Statistically Speaking: Metacritic's "Best Games of All Time"
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- Опубліковано 27 вер 2024
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I paid someone to datamine the 100 highest-rated games on Metacritic, and then made a bunch of wild observations:
1:11 Do scores matter?
02:07 What does the average-looking best game ever look like?
07:32 How have reviewers' preferences changed over time?
And yes, I got the idea from this Star Wars video: • I Scraped 2,500 Review...
The spreadsheet: drive.google.c...
Support the channel on Patreon: / superbunnyhop
Also, listen to the Dad & Sons podcast! / user-872413404
it's interesting how I'm hearing "AA has taken over" and "AA no longer exists" in equal measure lately
*Schrodinger's double A
Who's calling it dead? I'm not sure how common it is in western game development but in Japanese game development there's quite a lot of AA developers out there.
Dunno, can't remember the last time I played an AAA game. Even the best of them can't seem to hold my interest. Life's too short to be wasted on products for "everyone" rather than ones that seem to be tailored just for me.
Those types of games did die, around the end of the last generation. When THQ went bankrupt is kind of the big moment when it was "officially" dead. But since then they've made a comeback. THQ is even back, in name at least. Yet a lot of people are still stuck in that mindset of that part of the market dying. They haven't paid attention to it coming back. Perhaps it has something to do with the name. "AA" is a relatively new term. I don't remember it being used back when that sector was still alive before.
AA will eventually take over AAA if AAA developers can't figure out how to reduce their game development cost. The biggest advantage AA gaming has over AAA is how their games are sold at the same price as AAA games (if not slightly lower) despite having much lower development cost. This allows AA developers to take more creative risks thus their games have more personalities than AAA games. This is accompanied by the fact that most AA games are published and marketed by AAA publishers themselves.
So as a game publisher, it is much safer to bet on AA games due to higher profit margin. That explains why Japanese niche franchises are gaining more popularity than ever in Western market for the past decade.
One of my favorite reviews of anything is for Lord of the Rings Online, where the guy reviewing it gave it a bad score because he forever associates the game with a bad Israeli hash trip
link?
@@bensmith2269 ua-cam.com/video/1hAnvqyfFiM/v-deo.html
Hey hey people
Those kind of reviewers are so damaging to the industry. They just suck at their jobs and dont comprehend the big picture. Its really sad.
@@FredHerbert999 it wasn't even a real review. Just a passing joke on another review entirely.
God, just last week I had to suffer through a video where some guy took all the over-9.0 metacritic scores from 2002 and all the metacritic scores from last year and tried to say that 10 years ago everything was objectively better in every way. I had to post saying that data analysis (and review scores!) don't work that way, and it's like comparing apples to camels. Of course it's a youtube comment, so surely nobody cared. But this, this is a breath of fresh air.
I saw that same video man!
Ya but how many new genres/mechanics were created in the past 20 years verses now? I mean there are certainly just as many great movies (probably moreso) than in the past, but nostalgia aside, there will never be another Godfather simply because it broke new ground for others to follow. Most of those high scoring games of the past created new genres, or refined them to such a degree as to be unrecognizable from their roots.
Not much in the groundbreaking happening now.
@@quintessenceSL That's because you're not paying attention. I have a list of extremely original (and great) games just this year. Outer Wilds, Baba Is You, Dicey Dungeons, Disco Elysium. Of course, we can't know yet if these games will result in new genres because genres only form over time. Plus in the beginnings of a medium new genres form much quicker. It's harder to do something wholly original when a lot has been done already.
And sure, no one's gonna make another Godfather, but they don't need to since it already has been. Yet this year we've had an amazing year in film with films such as Parasite, The Lighthouse, Marriage Story, Uncut Gems. All great films in their own right. What was special about The Godfather was its marketing moreso than the film itself. Everyone knew it, everyone watched it. Art House films don't have that pull anymore but that's also due to industry juggernauts like Disney pushing them off to the side. In artistic industries we're seeing the same development as with retail and Walmart. Juggernauts completely decimating the competition.
welcome to george town. his stuff never disappoints and always surprises.
@@quintessenceSL The big ones are all the Dark Souls, Dota, CCG influences everywhere. Never mind a ton of mobile and indie games setting trends and changing things up regularly this past decade. If anything, the 00's were all about refining genres invented in the 90's. And improving on storytelling and production values. Where the 10's saw a lot of creativity and influences from all over, because game development opened up and it's way easier for anyone to start making games than it ever was.
At least that's my experience.
"When going by this number, these games are not comparable to one another at all, not in the slightest! There are suddenly oddities and exceptions everywhere."
Welcome to what 90% of the work is as a statistician/data scientist, George. You did well.
Hate to repeat myself, but: To be completely honest, I find the Celeste/Undertale thing absolutely *delicious.* Over the past decade, you have all of these increasingly extravagant AAA spectacle pieces battling it out over who can deliver the most "content" with the most polish... only for two emotionally intimate little indie games in unfashionable genres sporting the most retro visual aesthetics to completely trounce them by simply doing what they set out to do incredibly well.
Oh You comented it again, awesome, I totally agree 💜
I'd also like to say the same about the niche Japanese franchises that have been gaining popularity over the decade. They're still not the best selling games, but they go to show that a good niche product will have good audience retention. I'm hoping that Death Stranding proves the viability of niche AAA projects.
I mean, I doubt these two games sold as well as those big AAA titles. Is this really "trouncing" them?
@@JukaDominator That is like a larger discussion about if you really think money is an indicator of worth and or "excellence". Which, again, larger, bigger discussion but I believe it's something that's very subjective. Which I think was kinda the point George was making in this video, or at least one of the points (sorry my English is not the best)
@@alucardhellsing5466 I know a lot of people don't agree, but I do think money is a big indicator, since you wouldn't have bought the games if you didn't want them. You satisfied someone's needs, and that's a big deal.
I really thought when you started talking about the commonalities between them that this would end up a very long shitpost about MGS3 being the statistically best game of all time.
A man can dream.
When I hear the words "do review scores matter?" I turn my head to see OBSIDIAN looking down to a barren floor, and kicking a empty can.
What happened with Obsidian?
@@KwarterCraft bethesda basically held a ton of profit of new Vegas from them, because they were 2 points short of the required threshold on metacritic. It forced obsidian into a few dozen layoffs. Not only was it absolutely scummy, but it's made bethesda even more notorious now, as new Vegas is still the considered the best of the fallout games released by bethesda, along with bethesda revealing itself to be a horrible company that makes shit games
@@KwarterCraft Pretty famously Bethesda had Obsidian produce Fallout:NV on a tight schedule. They were told they were given a bonus upon a review score of 85. They got 84. They got nothing.
it didnt force obsidian into a few dozen layoffs. they lost out on a bit of money as per the agreement but the layoffs happened during development of a canned third person action game with microsoft
@@BillyMaizes/videos Not only that but Obsidian were given only 18 months to finish the game and much of the criticism New Vegas got was from technical errors that were entirely Bethesda's fault.
2:44 you forgot "person"
My favorite videogame genre, person.
I got a new game for you, an action, person, RPG. You in?
Guess thats the genre where the camera is turned off.
Metacritic lists Action Man: Raid on Island X with the "action" tag but not the "person" tag. Shameful.
Action adventure modern person shooter
or
Action adventure modern shooter person
__¯\_(ツ)_/¯_*_*
its from 3rd person and 1st person because its 2 words
A sincere 'thank you for your service' for compiling and navigating and interpreting that spreadsheet. It looks seriously daunting but as someone who's been thinking a lot lately about game preservation beyond 'ROMs in a folder', how games were marketed and talked about and reviewed and how those reviews aged and are relics of their own snapshot in culture, a video like this is really, really important and interesting.
EDIT: Also just want to say that I've always loved the way your writing can shift very rapidly and organically from hard, analytic number-crunching to 'damn, this art made me feel things' and the bit about 'games that were polished to a mirror sheen vs games that gave you tingling feelings in your stomach because you connected with them on an aesthetic and / or mechanical level' felt like an absolute crystallization of that. Bloodborne really was that for me. Yeah, it was polished, but the polish was used to make a sense of atmosphere that just set the tips of my fingers and toes alight. It still does.
One of the things you should keep in mind when looking at reviews through the ages is thinking about the idea of 'games journalism' itself. Like many cultures, it was just a fan driven thing at one time, not anything you would ever even hear about in schools or colleges. It's a very young medium (computers themselves being the actual medium, automated interactivity being the prime delineation here) and so it's worth noting that even in interviews with national magazine editors like Steve Harris from EGM, he'll happily tell you 'We were just kids having a good time and didn't know anything about what we were doing'...much like the majority of early adopters of the industry itself making the games.
Also, it's worth noting that Japan, where a lot of early games were also coming from, as well as the UK had very different attitudes toward both computers and games creation and are a bit of an extension to their general attitudes toward pop culture and media in addition to how they treated the shifting tides of technology itself and the 'computer invasion' as it were. I can't speak with any authority about Japan, but it's clear early on that there's a level of respect for games as a medium that ran along side their respect for animation (it's obvious to anyone looking at America's animation output that it's still viewed as 'for kids') and in the UK, their 'computer literacy programs' meant that there was widespread adoption of computers in general and therefor a pretty vibrant range of people who might make and play them. Compare that to the US where 'computers are for business' kind of attitude and marketing and there starts to be some real huge differences in the origins of what most would consider the three epicenters of gaming history.
I don't know if any of this makes sense because I'm probably rambling at this point, but I've been into gaming as a culture and history for a while now since modern games actually don't interest me much at all, at least in the mainstream sense. Call of Shooty, Sporty Game 2k20, etc. don't interest me at all. I don't care how good a game looks, I don't play them to oogle at graphics because I can do that just watching a Let's Play video, so I spend a lot of my 'gaming time' these days just looking at general culture around the time gaming became a thing.
I would also like to offer a correction to the video as well: Arcades in the late 70's and early 80's in every country was mainstream and made TONS of money. There's a reason why Time Warner bought Atari in 1981. However, I suppose in this context he means 'big AND sustained' since America did go through the crash of '83, but that has more to do with short sighted general capitalism and quarterly earnings vs. quarterly projections than games themselves. I tend to believe a good game is one that you'll play for 20 years, and that's really hard to tell a company that depends on selling at least one big title every year.
I'm surprised that "dark souls" wasn't one the highest used phrase in reviews.
Only 8 games from the last decade broke the top 100 so it'd have to be mentioned a lot in those reviews to appear. If his data was from all games in the past decade "dark souls", "souls like", or "soulsy" may be the most used terms by a mile
The media only jumped on the Dark Souls train once word of mouth made it popular. Like mentioned at the start of the video, this top 100 list is incredibly influenced by marketing budgets.
Because Dark Souls is not as popular as people think. Or rather, it’s harder to get into for the time a reviewer would need to critique it.
No doubt it’s one of the best things to happen to games in the past decade but I know a lot of people who hated the series and only came around to it after HOURS of trying again and again. Ben Crowshaw and Gavin Dunne come to mind as far as people who didn’t like the game but came around to loving the series.
It's almost like reviewers don't actually use that title as much as people like to claim they do.
It's the dark souls of phrases!
Review scores are better at capturing the zeitgeist, presence, and impact of a game and cultural values than they are at accurately reflecting a game's quality.
Very well said.
GTA, COD, Mario and Pokemon. Hearing those four names gives me PTSD flashbacks now. Video games need fresh new ideas not sequelitis and stagnation. Its the exact problem film is dealing with.
*The Legend of Super Auto Theft Four* is the first title when Disney buys out the whole industry.
I honestly feel like it really depends on the game, the franchise, and the state the franchise is in but I can definitely see where your coming from.
"Its the exact problem film is dealing with."
Well yeah, because its the easy way to make money. But sequels and fresh ideas aren't mutually exclusive. It's just the executives and the higher-ups preying on people who want a continuation of their favorite franchise, it being Fallout or Pokémon, and pushing out mediocre games because, like metacritic scores show, brand recognition is the only thing that matters for people to buy and love their games.
I dunno. I've been playing games for nearly 30 years, and I've played stuff in every genre and played all sorts of experimental games, but these days what I enjoy the most are games that just go back to the basics with stuff like mario-style platformers. Nothing beats that simple joy for me. I've played the Shovel Knight games dozens of times each. Being experimental and pushing limits for its own sake is cool and we definitely need that. But it's often that the experimental one isn't great but the subsequent games that adopt elements of the experimental ones but try to make coherent games out of them end up being great.
Just like with music. You get crazy stuff like Stockhausen, but then the Beatles listened to Stockhausen a lot (especially Paul) and then adapted elements of Stockhausen into their own better songs that were actually good to listen to as songs, not just as experiments
Incredible: It turns out you cannot objectively measure feelings about art in numbers, nor can you use those numbers describing feelings to see what, statistically speaking, would be the best work of art ever.
Truerly incredible Facts being speweed here :O
"Who critiques the, uh, Critique-Men?"
youtube commenters
@@NickHunter nice system of checks and balances we got going here
Well, there was a loose, nebulous collection of gamers who tried that, but the critique-men didn't respond well _at all_ to being critiqued.
Like, *at all*
Matt brought this up
@ShoLKAN Most of the people who participated in GG were left and center left people. I wonder who gave you this contrary impression. Certainly not the media figures who were being criticized... surely a person of at least moderate intelligence would see that they have everything to gain by slandering their critics and not addressing their core critiques, right? By the by, that's called an ad hominem fallacy. The actual kind; not the way it generally gets thrown around online.
George might be my favorite game journalist. Every video of his is the most amazing interesting topic you never knew you wanted to hear about. Keep up the beautiful work Mr Bunnyhop
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This is why I sort of like retrospective reviews, not only it is separated from the marketing infused hype pressing for higher scores to get more sales, it is able to get a new metric that you cannot get from launch, "how well does it hold up today"
Also while this is all subjective it is a pretty good indicator why games after 2015 are not received with the same enthusiasm that the past generation games have been, in short yes games of yesterday are just better than many of the big budget title games of today.
If you listen closely at 1:08 you can hear george clicking his mouse
George just lost another dollar there.
Your profile pic. I require the source. That is some high quality shitpost material
George clicks confirmed
ethan philpot Google shaggy rei, not my own content unfortunately lol
*IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU*
THIS GAME WILL GET YOU LAID
Oh, good ol' NAViGaTR.
WELL I LIKE IT BUT THERE'S DEFINITIVELY, OBJECTIVELY, A LOT OF THINGS WRONG WITH ME.
Donkey Kong Country is truly perfect. If you do not get this amazing new generation of Donkey Kong Country madness, you are stupid. Yes, I know it's insulting, but that's also the truth. If you're a true video game fan, you will not hesitate in the slightest bit to "buy this piece of gaming history." - George Wood
"Slightly fewer" editing errors. :p
thanks Stannis :p
You may be more grammatically correct but I swear "less" still sounds better.
@@bunnyhopshow no one says fewer anymore, it saddens me
@@bunnyhopshow I'm gonna guess this is because "less editing" sounds more natural, even when the wording of "fewer errors" is technically correct
@@bunnyhopshow "slightly less" is a bit of an established phrase, so I guess that's why it rolls off the tongue better.
Finally, ACTUAL journalism.
(This time With slightly less typing errors)
EDIT: I swear to god how many times is this man gonna change the title now no one will ever get the joke anymore ):
*Fewer
Things I'm surprised didn't get mentioned:
•Sonic Adventure has a 95 or so from its original dreamcast release but like a 49 for the HD version, probably the biggest discrepancy between releases I can think of (good for the time capsule point but maybe a retread of the first Sonic levels video, arguably George's best)
•MGS2 is the highest rated MGS despite its reputation for critical pushback at the time, and the later consensus of MGS3 as the best (especially in George's view)
•Why it might be getting harder for games to crack those top ratings. Less consensus? Higher standards? Stagnation?
Overall a good overview of the situation, I love George's content as always.
I do appreciate the return to this OP ed style about video game critic culture having this strong need for not just maturity but self-importance and self-vindication as a medium; and how in pursuing said ideal of an objective "worthwhile"-ness for games has instead paradoxically proven how fallicious it is, not just that the statistical nature of more and more games becoming almost impossible to dethrone the "top" games, but also the Capitalistic drudgery that the most "objectively good" games wind up becoming more and more homogenous and possibly even more forgettable like every new Marvel movie that everyone socially agreed they HAVE to watch but with the same story beat formula and everyone forgetting it within a week post-opening weekend. It's funny like that, quantifying aesthetic vanity into tangibleness just winds up disillusioning the whole art.
Quantitative justification for anything will never best qualitative. You can have 100 dixie cups, but your glass can be used a million times.
I feel like UA-cam should implement a proper revision feature. It just messes up the algorithm and people's sub boxes whenever minor changes like this need to be made to a video. Have it so you can easily go back and watch previous versions, but make the latest one the one that plays when you click.
They're too busy superfluously messing with the layout every few years and being concerned about "hate speech" to add actual features to the site.
The problem with that is that a video could amass a lot of likes and traffic before being "revised" to be completely different. If you could keep the same url for a different video, you could release and entirely new video with inflated statistics and a history of traffic on just the first day it comes out.
This might not be so bad for youtube, but it definitely has been a problem on amazon. On amazon, a seller can make a page for an actually good product, and then completely replace what product is being sold on the same page while keeping the same review score and reviews. This can lead to a whole lot of scams where defective products have good reviews and will make it seem like the product isn't a cheap knockoff or something like that. UA-cam videos aren't exactly capable of the same kind of scam, but it would be possible to mislead people if you could just replace the existing video on a particular page to revise it.
You mean like the annotation feature that it used to have? Because the loss of that feature is still the biggest loss to UA-cam that I've ever seen.
@@tinkerer3399 Yeah, I agree. I have no idea why they got rid of annotations, they were literally the best thing youtube had ever added to their site.
I love how the new form of game criticism (like this channel) is actually becoming like "self-aware". Self referencing and critically overviewing how we even concieve and criticize "games".
Postmodern Critique.
It's neat. Lol
To reduce film to "90 minutes of audio and visuals coming from a square on the wall" is to reduce video games to "10 or so hours of audio and visuals coming from a square on your desk".
The point he was getting at is the mechanics, experience level of the player, maybe even their income all affect the overall impact of a game on a person. Whereas film, unlike games, does not change so drastically between people. You will not find someone who 'wasn't skilled enough to make it to the end of a movie'. You will not find someone who can't watch a movie because 'their computer isn't beefy enough to run it'. etc. etc. The tech and a person's success with the game as intended by the author (strange how we used to call them authors but now they're developers, like...they make buildings or something) very much change how a game is perceived. I'm sure you remember the reviewer playing Cuphead 'badly' recently meme'd....Again, movies are pretty easy to consume as intended.
Loving the Outer Wilds snippets, just seeing those images brings back good feels.
Kevin Bromley I wish it was more popular. It’s easily my favorite game of the last ten years and I just stumbled on it on game pass, I’d never heard of it, nobody’s talking about it. It was a life changing unforgettable experience and I hope the studio gets to make more.
I think a large part of sequels having so much critical prestige in video games compared to other media has to do with the technical-interactive dimension of games. It becomes an iterative process, sequels work (up to a point) because the technical aspects are fine tuned and the games interact progressively "better" with the player. I guess you could also compare to a similar phenomenon in popular music (to a much lesser degree) where in a lot of cases the sophomore or third album from an artist is their most acclaimed work.
"50% of the best selling games are sequels for either GTA, CoD, Mario or Pokemon."
Ah, the world of gaming is no exception from the laws of hierarchy that exist in all walks of life.
Undr Capitalism*
@@aturchomicz821 🤦♂
Really informative and interesting, thank you!! Seeing how review trends have changed over the years is hilarious, and I never considered how the top of the Metacritic list has been crowded by games from previous decades. I really hope the public consciousness loses interest in objective scoring. It really just feels like a reductive way to understand media in general. I wonder if this is something that can be done with existing generations or if we just need to be teaching better media literacy and comprehension at a younger age
Pretty eye opening stuff. Well done.
Hello from next year.
13:53 "Chances are you played a helluva lot more than 8 great games over the past 5 years."
Unfortunately I doubt I did :( The adulting life is real....
I'll share that sigh with you for sure
“The legend of super metal auto theft IV” sounds awesome. Can’t wait to try it!
god that helena in the background at 9:14 hit me in the muscles i never knew i had
If I made a top ten games of all times list today, it would contain more games after 2010 than before. And this year might have some contenders too, with Doom Eternal, Half-Life: Alyx, Cyberpunk and Last of Us 2.
Maybe it should be switched to a top 50 or 20 list per decade, it would also make sense since an average Joe can just look at the list to see a recent game with a score of 92 he can play on his New Super Playstation Series X. Also considering how older highly ranked titles like Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye have greatly aged and probably don't need to still be compared numerically to Breath of the Wild and Sekiro outside of a random Watchmojo video, it would make more sense to have it per decade which also allows a retro gamer to see highly rated games for their gamecube.
I appreciate all the love you gave Outer Wilds with the shown gameplay
Basically, if it's popular and people remember playing it and having at least a moderate amount of enjoyment out of it - its at minimum like 90/100.
Before I rant I'd like to say that your vids are often enjoyable George and this may be one of my favorites you've done in a long.
I'm not a big fan of metacritic or any averaged group of critic scores cause outside of the wide appeal genres like action, shooter, adventure, etc you'll find certain genres are being reviewed by people that hate/are unfamiliar with the genre.
Generally speaking if you love jrpgs the only thing you should look at are your own taste, user reviews and small UA-camrs. It's how I discovered the Trails in the sky/trails of cold steel series. Gaming has gone through many changes over the years and I do hope people stop paying attention to the "objective standard" of critics.
here's a statement of opinion: reviewers are looking for 3 things: to guess and validate the consumer's opinion in products they don't care about (are not being paid to promote). To influence consumer's opinion, or at least pretend to; to imprint the marketing team's pitch disguised as "popular" opinion on the consumer, and finally, to constantly reinforce their own credentials as hip, true gamers in touch with the community with phrases like "from start to finish", "sunk countless hours", "if you call yourself a gamer", "we all know", etc. which are all lies that start to appear in the narrative when people are insecure and feel compelled to patch their own perceived lack of credibility with veiled preemptive assurances to the public of the status and competence which they know themselves to lack.
You did well George. That list must have been hell to make.
"[Recently] reviewers have typically come to regard polish, spectacle and technological advancement as a safer guideline to score by than the wishy-washy subjective factors."
You know why that is? This overly-sensitive narrative that all reviews must be 100% objective (unless it's about politics). In a not-surprising way these narratives, mainly because it's so difficult to fight back against them in an objective way (it's subjective, so...), began to shape the industry in dangerous ways. Because you're not allowed to have feelings about something a lot of valid and good criticism and observation gets left aside. Only time we're allowed to have those discussions is if a game first passes some arbitrary technical tests (mechanics, technical details, etc.). When you only favor the technical details things become more expensive, quality experiences get left behind in favor of washed out tech demos and the whole landscape sort of becomes homogeneous. What's more telling though is the way the general gaming public views indie games. Indies are allowed to create those feeling productions and are allowed to get away with a whole lot more, even in reviews simply because of the perception that money has everything to do with production quality.
The less money the developer has the more mistakes they're allowed to make. The more money they have the more perfect and tightly fitted into a checklist of features and predefined boxes that developer's games have to conform to. And to be fair, pricing hasn't helped this either. But then, regardless of game length, fitting every bell and whistle into a game is going to raise costs so there's that. It's just unfortunate and I think a lot of it has to do with the very secret and hidden nature of business, too. If information about projects was more freely available (at least the statistics of it) and the system was more open I feel people might be more understanding of individual struggles and perhaps allow reviewers more leeway as well. But with everything so closed off, people get paranoid and people get tense and then they get defensive. And then no amount of logic matters and everything becomes a matter of extremes and everyone is running off of the misinformation of everyone else. Today's critical reception sphere is just insanely chaotic.
In general, I think the entire game industry and it's culture has growing up to do. I think even the act of identifying yourself as a 'gamer' is silly. It'd be like someone who likes listening to music labeling themselves as a 'listener'. Games are just a part of pop culture now. This sectioning off because 'its different than the other things' makes no sense. You can't simultaneously have an industry that collectively rakes billions of dollars annually AND be niche. The fact is more games are played today than ever thanks to them being in everyone's pockets via cell phones, which 'gamers' will say aren't 'real games' as if there's some hidden deficiency that is allowable to label all mobile games as crap because there exists crap games, but it's NOT okay to say that about a console like Wii where the vast majority of games were stupid shovelware cashgrabs as well.
Either way, the culture itself is going to have growing pains, and I feel like the Industry with a capital 'I', your UBI's, your EA's, your Nintendo's and the like are actively keeping it's general audience in a 'feel good' state of blissful ignorance of all of these things and the cynic in me says they think it's probably better for business. The unfortunate truth is that the more games mature, the larger your audience is and that means, really, more money.
I find that either metacritic has a much larger impact on people that they are willing to admit, or as a whole, metacritic is somewhat useful in understanding how flawed or unflawed a game is, and it tends to stack up with consensus neatly, if not imperfectly. Most people use critic reviews for video games as buying guides. So a games flaws will naturally outweigh its strengths. Making a good game with minor flaws review better than a masterpiece with major flaws.
Dammit Johnson we need MORE millions put into the game, or else they'll never buy it "haha silly bone man and flower game slam dunks" Dammit Johnson, why did you lie to me.
A lot of those games specifically the ones in the Top 10 get very high scores because of the smaller range of people reviewing them, The top games on that list have around 25 to 40 reviews, But more recent games that have a similar score have several times the amount of reviewers upwards of 200 that kind of gives the older games in unfair advantage in terms of reviews because they are subject to a smaller range of opinions.
It goes both ways really. If one guy makes a review with a low rating it's gonna have a bigger impact on the average if the pool of reviews is smaller.
It was stated that the metacritic scores were all from the same places and very few at that. I don't think it changes the weights all that much.
Critics as a whole seem more swept up by marketing campaigns than anyone else. That's why critic scores for big publishers are consistently higher by a wide margin, even when something is actual garbage. Player reviews offer a larger sample size. This means that trends can be observed and those that distort results, accounted for, especially as the data just keeps coming. The wisdom of crowds can come into play.
Critic reviews largely occur in one wave, one period of reaction. That's why quality of large titles is so heavily frontloaded to make the first 10 hours feel great. It's the bare minimum they can get away with, while still being favorably or even ecstatically reviewed. The rest of the game can be garbage and people will defend it to the death, citing critic scores and sales figures. Establishment voices are especially misleading, but without a consistent rule for exclusion, it ends up being cherrypicking. Not all of them are incompetent/corrupt, let alone all the time. Nor is every independent/3rd party critic pure and true.
A good review score is really only good for games that lack a big marketing budget. Or for telling me to avoid a game that’s had a big marketing campaign.
That’s why I watch people like you and Yahtzee. You convinced me to buy several games I would’ve completely missed by not knowing about them or thinking they weren’t for me. Super hot, what remains of Edith finch and the Re Remake were games I like played because YOU were the one to recommend them.
Other than that 95 percent of the time I watch reviews for entertainment and also to confirm/stop a purchase.
I don’t trust an opinion of a person I do not know, therefore metacritic means nothing to me.
That's the point of great reviewers, everyone from Roger Ebert to Totalbiscuit said it. If a reviewer is good, you can get to know them really well, and then when you see new reviews by them you can tell by their in depth analysis whether it's the game for you, even if you disagree with their own opinions on it. They may love a game but explain it so well that you understand that you _wouldn't_ like it, or vice versa. That's the value of a great critic.
This is basically a journalistic rendition of Dunkey's "Video Game Critics" video, and I love it
I have been gaming before I could speak. Metacritic isn't something I have ever stumbled upon....ever. It is only mentioned by games journalists. I legitimately have never met another human to speak about its existence.
The insight you’ve provided here is fantastic. Thanks so much for taking the time to pour through all this data. Super interesting
I don't remember ever having cared about Metacritic's scores. In the past PS1/PS2 era, friend recommendations would drive my choices. Recently, I find reviewers who have a similar taste in games to me, Super Bunnyhop, Erik Kain, Colin Moriarty and Total Biscuit (God rest him) are examples of some of these. I know what they like and what they don't, from their reviews I can determine if something that bugs them will bug me or visa versa. Having spent time reading their reviews/watching their videos and getting to know them has made it easier to know what game I should check out next.
Quite a bit of Outer Wilds footage you got there... Any chance of a review or "check this out" vid?
"Check this out" that's a nice name for a new series I have to say
Good video. Plus, it's hard to inspect objectively, unbiased, and night impossible with backed data, but it also has a lot to do with the rapidly changing relationship between the people and the press, especially in gaming press. We went from faith and love and monthly periodicals, to minute-to-minute bombarding of niches, wide range of choice of voices to listen to, and a decade marked by increasingly hostile and paranoid view of a media that often went out of its way to place itself separate or above it's audience. I feel like changing standards, trust, advertising, and methods really contribute to this as well, and is at least touched on by what you noted with some outlets dropping scores. Least of all that the audience, in some cases, doesn't like MetaCritic itself, due to stuff like the New Vegas scandal. It really does feel like the reviews are becoming a a curio of the past, and frankly, in some way it feels like the current audience isn't going to miss them.
Please make more reviews based on data, this is a really unique take on videogames, and as more people learn data science, they will be delighted to see their favorite games analysed
Very specific question, but what is the music that plays during your opening sponsor spots? It sounds like a cover of a song I know, but I’m not sure if it’s just a coincidence.
OMG Super Bunnyhop is still alive! Great video and finally some more video bout video game ''philosophy'' and game critics and more in depth talks. Hope to see more videos from you in 2020 and more in depth reviews and interesting and original subject on that matter.
I really liked how the review language shifted. It has to be over the top to get people to keep reading and be excited so I assume it will always have the catch phrase of the day
Rock, Paper, Shotgun have been doing reviews without scores since 2007. Although I got fed up with their other nonsense around 2013, I always thought their approach to reviews was smart.
Too many reviewers are trying to please publishers and their audience with scores, rather than say anything meaningful about the game. When you couple that with the fact that some journalists can't or won't play the games they're "reviewing" and it becomes a farce.
Around 2013 I switched to UA-cam reviews and let's plays for my buying advice. That later included Twitch livestream and Steam user reviews.
I enjoyed this video a lot, you should do another data analysis type video. I'd recommend you use some data visualisations next time though, and fewer shots of moving around Excel. Would become a lot easier to understand the data you're explaining.
The fact that Celeste and Undertale are on that list among Red Dead II is *chefs kiss*
Because there has to be some ceo or board somewhere that is trying to imagine a way to replicate that success along with the profit margins that come from the such small titles
Surprisingly I think something like Disco Elysium (currently number 11) is an oddity just undertale. They are great games that aren’t going with the current trend of AAA games of spectacle and technology, and games like that becoming top Metacritic games are going to become rarer and rarer in the future. That being said, I think Metacritic as a whole is falling out of style. Too many good games aren’t on the top 100 and lord knows there’s more video games than ever coming out.
We now have sorta-kinda-close-enough objective proof that the sixth generation was the best generation.
Long live the Gamecube and its peers.
kinda missing the point of the video...
fuck, the music is dope in this. Nice choices George!
I like how gameranx does it. It’s not really a review they just show gameplay and say what they thought of it. No score or anything, it’s like if one of your friends bought a game you didn’t buy yet and you asked them what they thought of it
Super insightful and innovative video. This is the first meta-analysis of the history of video game reviews I've seen. It's an interesting topic and one I think many video game fans will have wondered about.
Hey superbunnyhop did you see the discourse on twitter about some of your research about the localization of Kojima games?
God Hand sends its regards
I know from my experience, research is getting serious when you bust out the spreadsheets
Action RPG isn't that vague really. We have expectations that evolve as we use genre names. Rock is a genre, we know what it means but does that have anything to do with the word rock? No, and RPG has little to do with roll playing, any more than any game that gives you control of a character. We know what it means because it means what we know it to mean.
This is going to be a weird thing to appreciate, but I didn't know you could do a lot of that with Google Spreadsheets. I use it every day and this is going to make it much easier to use, thank you!
While game review scores dont hold the role they once did, they were key in developing the industry. Whilw the internet has been a deathstroke to review scores, they played an important role in game analysis and consumer advocacy
I'm sure someone else has already mentioned it but there are way more reviews for games now than there were back then. Sure OoT has a 99 but it is only from like 21 reviews whereas modern games receive at least three times as many reviews and it becomes much harder to keep a perfect record when a single low score can tank your aggergate score. Not to mention different platforms get different scores for the same game in many instances.
Dude only discovered your channel now - thanks for the quality content and insights
Ay shoutout to Michigan Football at 9:01
Go Blue!
edit: Oh it's The Game, even better!
Do you manually compose this list or use a script?
Another factor that I could think of about how average scoring change in 2010s is because of videogame review website/journalist have grown in number too and that might shrink the average score a bit because more reviewers got more fair share instead of totally hype or totally down. Maybe I'm too optimistic, But I'd say that I don't have faith in Metacritic scores at all after New Vegas "the review have been rigged from the start" incident , just offering perspectives here. (But still I love how Celeste make one of 100 tops)
The play time thing is weird. Two of my favourite games recently are factorio and super hot vr. One of them is one of the most amazing experiences that you play for a few hours, the other is hundreds of hours of pure crack.
You mention it in the video but I think you're right, I wonder if part of the reason we see less and less top of MetaCritic games is because people are using MetaCritic less and less. I don't think it's going anywhere, but it used to dominate the conversation about review scores, everyone cared what MetaCritic said about a game. Now, I just think it's lost a lot of that relevance, and I think that started in the mid 10s.
I think the point was that metacritic doesn't actually mean anything. Once you get all of these numbers mashed together, they don't tell you much other than there's a number. I would argue metacritic was a novelty project the public took way too seriously. It's still used in dumb arguments about how 'good a movie is' in terms of RottenTomatoes scores and such. Numbers zoomed this far out have no context and no cultural value.
What a fascinating essay! Never thought about this
wonder what the word count for "feel like spiderman" is
So much of everything. Movies, games, music. Top lists are stupid. There is no common best of anything. Its just another commercial aspect of things we have to accept
I think review scores (in the "give it a number out of 10 or out of 100 in a single category of bad or good" sense) are some of the least useful things. I've tried to write reviews before and while I had all my opinions on a page along with extra information and stuff, people only seemed to actually care about them if they had a number at the end of a "yes / no" when opinions are a complicated and subjective thing and trying to sum that all up in a single number just makes no sense
Sadly, it's a convenience clickbait type thing. Everyone knows top 10 lists get more action than the most well thought out piece about anything you can think of. I too don't think stars or reviews that end on a number really matters because for one, you can't have a perfect 10/10 or whatever, because if something better comes out, you have to re-review everything up to that point to make room for the NEW perfect. I do think it's moderately more useful to rate various aspects of a game in this way, but an overall score I don't think is useful. For instance, if you had ratings of graphics, sound, premise/theme/story, control, inventiveness etc. you could better get an idea of whether that game is something you'd be interested in. However, at the same time, how does one judge graphics? I particularly like hand drawn animation for my graphics and think 3D is still treated like a gimmick after 30 years of iterative technology that continues to add more work with less returns...I also think there's a charm to lower resolution in games, so how does that work when comparing a game with billions of hyper shaded polygons in 4k resolution? Same for the music. Same for the story. etc. etc.
Also, one thing I think is sorely missing from critics in the game industry is there's not really a school of thought about them that's on par with film. For instance, if you want to get into serious film criticism, simply watching whatever you want is not going to land you a job. (well, i guess technically it can since the internet exists, but bear with me here). Instead, you'll want to have art history and film school backgrounds that allow you to properly put into perspective the films you're looking at and talking about to the public. In those schools, they force you to tackle very important historical pieces of art and/or film. You have to know about the Dadaists, you have to understand that Citizen Kane solidified modern filmic language, etc. etc. There's a list of must-knows. In gaming, there's nothing like that. There's no real history here, it's all pop culture. Basically game reviewers seem to be hired based on whether they have a personality when they write up an article, play games...and....that's it? I'm sure some of them have a journalist background here and there, but it doesn't really have an institutional regard for it's own history itself nor of art as a whole.
Until that happens, I doubt game journalism as a whole will ever be more than just fanbois. The sad part is that most 'gamers' (I loathe that term, it drips with self importance and pointless rebellion) actively fight against any kind of movement to legitimize gaming as an artform in any serious way. When done in the most modest of ways like Sarkesian's feminist critique of historical games, holy SHIT do the 'gamers' go nuts. It's like...you can't want games to be treated like a serious art then keep all the things that other artforms have that legitimizes them, like actual social and technical critiques, from happening. It's like saying you want to go swimming but don't want to get in the water. I see this so often as well and it's mindnumbingly common and I hate to say it, but I feel like the industry itself cultivates this behavior whether they want to take responsibility for it or not and whether it's intentional or not, neither of which I give a shit about because no matter what, it's a thing and they do it.
Sorry to respond with a wall of text, but I was agreeing with you in possibly the longest winded way there is.
How did you make a video about a excell sheet INTRESTING!?
As soon as you said you were ignoring user reviews I don't trust you.
User reviews are the only reviews that are not bought and payed for.
Actually that's not true. You can buy reviews, just like you can buy views on UA-cam, retweets and twitter followers, etc.
I think you have a blind spot there.
The inner geek in me really wants to know other than excel what was the other software you was using in this analysis!
I have to wonder if the discrepancies are due to a larger disconnect between journalist reviewers and consumers or the change in consumer demographics. For me personally the journalist reviewers don't represent my interests anymore and I opt for less cooperative options to help me make informed purchasing decisions.
Its funny that long play times worry you, but short play times turn me off because I don't like getting invested in a game that will end too quickly.
Plus Persona is amazing.
But to each their own :)
If it's short and good you can just play it more than once. If it's long and you get tired of it you lose out by quitting early.
@@Graknorkedepends on the player. I don't think theres anything wrong with liking short games at all. But I have games like Gris on my list of games to finish even though its only a few hours long. But then on the flip side I have almost a thousand hours into multiple Persona games.
I love both but I am compelled to replay one over the other.
The idea this video tackles has always been in the back of my mind. Reviews nowadays aren’t what they used to be, that’s for sure.
Tbf, I would've preferred if favourable score in Metacritic was lowered to 60 rather than being 75, just like how Metacritic did it with movies. Also, you claimed that reviewers prefer high production values, graphics, polish over wishy-washy subjective feelings but I would slightly disagree with that statement because "The Order 1886" which was a high-budget AAA game got mixed reviews. As for your examples like "Bioshock Infinite", "Last of Us" and "Red Dead Redemption 2", well lots of people love those games and not just simply for their graphics.
I have 3310 hours of Ultra Street Fighter 4 played on Steam, more on the original release, more on ps3, ps4 and xbox and more on consoles i don't own. Probably like 6 or 7 thousand hours.
Loved this video! You can't just tease me with that Outer Wilds footage and not talk about it! Hopefully on the Dad Awards you'll discuss it.
You invoked the name of Undertale on a popular media channel, 10 more porn pictures and 20 more fanfics just materialized into being.
Man, Bunnyhop makes such quality videos.
Double-A games - as in, the stuff you used to rent for rainy days out of Blockbuster or somesuch - no longer exist. We're seeing an influx of Double-A titles with Triple-A ambitions, several of which are put together with more than enough professionalism to actually challenge your traditional big-budget setup.
Consider CD Projekt RED. They're massive now, nobody could argue they have a space on the Triple-A docket, but I remember the scant few weeks that preceded the first Witcher's launch in North America. I had about as much faith in their surviving as I did in GSC GameWorld, the STALKER franchise's developers. GSC didn't survive, point in fact, but CDPR's Witcher transcended the buggy, lag-riddled mess of their modded Neverwinter Nights 2 engine, their horrible interface design and clunky controls to create something that stuck with me, well after the game's ending. The first Witcher felt like a Double-A game in every way, and it set the stage for its Triple-A little brothers - the second and third Witcher games.
This particular studio's story is so unlike anything else on the market: it's hard to believe that it all starts out of spunky Polish gamers wanting to confront their country's rampant piracy problems by offering localized versions of early aughties' gems, like Baldur's Gate.
I personally don't think game budgets have any effect on quality like they do in film and television, but even then there's definitely exceptions. Clerks being made for roughly 10,000$ or so becoming a cult classic is a thing that happened. I think inflated budgets are simply there as a fallback for big studios to overpower smaller studios and their puny budgets in a dick waving contest for market share because nothing about a dollar amount spent on a game can tell you whether it's any fun to anyone. It just means x amount of dollars were spent making something. It's a bit like the 'objective review' isn't it? "This game's graphics depict the theme it says it's got quite well. The controls make things happen without too much lag." Great. Now how does it play?
I actually prefer consumer reviews
but when I say that, I'm really referring to steam's thumbs up/thumbs down system. Which...now that I think about it has its own problems.
"Reviews are bullshit". Got it.
So, you liked Outer Wilds, eh? Playing it myself. I still don't have an opinion fully formed, but some of the situations I have experienced in it have been... wow! I don't think the game will keep that level, but it has been already worth it.
I think new console releases really skew this list, especially for the larger jumps in graphical quality from the past, such as PS1 to PS2. I think that's why so many PS2 eras are on the top 100, for many people that sort of high end graphical presentation was new since high-end PC hardware was expensive at the time and the power of a new generation of consoles along with the higher budgets for games allowed for quality experiences that really were like nothing else people had experienced at the time, especially if you were coming from a PS1 or N64, or even a low-end PC.
As someone who's recently started doing reviews for a site that gets put on metacritic, I approach review scores by knowing everything's very arbitrary, and hope that the actual text of my review will inform opinions. Metacritic is just to get an average of the kind that says you should get the right number of jellybeans in a jar if you average all the guesses.
A single critic gets you their gut reaction - a metacritic score gets you closer to consensus.
8:46 Featuring Dante from Devil May Cry Series
Hi, I was curious if you were going t make a ‘2019 in review’ video?
No