Then you have people making good games and getting negative reviews because they aren’t appealing the widest audience possible. This is how AAA games got to where they are now. I agree with you that there shouldn’t be a neutral option…they should just simply not review the game.
People buy games they are interested in, but that doesn’t mean the game is actually what they were expecting. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. If these people give bad reviews, the only thing the rating is telling anyone is how mass appealing their game is, not how good it is.
if people in big enough numbers broadly buy a game expecting one thing and find it is not to their liking and they rate it accordingly, the system is working as intended. Literally what else is a rating supposed to do other than reflect that.
how can the quality of the game be reflected by any metric other than whether it satisfied the people who played it. fundamentally that's exactly what reviews set out to convey.
I think the issue is that what you're describing here is something along the lines of "every product should be for every person," or similar. Even if you discover that something is not to your taste, a negative review where you explain that it wasn't to your liking is still valuable and useful.
I don’t believe every product is for every person. Quite the opposite. A negative review on a good game hurts the devs. People are notoriously bad when it comes to knowing what they want, so negatively reviewing a game that’s not for you prevents others (who it is for) from trying it.
But if it's not a game you enjoyed, is it still a "good game"? Reviews aren't there to be objective, they are explicitly for someone to record their subjective opinion on a game.
I’m not saying that’s not what they are. I’m saying they should be objective and people should be responsible so we start holding shitty devs accountable and good devs get recognized. We disagree.
There is no such thing as an objective review of art. All reviews or analyses are inherently subjective. You're pursuing an impossible standard with this line of reasoning. You can objective about things like performance, bugs, etc - but not about how a game feels to play, for example.
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The average steam review rating is *85%*. Simply because purchasing a game already self-selects for an engaged audience.