Elden Ring surpasses The Last of Us Part II as the most-awarded Game of the Year recipient

You are now officially a developer.😎

You should have been here for some of the game engine talk that took place during your hiatus.

Almost got involved, but figured nah, deaf ears.

Basically the Unreal cycle at it again.

ER can only be played on PS? What crack are you smoking?

LMAO! I directly quoted you from the people who served on the panel and why they declined and here you're with your assumptions that those 100s of media influencers have to be objective or infallible.

Yes, I do and all you have is your feelings to disprove everything I said. As for reviewing them 'fairly', objectively it has been pointed and found countless times how those reviewers failed to properly assess the game or even knew their mechanics and docked points for that or vice versa. One instance was literally a game dev had to call out on how the reviewer didn't even know how the mechanics work (I think it was Age of Singularity). Another very recent example is that of Death Stranding where across the board it got high scores but the actual content of the reviews were either the polar opposite of the scores or sounded apologetic on how they are dumb for not understanding Kojima's 'masterpiece'. Hell, those same people and fans in general before the release kept saying that the game won't be just climbing and walking; Kojima is just trolling and the actual gameplay would be different. LMAO, once the cat was out of the bag how they quickly changed the narrative.

Another example of 'fairly', if they are afraid of losing the trust of their audience than that precisely means that I'm right and they chase clicks. The prime example of being afraid of the mob and chasing the hype/sentiment. Way to self own yourself. I think one recent example of the lady who reviewed (CP2077?) on GS I believe. What happened to her? She was mocked and harassed constantly until she quit and once the cat was out of the bag, she was proven right. That's the environment where games are reviewed.

You can continue to kiss a$$es of your so called 'professional reviewers' as much as you want than actual gamers or people with taste/integrity/no skin in the game. However, I'll continue to trust actual customers and their experience precisely because they all comes from different skill sets, setups and backgrounds. Far often they were the ones who found the problems and brought attention to fix the problems with the game or issue refunds which none of your 'professional reviewers' raised or even care about. Oh and Steam has many tools to filter down the reviews on criterion you are interested in or have some doubts about. Of course, a cow like you wouldn't know that since you never got a choice and had to be spoon fed things via marketing.

EDIT: Oh and I didn't even mention how many publications are outright owned/affiliated to actual platform owners like MS/Nintendo/Sony to pad their scores and also awards. I mean imagine if a movie is allowed to reviewed/rated by its own studio.

The only platform you can play the two most awarded games of all time is on Playstation. You know what I meant, sorry if you don't like it... You gonna cry?

LOL If you seriously believe in some weird conspiracy theory that ER was voted GOTY at TGA by over 100 media outlets for clicks or ad revenue, I have no words to convince you, just pity you.

Of course, like all humans, reviewers are not always perfect and can make wrong judgments. To add to your example, IGN plagiarized a review of Dead Cells, or reviewed RE2Remake without playing Claire's part and later revised it, but those should be considered a few individual screwups rather than a general case. To take those few instances out of literally countless reviews and use them as evidence to generalize that "their reviews are not fair” is too stretched and just a disingenuous argument.

No, you're mistaken, Death Strading is rated relatively high in the aggregate, but individually, the ratings were split, with IGN giving it a 6, Game Informer a 7, and GS a 9, for example. Despite the differences, the reviews support the individual opinions, and there is nothing particularly strange about them. It is because Kojima has created a new experimental sub-genre, and it is only natural that there are different evaluations about it. Again, it has nothing to do with your point.

It was very unfortunate that Kallie Plagge, who had valid criticisms of CP2077 (she still gave it a reasonable 7, though), was harassed by some CDPR fanboys. This was because she criticized the sexism in CP2077, to which those fanboys reacted overly defensively. But is it true that she expressed her honest opinion because she wanted clicks and ad revenue? And did she correct her opinion because she was harassed? No. She did not. Rather, this is an example of her reviewing and expressing her genuine opinion, which, again, has nothing to do with your claim.

Again, to me, a well-structured analysis by a reviewer who is familiar with a particular genre is far more beneficial than random guys, and this is from my long gaming experience and I find nothing persuasive in your opinion about the Steam reviews. Also, as you point out, as a cow, I don't need to waste my time dealing with the problems that a PC can cause. Reddit and ResetEra are much more useful to me than Steam reviews when I want to discuss specific issues and personal opinions of each game with "actual gamers or people".

It's quite strange that despite MS/Nintendo/Sony controlling those publications according to your opinion, ER wins the most GOTYs by far and not their first-party games, haha.

You can continue to cry all you want and keep you head under the sand but everyone knows what TGA stands for. I'll continue to laugh at you for taking it seriously.

Actually these are not few or individual screwups. That happens constantly and consistently across the board. You don't know about it because you only play on consoles and that too, mostly mainstream, heavily marketed games probably. Everyone in the PC space knows this. Hell, it's common that reviews are now done under extremely controlled conditions and only on a single platform with often times as fast as possible to get it out on time. Don't blame individuals for a systematic problem.

No, my point was the complete opposite that happens when someone tries to have an honest opinion, same as like Jeff Grubb or other reviewer that originally reviewed TLOU. If you want to survive the publication has to chase the sentiment and clicks. You can't have differing opinions.

ROFLMAO at 'well-structured analysis by a reviewer who is familiar with a particular genre'. Your typical 'critic' if anything is the one least equipped with knowledge about the genre, one very classic example is reviewers from IGN calling GoW having better combat than DMC5 or a pannel on GS discussing the GoW4 admitting they never played the original trilogy and the new one definitely is a better game.

I never said Sony/MS/Nintendo controls all those publications. I said they pad their aggregate scores with their publications and it's has been demonstrated time and time again while sometimes finds stupid reasons to rate the products down they consider competing with 'their games'. Couple of examples that I remember from the top of my head is OPM deducting points for Witcher 3 saying it's not an open world game because it has different regions and another is them giving KZ:SF the 9.5 and a review full of praises. It's now taken down and replaced with a different review and score probably because of a blow back and how different it was comapred to pretty much all other non-affiliated outlets. No matter how you look at it, you can't DC this fact that you have content owners allowed to review their own content. A big f**king giant hole in your entire 'awards/scores' are objective and indicative of quality and just quality of games alone.

Well, there are people like you in our society who always claim that the voting was rigged if they are not happy with the results and jump to conspiracy theories, haha.

That said, I'm tired of your dishonest arguments that pass off as a few extreme/off-the-mark examples as if they represent the unfairness of reviewers in general.

If you seriously believe that they can't write honest opinions because they are afraid of backlash from fanboys, that is a grossly unfair underestimation of their professionalism.

In fact, for studios that have vocal and dedicated fan bases, such as Bethesada, CDPR, and Bioware, for example, many of the critics from mainstream media outlets are not afraid to backlash and give games like FO76, CP2077, and Anthem a fair shot, criticized the problems and gave them low ratings.

Likewise, they harshly criticized and gave low scores to games that did not reach a certain quality, such as Days Gone, Pokemon SV, Sea of Theives, for example, from Sony, Nintendo and MS, which you believe are padding their review scores.

All of this seems to have never happened in your mind, because it doesn't fit your very biased agenda that reviewers are only after branding, hype, clicks and ad revenue.

Also, as far as DMC5 and GoW combat is concerned, each has its pros and cons, with DMC5 being better in some aspects and GoW being better in others. If he has a persuasive logic to make such a claim, then there is nothing wrong with the review.

Again, I am tired of you making up weird strawmen to affirm your claims, and I think further discussion is a waste of time. So, as usual, I agree to disagree and would like to end here.

It is time people accept that reviews are not objective truth and neither are awards. Both are driven by opinion. There are not clear metrics for these evaluations. This is why it is a waste of time arguing over these things. If GOTY was based of hard metrics such as most sales, most played game by hours etc but it is not. So, we have multiple GOTY from multiple sources that are from individuals with varying opinions. With regards to reviews, well they have become closer to opinion pieces than reviews.

That's all true but a particular bunch loves GOTY awards, sales, and Metacritic scores when they works in their favor. When they don't, they lose their minds. I won't name that bunch.

It is time people accept that reviews are not objective truth and neither are awards. Both are driven by opinion. There are not clear metrics for these evaluations. This is why it is a waste of time arguing over these things. If GOTY was based of hard metrics such as most sales, most played game by hours etc but it is not. So, we have multiple GOTY from multiple sources that are from individuals with varying opinions. With regards to reviews, well they have become closer to opinion pieces than reviews.