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Forums - Gaming Discussion - It's Official-ish, PS4 Has the Best Games Lineup for New Gen Home Consoles this Holidays

As far as Metacritic is concerned, it really is the best forum to show a general barometer of aggregate scores for games though. Of course, certain games get reviewed differently for certain consoles (See: The Evil Within on Xbox One vs. PS4), but it's the best source we have currently.



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I agree with many people. In my opinion ports, multiplats and indies dont count.

And as of right now id rank the console libraries as:
1-Wii U
2-Xbone
3-PS4



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binary solo said:
Veknoid_Outcast said:

Is this a joke thread? I thought at first it was, but now I'm not so sure.

If it is a joke thread, disregard the following question:

Is it your contention that Metacritic scores are objective indicators of quality? In other words, a game with a Metacritic score of 90 is, by definition, better than a game with a Metacritic score of 89? And that a game with a score of 70, however popular and beloved, is a poor game? Are you saying, in the end, that our own personal evaluations of individual games are immaterial, and, by extension, all the debates on this forum are pointless?

Or are you just messing with us?

P.S. Velocity 2X isn't a new IP.

Do you not understand metacritic and how it derives the metascore for each game? And do you not understand the meaning of the word objective? It appears from your question that you don't understand either of these things. Let me educate you.

Metacritic derives its score from a weighted average of the scores from reviews it collects. Each review is obviously a subjective assessment of a game based on the views of the critic. The metascore is less subjective than each individual review's score because it is effectively a poll of many different opinions. But less subjective =/= objective. The metascore is more like a probability of whether you will like the game.

Objective means " not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts." This thread is an objective presentation of the best reviewed games that are available on the three new gen home consoles and their respective metascores. Errors caused by laziness or carelessness aside, the list in the OP is completely free from my personal feelings or opinions. I haven't included or excluded any games from consideration based on whether I think they should count.

You will note that in the OP I say "This is as objective as it gets in this industry". Ergo I am saying it is not truly objective. But the fact is, there is nothing more objective available to base an assesment of which console has the best library of games leading in to the holidays.

TBH I should add the 70+ games because I've argued (subjectively obviously) in the past that 70+ games should be regarded as good/great games. For Wii U that's 19 more games, for PS4 that's 25 more games and for Xb one that's 14 more games (that's without making sure all the multiplats are in each list). But as you can see it only adds further weight to the assessment in favour of PS4.

This thread is not so much a joke thread, as bit of a snark at claims PS4 has the lowest quality library among the 3 new gen platforms. While metascore isn't really objective proof that PS4 has the best quality library, it is objective evidence that PS4 has a more than sufficient library of good quality games and it is comparable to the other new gen consoles.


I understand how Metacritic works and I understand the meaning of objective. 

Your presentation of these numbers may be objective, but the numbers per se are not. They are the collected works of human beings, all carrying their own preferences, priorities, hang-ups, and biases. Yes, by virtue of their proximity to the industry and their experience with games, they are given deference. But in no way does a 95 on Metacritic, for example, make a game great. It signals that the average weighted score from critics was 95, it signals overwhelming critical approval, but it doesn't signify greatness. 

And if we follow your line of thought to its logical conclusion, which I did in my original post, then why bother debating the quality of games? How can I argue that game A is better than game B, if Metacritic, which, as you say, is "objective evidence," says otherwise?

If you truly feel that PS4 is being unfairly criticized, then I encourage you to play its games, play its competitors' games, and write a detailed, thoughtful essay on why you personally believe that PS4 has an excellent library of games. It would be a lot more meaningful coming from you, based on your own analysis, written in your own words. Simply copying and pasting an aggregate of others' opinions does the whole topic a disservice.



Smash

Your argument is now invalid.



Veknoid_Outcast said:

Well, that's just it. All Metacritic tells us is what a few dozen publications thought of the game in question. It gives us a sense of the critical consensus. It doesn't tell us anything about a game's quality, because that is very much a personal evaluation. 

Metacritic is a collection of opinions, not unlike this forum. Sure, Metacritic collects opinions from so-called experts and industry veterans, but in the end those opinions are as rooted in subjective truths as our own. They simply have a byline.

To collect such opinions and present them as objective facts is misguided. 

I agree, but like i said, that's not really how metacritic should be used. Reviewers are not free of preferences and biases, no one is. But they are (usually) the closest to that we get. If a mass of people think a site or reviewer is letting their bias overwhelm their role as a critic, they stop reading them. That, combined with meta often being a weighted average of 50 to 100 of them (a decent sample size), makes metacritic the most objective data we have. I'd argue that its use is fairly limited when comparing a select number of games, even if you are just looking at their probable generalize quality, but on large scales (such as 2 game libraries) it's a useful source of information.

While it should never be used as proof of an absolute, metacritic is objective enough that it can support statements like "[x] library is objectively more likely to be enjoyed than [y]". A statement doesn't have to  be a pure, unquestionable fact for it to have merit.

Of course, none of that will stop people using it as proof that someone is "wrong" for not liking one more than the other :p Damn your opinion, mine is better!



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Yet my PS4 still collects dust. I need Drake and i need it now



PSN & XBOX GT : cutzman25

binary solo said:

Irregardless of the various failings of metacritic, it's a better metric to use than some random dude posting in an internet forum. There are typically sufficient reviews in a metascore to cancel out various of the most egregious biases. It is particularly effective at negating the influence of the platform preference bias. And in that respect metascore is fairly objective. Platform preference bias can affect metascore by a few points, but the presence of platform preference bias in any given review cannot cause the metascore to alter all that significantly.

But to support your claim that weighted average of selected reviews is sufficiently problematic to make metascore of negligible value you'd have to provide evidence that the contributors to metascore are not a reasonable representation of critics in general; qualitatively or quantitatively. Taking a sample, and weighting the results in an effort to account for certain biases is not in itself a fatally flawed methodology. You need to show either sampling bias, or evaluation bias in Metacritic's methodology in order to show that the best option available is not beter enough to be worth using for any meta meta purpose.

No, actually, I wouldn't. A simple citation to a basic manual on statistics is all I'd need*, and that only if I decided to not hold you responsible for first proving your assertion that metacritic is somehow what you claim it is.

In reality, the system you're lauding as somehow eliminating system bias due to its non-random selection and weighing of a few dozen reviews (a highly questionable assertion in my opinion) demonstrably introduces equally egregious biases which negate the value of whatever information you're trying to discover, as a casual glance at its lists will easily demonstrate.**

So what does metacritic tell us? It tells us what the critics selected by metacritic think, as weighed by metacritic's opinion of the worth of those reviews. Nothing more, nothing less. If it got rid of the weighing system, it might actually tell us something about what professional game critics think, depending on how you define that term and how generous you want to be with your confidence level and interval. But then this thread was never supposed to be about what "critics" thought, was it?

 

*You're championing a system wherein gatekeepers first decide whose opinion is worth valuing - which is how Dewey beat Truman once upon a time - and then further degrading their questionable results by assigning arbitrary weight to each of said opinion. In other words, there's no randomness in the selection sample, and there's nowhere near a sufficient sample size to determine what game critics think of these games, let alone the general gamer population. I find it harder to believe that this system somehow creates even an illusion of a worthwhile result than that my calling twenty people I know who answer their landlines gives me an accurate idea of what most Americans think on any given topic, even without then giving Martha's opinion twice as much importance as Danny's.

 

**Unless you believe that the relationship between how people spend their money and what they think of games are independent of one another. I do not share that view in the least.



cutzman25 said:
Yet my PS4 still collects dust. I need Drake and i need it now


I turned mine on today to get the update and it has been so long the controller would not even come on. I had to plug it in and use the system.



Ah! Oh no! My personal taste suddenly feels so invalidated! I... I thought I was the one who decided what games interested me; it was Metacritic all along!!?



Nope! X1 has the best one IMO.



    

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