What is the cause of the slowly raising 'average' score for games? I swear a game with an eight average is now considered to be an average game these days.

I get the feeling that game reviewers in general are convinced that the majority of games are better than average - so they rate the majority of games higher than average. This raises the average score of games in general meaning that reviewers then rate more games higher than this average.

It's generally based on how most reviewers use a 5-10 system, or a 6-10 system for reviewing games, and for those, any score under 5 or under 6 is just dramatic effect to signify how much of an abomination this game is.

We need more free thinkers (at least in terms of setting a scoring system) like GiantBomb or 1up. Their scores always fuck with metacritic, like GiantBomb's 3/5, which is still a decent score in their eyes, becoming a "zomg! horrible!" 60% on metacritic, helping to devalue that system further.

75% is the new average.

I still stick to 50% being the average, though.

It's because the there is no accountability and because most publications don't have any clue as to how to review games. They review games like they are software like Windows 7 and not like they are art. There is just far to much agreement between reviewers, which is unprecedented and wholy unique for gaming. There isn't a movie, book or album, even the year's best that won't have a wide range of reviews starting in the 90+ and with a low end under the 50s. So there are two ways to look at this. The first is that games are not art, and reviewers are correct to review them the way they do, or that games are art and reviewers need to extract the artistic merit of each release and not rate them like they would software.

Secondly, unlike other areas of critical review, game reviewers seem to be scared of one another and scared to buck the trend. It doesn't matter where you go, even on VGChartz. We've formulated a certain way to judge games and that has caused us to be in general agreement. Reviewers pick up on this and adjust the way they review. This in turn has narrowed the field in which to review games. Very bad games that no one should play take up 50% of the potential scoring. Effectively, they've condensed the scoring. I see it like this:

95-100=Classic
90-94=Amazing
85-89=Great
80-84=Good
70-79=Average
60-69=Below Average/Mediocre
50-59=Bad
40-49=Shovelware Level 1
30-39=Shovelware Level 2
20-29=Shovelware Level 3
10-19=Shovelware Level 4
0-9=Shovelware Level 5

Notice how much of the general scoring is used to categorize games no one wants to play anyways? Really, what's the difference between the games in that bottom half anyways? Effectively, there's very little difference between a game that is a 45 and a game that is a 25. If both are practically unplayable messes (which is another sign that games get reviewed on general performance and functionality), then why have such a long range to seperate them? Why not use a 10-20 point scale for games of that quality and open up the rest of the field?

Lastly, you have pressure to one up the next guy to entice people to read your website/magazine, and you do that by having sensationalistic reviews. There's one publication that recently gave Uncharted 2 an 11...out of 10. It's that type of one-upsmanship that will cripple any chance of game reviewing to be legitimately worth reading. Not to mention how much emphasis is put on game reviews to bring in readership. Do you think Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly has to advertise on their cover almost every month that a certain big name movie, book or album is getting reviewed? Absolutely not. Now look at gaming magazines and tell me what you see on the front cover. "FIRST EXCLUSIVE REVIEW OF HALO 3: ODST!"

It depends on what you consider to be average.

I'm okay with a lot of games that come out being rated high. It shows that there are a lot of good developers out there.

Also I think people tend to focus on high rated games... but there are a lot of low rated games too.

One more thing. It would be practically impossible to find a single game reviewing publication that doesn't provide a score at the end. This is completely different to any other artistic field like the aformentioned, because you'll always find publications that don't bother to score their reviews. They trust the content within their reviews to tell you what it is about. What doesn't help is that most gaming magazines are glorified picture books, made for people more into looking at the pretty pictures than reading the content surrounding them.

It's come to the point that the emphasis of the review is to score it and the writing within takes a step to the side because it's of less importance. How many here have judged a review based solely on the score without bothering to read the context? Don't worry, it's not entirely your fault. One reason why could be because most reviews are glorified game manuals that explain to you what the game does, but do not explain at all why you should or should not like it. You rely on the score to help explain what the surgically precise and cold review does not. That's because again, games are reviewed like Avast Antivirus and not Disney Pixar's Up.

Onyxmeth, would you say that the ideal scoring system - at least in theory - would be to drop a scoring system altogether?

Probably because they receive tons of hate mail from fanboys if they score a game too low.

As much as I hate to say it, we need more EDGEs.

has anyone gone through year by year and found the true average review score (as in the average score for all reviews for all games released in that year) to see if the scores are really creeping up? i feel like they are but i'd love to have some proof to point to.