Let's start with this: What exactly defines "quality"?

Many features that people say make a "quality" game are actually subjective, so the question in itself is actually kinda meaningless IMO.

Graphics, story, gameplay etc. Many things are in games and every small piece can be good. The best games have everything right... like GTA :D

if you for example dislike fighting games, but work at a website where you are part of a group who need to review a whole load of different fighting game mechanics and see which games either offer more than just a roster full of clone characters or a roster with few characters but each one built around unique ideas. Trust me to a person who doesn't like a genre each fps could be a Halo:CE or an Aliens CM if you don't like Fps to begin with you aren't going to be able to distinguish anything less annoying about the great ones.

You just can't expect people to go that far outta their way to praise something and see the good parts about something they've little to no interest in.

I've argued this before. I mean, I don't like sports games at all but I know a good one when I see one. I'm not the biggest FPS fan but I can appreciate what goes into one (and I actually do enjoy Call of Duty and Halo quite a bit). I don't like sim racers at all but I can see why people like Forza and Gran Turismo.

And then, there's the guys that, when asked the question "What's the worst game of all time", instantly reply:
Halo
Gears of War
Uncharted
Mario

What. The. Fuck.


Just because it doesn't appeal to you doesn't mean it sucks! There's a lot of movies that can't hold my interest but I can acknowledge that they're good for their respective audience, right? Same goes for games! If the game isn't broken, the gameplay is solid, the graphics are great, the story is good, why hate? Blows my mind every single time.

Some people just see that a game has mario in the title and guess it is going to be yet another game in the exact same series with the exact same gameplay. Doesn't matter to this type of gamer if it's Mario Tennis, Mario Golf or Mario Kart it's just another Mario game. Nintendo addressed this in the last Nintendo Direct even, they said they had some great ideas for new games but they were worried about if they should create new characters for them or just use the known and loved Nintendo characters, they said in the end they said that adding different faces wouldn't change the final game and would just make it easier for their fans to associate with the game if it featured them.

Again some people just look at the new games which feature that lovely italian mustache and just think.... Rehash, sad times.

There's a long, very complicated answer to this question that I'm not going to flesh out here.

The simple answer is that there are a lot of very different kinds of gamers, and a lot of very different kinds of games. Many games have narrow appeal, and many gamers have narrow interests. Expecting such a fractured community to agree on anything is more than a little overly-optimistic.

taste =/= quality

For example, i dislike GTAV but even i can tell that is in fact a high quality game.

The other way around, i love Bullet witch (my fav game on xbox360) but without a doubt is a crappy game.

I can. I recognize Forza and GT are great racing games yet I am NOT personally interested. I also recognize Demon's/Dark Souls as great JRPG style games, but personally I can't get into them (I platinumed Demon's Souls after getting it on Plus but still didn't think it was GREAT I just wanted the challenge and it certainly gave me that though through questionable means). I also can go with consensus on some like FF7-10 being great according to most of the JRPG fans I know both in real life and internet-wise.

I've always viewed quality as the overall functionality of a game. Does it do what it was intended/promised to do? Does the game work? I tend to to look at a game that's very buggy and has terrible controls as a game of lower quality. I also tend to look as things like graphics, cutscene editing , music, and voice acting more as the aesthetics of a game and not something that's as important as functionality as long as it does not intrude onto the gameplay. I look at game design as a combination of functionality and aesthetics, something that in my opinion is about as important as gameplay.

Games are complex beasts,
IE Valkyria Chronicles, pretty much every final fantasy (FF6 evasion stat does nothing, FF7 MAGDef does nothing because of bugs), Elderscrolls or RPG's in general can be broken if you know how to break it.

However, I'd argue breaking it is part of the fun. But, I'd completely understand why some people would think said game is broken, and downrate.

Story's are extremely subjective, you can like camp silly stories for being an entertaining camp silly story like say escape from new york. But if you analyze the plot, characters it ends up being ridiculous.