And that is based on how many people giving it a 3, 4 or 5?What do you think the reaction would be if IGN gave Fable 3 a 4.0? What if Gamespot gave Halo Reach 5.0? Gametrailers gave Donkey Kong Country a 4.4? Do you honestly think it would bolster their credibility or inspire even greater fan outrage?

Gamer reviews fail because they are by far and large merely a fanboy war of people giving 9s and 10s vs those giving 3s and 4s, and they are definitely not better written. They are littered with incomprehensible english, terrible spelling and grammar, and are just as filled with factual errors if not more so than "professional" reviewers. Plus for anyone that took any classes or just like to read there is a very noticeable difference between professional writing and some guy writing his opinions down. Gamer Reviews only work in the sense that you get a feel of the games popularity by the number of people that hate it, the people that would have given it a 9 or 10 regardless of what the game was like, and the tiny tiny handful of people that are trying to be objective (and the content of those reviews are not somehow gauranteed to be of a high quality just because they gave out a 7).

Who do you think actually takes time to write most of the fan reviews? Do you think these people who own one or two systems and buy a few games a year are somehow more immune to media hype, marketing, and other outside influences than people that literally have to play videogames as a fulltime job, and are so bombarded by PR representatives they are annoyed and jaded by them, that have to play all the crappy games along side the good ones? Take any of the people just on this website alone that would defend and of their systems big hype train games to the death against their own mother if she so much as uttered a negative word against it. Now Imagine the ones that are just chomping at the bit for some negative press against Halo, or Killzone even though they don't even own the respective system. Now imagine hundreds of them all writing reviews. Why am I trusting them for objective analyzation again?

The fan review scene does not operate at all like the professional review scene. Fan reviews are a tug of war between fanboys that know what score they are going to give before they even play the game, and by reading ten of them you may get an idea of what the game entails and if you are cool with that. The proffesional review scene is people paid to appease the aforementioned audience. Gamers get the reviewers they deserve.

That's exactly what I'm saying. Gamers sitting around complaining about reviews deserve the kind of reviews that they are getting. Score inflation is a direct result of people complaining about low scores. It doesn't mean they don't say what they think, it means they grade on a 7-10 scale so as not to anger their audience. It can't be both ways. Either everybody complains that they are stupid money hats because they give games low scores or they are stupid money hats because they give high scores.

Also, there is no moneyhat conspiracy. Activision is not bribing Giant Bomb for better reviews. That doesn't even make sense. Publishers use metacritic to gauge any number of factors ranging from sequels, to funding for teams, why would they pay to screw up their own metric that they are using? It doesn't even make sense.

And your argument now comes down to "Yeah, well amatuer reviews are stupid and biased too, but you can ignore those and read the ones that are good, you know just like with professional ones...but those all suck...all of them" Which isn't even a sensical argument, it's a crass generalization of a vast broad and varied group accompanied by special pleading for a group so massive no consistency can even be hoped for.

I don't give a shit about reviews, professional or otherwise. I'm 26 and I know what games I like by now. I don't even read reviews, I don't know what GT5 is averaging on metacritic, I don't know how black ops did critically. Stupidity just drives me nuts, and when I see people say dumb shit like "professional reviews are becoming irrelevant" and "Amatuers write better reviews", I feel the need to interject. The first statement is blatantly untrue, proffesional reviews are incredibly relevant, go ask any publisher. The second one doesn't even make sense on account of it's tens of thousands of people compared to a few hundred, and you have to shuffle through mounds of amatuer crap to get to something halfway readable and informative. If you want to go read ten reader reviews for a game, knock yourself out. But the statement that they do a better job doesn't even make sense.

I think gamrReview's "average" score (which is to say an average game, rather than our mean score, which is somewhere in the 7s - we're more likely to buy and review good games than bad ones) is around 6-6.5. We do try to keep 9 somewhat exclusive, and not throw it around like certain reviewers.

kantor = review inflator.

Yes it does mean they don't say what they think most professional reviews leave out whole aspects of popular games, and as for the 7-10 scale it's only used on the popular hyped highly advertised games so it creates a gap of like 2 points and if a game really is a 9 they leave it at 9 instead of giving it points but if it's a 7 they'll make it a 8.5-9 so relatively to each other they are way off it's a crappy review system, the reviewer should not be swayed by people bitching that the score is too low or by how much the game is advertising on their site but they are swayed by both making user reviewers FAR better 

I never said they were taking bribes bottom line game advertisements pay the bills for most of these sites, it's a case of not bitting the hand that feeds you, they aren't going to give a game who's company is paying the most of advertisements on their site anything less then a 6 no matter how horrible the game is 

On average there more good user reviews compared to bad ones then there are good professional reviews compared to bad ones, but you wouldn't know that since you haven't read any user ones in the last year, go to gamefaqs and read a few they are way better then anything from IGN 

So you have no idea what you are talking about and all of your arguments are based on your random assumptions most of which aren't valid, and you are calling us stupid?

Gamefaqs user reviews are the ONLY user reviews I trust. Anything else is fanboy crap. as for the professionals, EGM is the best, 1up is pretty good, Gamepro has improved and for the most part GI is aight.

Well gamefaqs is the only place I go I really don't know of any other places other then gamespot where most of the "reviews" are a paragraph explaining their score, there needs to be a minimum amount of words for it to be considered but other then that I don't see what else would effect it

The system is not broken people just get to hyped about games and are dissapointed when they don't reach the individuals expectations. Basically, it's a bunch of whining over nothing. In my experience, the rating system has been very reliable and I usually agree with metacritic sore. I laugh whe I rate a game than look on metacritc and danm the score is almost exactly the same.

Enough whining.

@ontheedge  Ive been reading gamefaqs for years and there fan reviews are the best. IGN fan reviews for example are horrid, that website is just a bunch of fanboys trying to 1 up each other.  I still rely heavily on the professional reviews mostly becasue their usually more indepth and come out faster