be able to understand it and determine whether it will likely appeal to me.

But do you think what you're describing is fitting for one individual game site to provide (i.e. a non-aggregate hub).  Because I think it'd get confusing to see a laissez-faire approach to reviewing where 4 different VGChartz writers could have wildly disparate opinions on the same game.  You could say IGN does that now, but I think delineating between nationalities (IGN, IGN Italy, etc.) is a different case that hardly any other site can financially achieve.

Yes. I think it's totally fine for one site to provide multiple perspectives.  Reviews are written, in most cases, by individual reviewers.  I don't see how it would get confusing to have multiple reviewers at the same site reviewing something. It's no different than if they were writing for different platforms. 

Last edited by VAMatt - on 26 April 2023

VAMatt said:
coolbeans said:

But do you think what you're describing is fitting for one individual game site to provide (i.e. a non-aggregate hub).  Because I think it'd get confusing to see a laissez-faire approach to reviewing where 4 different VGChartz writers could have wildly disparate opinions on the same game.  You could say IGN does that now, but I think delineating between nationalities (IGN, IGN Italy, etc.) is a different case that hardly any other site can financially achieve.

Yes. I think it's totally fine for one site to provide multiple perspectives.  Reviews are written, in most cases, but individual reviewers.  I don't see how it would get confusing to have multiple reviewers at the same site reviewing something. It's no different than if they were writing for different platforms. 

Gotcha.  Don't think I can agree to that extent, but I appreciate you laying it out.



I think it's fine. A lot of magazines like EGM used to have games reviewed by panels of 3-4 reviewers. I believe Famitsu does this as well. It provides contrasting perspectives from reviewers who have different tastes and different things they are looking for.



One problem is they are official site reviews. The site can't really have two different official reviews*, which is partly why I now regret us doing new reviews for Director's Cut versions of what were still very new games.

An extension of that is it also poses this question: which review becomes the site's official review on aggregate sites? The first one, or the second one, and why?

While I certainly see merit in an updated look at a game that may have been patched extensively and given significant free content updates (I'm thinking something like No Man's Sky, which by most accounts is now a radically different and much better game), I think this is more appropriately covered in an article rather than a second scored review that in a way overwrites/overrides the original.


*(I will say I do like the Famitsu approach of having 4 individual writers giving their scores, which are then added together to give a combined Famitsu total, but that's not feasible for any but the biggest outlets. It's also slightly different in that the separate reviews/scores are all done at the same time and it's baked into their system from the start, rather than being haphazard after the fact.)