I have two points that you didn't bring up at all, first I don't think reviewers get paid, at least not like some people think that everybody in the industry gets paid. But there is probably some pressure to some degree imposed by game publishers, it would be pretty easy to without actually paying anybody directly, here's how: How is Gamespot making money? With advertising, and what advertisements are there? Only gaming stuff: games, consoles and everything that has to do with games. So the producers of the games that you review are actually the ones that pay your bills it is pretty easy to see the link between this. There are also a lot of different gaming sites these days so it would be pretty easy for those publishers to exploit the situation and say: "Hey if you don't give us some good scores we are going to go to IGN, Polygon or Kotaku with our money" (And by the way this already happened: http://kotaku.com/5893785/yes-a-games-writer-was-fired-over-review-scores)
And my second point is that some reviewers are just not honest in their reviews, this can have many different reasons. I personally accused Tom McShea multiple times that he gives beloved games bad reviews on purpose just to spread controversy and get himself known as a tough reviewer.
@Kevin-V @realguitarhero5 @poomonger613 @MateykoSlam I actually agree for once with his score, NBA Live looks terrible next to NBA2K14 and therefore the low score is probably justified, but I still have issues with Tom McShea as a reviewer. In this case he had to give a bad review and it might be true that he is on average with other reviewers and of course you have to defend him but there are things that just seem odd. I personally accuse him of giving bad scores to beloved games on purpose just to polarize and getting himself known as a tough reviewer and that makes him not trustworthy which, as a reviewer is the worst thing you can do.
Here's an example he reviewed Bioshock Infinite months after the initial review on Gamespot and months after the launch, what exactly is the point of that? A review should be a guide to us what Gamespot thinks is worthy of buying, of course this can change considering your personal taste but it should still give us some idea what you think. Now like I said there was an initial review that gave it a good score (your review), you talked at length about the game, its strengths and flaws and gave it a 9. Then months later(after the game got universal acclaim), McShea gave it a 4, of course he is allowed to his opinion, but what purpose served this review months after the release? The points that he made to detract from the score were often weird and sometimes even stupid (sorry to say it like that but it's true), for example did he say "Mechanics clash with the narrative", saying that the vigors made no sense story-wise! Really? Since when do we look for realism in games that add up to 100%, well then an italian plumber walking all over mushrooms for a princess should be considered the worst game in history. My point is that you can make that point in any game in history of gaming, there is literally no game that is 100% real, so why make it here and not in every other review? He just seemed to want to look for things to give it a bad score, and he did. (Furthermore it says that the original Bioshock was his favorite game, he probably build the game up in his mind on what the game should be and then was disappointed when it wasn't what he was expecting, leading to him being even more harsh on the game)
You could say, well this was just one review, no, there are other examples of weird scoring with him, another example is DuckTales Remastered. This is a game released in 1989 which has a good fanbase of people who love it. What was the point of releasing a remastered version? Well it's easy, to offer fans of the game a new version of a beloved game of their childhood, it wasn't to attract new fans(well not its primary goal) but offer a possibility to fans to relive childhood memories. What did Tom do? He compared it to other, newer platformers and held it to standards it couldn't possibly live up to and gave it a 4.5. Why even review this if you weren't a fan of the original one, again what was the purpose? What he did is again just giving a beloved game a bad score to spread controversy and get himself known as a tough reviewer.
There are more examples but I think for now this is enough to get you to understand what my point is. I hope you could give me an answer on this.
@Scream_AimxFire I respect your points that you made, but I have a different opinion, mainly because of two reasons; first I'm European which means most of those TV features won't work here, so I would pay even more than people in North America for an XboxOne for just a fraction of the features and that hardly seems like a good deal(and don't say we will get similar features for our market, that is true for the UK or Germany but not here, we won't even get the XboxOne at launch and a 2014 release date hasn't even been announced for my country). How MS treats the European market is really baffling to me, I know that NA is more important to them but still we are a huge market and right now it seems that we need to pay 100€ more for nothing.
And secondly I'm a Playstation guy, I owned all of their consoles and handhelds and I always enjoyed them. I also think that PSs exclusives are way better(just my opinion) and that the PS has a better support in the long run, just look at this gen, the PS started pretty weak but in the last 2-3 years they really had great exclusives which you can't say for the 360. For example this year, the 360 had no exclusives, none (I might have missed one but I don't think there was one), and just look at the PS3, The Last of Us, GoW Ascension, GT6, Puppeteer, Ratchet and Clank, Beyond, etc, their support seems to be bigger. And this is also a big selling point for me, Sony is really investing in its gaming section, it's important to the company, whereas MS seems to be split about the Xbox brand and some of the investors even call for them to sell it which worries me for their future.
I will probably own an XboxOne at some point but I will definitely start with a PS4
@Tiwill44 Well it is different, GT is more realistic and has a huge amount of cars and tracks, whereas Forza is kind of in between GT and other racing games like Need for Speed. But in the end they are all racing games, if you don't like one of them you probably won't like the others.
@HesamB What were you expecting? It is a launch, when have launch games ever been good? In addition we have been spoiled this year, GTAV, The Last of US, Bioshock Infinite, Rayman Legends...
@Primeyuri @DamnILoveGames Well they probably got a lot of money to make it an exclusive and to make it a 360 game too would defeat the purpose of getting people to buy an XboxOne.
@dubbmented Yeah I read that too, it's from The Globe and Mail(Toronto), they gave it a 10! A 10! They probably went a little bit to far, I mean according to that review it should be mentioned in the same category as GTAV, The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite and that's just stretching it a little...
@ewjiml @shingui5 Well there are still people who will enjoy games like Killzone or Knack on PS4(I'm one of those) or Dead Rising on XboxOne even if they have mediocre scores, it's just a matter of opinion.
denhoffi's comments