With recent big game releases, it's become obvious that a game is either a resounding success, or complete shit. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground.

Kingdom Come Deliverance II is a ambitious masterpiece, and Avowed is lazy slop. 93% of Steam users recommend KCD2, vs 77% for Avowed.

And maybe this has been an issue for a long time, fed by the need to get viewer numbers on articles and videos, leading to more polarized opinions that give people a reason to pick a side, even if they're never going to play the game.

But as regular people, gamers, Lemmy posters, why are we doing the same? How is it serving us? Are we all influencers in waiting, hoping to up our updoot count and build a following of... dozens?

More than 2/3rds of players of Dragon Age Veilguard recommend the game on Steam. And yet reading the comments here and other places, you'd think that 90% of people who tried the game found it to be, not just bad, but absolute trash, with a small number of people chiming in that they actually enjoyed it.

And game studios are reacting much the same way, and are quick to start layoffs, or shut down all together.

But hey, we don't owe those corporations anything. But, as a community, do we owe it to each other to foster more honest correspondence?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

From a mechanistic standpoint I think that mostly has to do with the high cost of entry for games.

At $80-$100 for a full priced game these days, it's hard to just buy on a whim. The only time you would is when they're on sale, which happens well after initial release. So initial sales of games are basically entirely driven by reviews and online discourse (which itself has an effect on reviews), and you basically just have a bunch of people all waiting for the signal to buy or not.

I do think that services like Gamepass are a genuinely good way of reducing that effect, because now anyone can try anything on a lark.