Probably the most valid point in this thread.

I hate it when I read a review and the first thing the person says it "Well, I'm not a big genre buff, but this game..."

Seriously, why? Clearly you won't have had as much exposure to the good and crap of the genre to be able to make a fair judgement about the game, let alone giving it a numerical score.

i repeat that 0s and 10s are just affect score on IGN and Gamespot, user review score is taken from more sites

it's not a single game, it's many of them, except Wii games, where in most of them user score is higher

also, reviewers are forced to play a game, and most reviewers are normally core gamers i guess

if userscore is just 0s and 10s then how the hell does games get a user score they deserve or close to reviewers score??

SoulCalibur IV has 8.5 reviewers and 8.4 gamers score for example, is it luck that they are so close? same for many other games

and for god's sake, this is just wrong, i don't think HD fanboys bothered to give 0s to games like Castlevania Judgement, and Wii fanboys bothered to give 10s to Castlevania Judgement, which has

	PRESS SCORE	4.8
	GAMER SCORE	7.3

and i have the game, 7.3 is a much reasonable score than 4.8, maybe i'd give it a 7.3 myself

same goes for SoulCalibur Legends, i don't think that game has 10s or 0s either, but use score is higher

The press score for the top 20 Wii games (excluding duplicates due to bundling) is lower than the gamer score on average by about 0.28 points. I was going to run the numbers for the PS3 and 360 to see a difference, but the Wii number speaks loudly enough. If someone can tell me a way to get games randomly from their pool I will do this over the entire library and see what it comes out to, but currently I am not seeing this bias. Being off by 0.28 on average tells me the examples here are the exception rather than the rule, and there is probably some other reason they are so much higher than the press score.

top 20 games are top 20, they receive great press score anyway, games like Mario Galaxy, Zelda, Metroid, of course they get their 9.5s

this research shows that gamer score is really logical and not random by 10s and 0s by fanboys as mr Torillian suggests, for my point of view

but what about The Conduit, Madworld, Tales of Symphonia 2 (i made the thread mostly for 3rd party Wii exclusives which are rated bad), Wii gamers love those games and rate them close to 9.0, but reviewers have very different tastes and just killl them

IGN starts to understand Wii better later, come on, Symphonia 2 and Conduit are not 6.5! JUSTICE!

The Conduit

	PRESS SCORE	7.0
	GAMER SCORE	8.9

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the new World

	PRESS SCORE	6.7
	GAMER SCORE	9.0

Mario Kart Wii

	PRESS SCORE	8.0
	GAMER SCORE	8.8

Mario Party 8

	PRESS SCORE	6.4
	GAMER SCORE	7.5

Madworld

	PRESS SCORE	8.3
	GAMER SCORE	9.2

This just again shows that review scores are of no use other than fanboy wars. They don't reflect how much fun a game is, they don't let you judge if the reviewer is biased towards or against the game, they don't show the strengths and weaknesses of the title. Text/video reviews are much better at each of those points, so I just don't care about scores anymore.

Problem is gamer scores= fanboys trying to make there game the best.. you cant trust them

@dark
3 of those examples you just used were part of my data set. MKWii, Madworld, and Mario Party 8 were all included. You are seeing a pattern where none exists. Cherry picking never proves a point.

You realize the top 20 would have the least variance.  Pick middle 20 for the best or even lowest 20 for a better sample set.  People generally don't complain about the bias of the top games.  :;

There is an element of truth to the claim that fanboys will score games for their favourite platform higher and games for another platform lower but I think that (in general) these numbers tend to balance out ... I wouldn't use the user score to argue one game was better than another, but if there is a large disparity between the user and the reviewer's scores it does indicate that there is something that is up.

One of the big problems I have seen over the years of reading videogame reviews is that reviewers tend to play games in a drastically different way to how most gamers will experience that same game. Some games (like Halo 3) have somewhat short and disapointing single player campaigns and get high scores primarily because of their online multiplayer, and a majority of gamers still don't play videogames online; some games (like Mario Party 3) are built around local multiplayer settings and are very enjoyable in them, and some reviewers only play the game as a single player game and then complain that it doesn't have online multiplayer; and then there are games (like The Conduit) which generally don't stand out when compared against a dozend games that the average person interested in the game will have never played.

You realize the top 20 goes a ways down and includes games like MadWorld, Mario Kart Wii, and others that people are panning for critical problems right? People are complaining about bias in the top 20. There is a lot of variance in it too. The largest difference I saw was the Gamer's score being 1.3 points higher than the Critic score. This was for Guitar Hero: Metalica.