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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9445743" data-attributes="member: 18">That's kind of an outdated view. I'll give a run-down of the history on this.There are two separate issues here:1) Score inflation.2) Industry influence on videogames reviewing.Re: Score inflation, this primarily happened as game reviews became more "professional". Back in the '80s and much of the '90s, being a game journalist was not a very professional or serious kind of reporting, and a lot of game magazines, particularly in the UK, were in highly unprofessional ways and featured a lot of material that wouldn't really necessarily "fly" today (like early Charlie Booker cartoons). Further, prior to the mid '90s, reviews were deeply unprofessional and often not even critically literate (though a few were), just the opinions of the reviewer, often presented somewhat hyperbolically.But as game mags started both making more money (as more and more people in their '20s and older were buying games), and having more influence on the sales of games, people started "professionalizing" the reviews. This generally meant cutting down on needless snark, bawdy humour (usually of a misogynistic or homophobic nature, to be real), and particularly lead to magazines feeling they needed "more objective" criteria for scoring, and to be more consistent in the scores they gave out and how they justified them, lest readers decide to go read a different magazine instead.As games kept getting better in terms of writing, graphics, etc. (which they did), this faux-objective approach presented a problem, because it meant the scores surely had to go up, to show game B was better than game A from two years ago.Plus, as new console wars ignited, you got console fanboyism in on the act. For example, If you reviewed a first-party Mario game too badly, people would literally stop reading your magazine, so stuff like Super Mario Sunshine, despite being liked far less than any previous entry, had to get great reviews. Likewise Halo sequels (3 being the biggest beneficiary of this).Scores kept going up until like, somewhere in the 2015-2018 range, where they'd more or less lost credibility, and a lot of gaming mags started the process of become more critical in how they reviewed. That means that pandemic and post-pandemic review scores are usually a bit lower than those from before that. A game of similar quality to this would absolutely have got 9/10s in 2016.It's worth noting the deeply unprofessional hyperbolic style of reviewing is still alive and well, it's just on YouTube now, where gaming YouTubers mostly make out whatever game they're review is utterly terrible beyond comprehension, or so good, must-play, essential, and nothing in-between, whilst frequently spewing misogyny and homophobia and so on (with bonus racism too).Re: Industry influence - That's a more complex topic, but the games review industry did basically sell out to a certain extent from like 2003 to about 2018, being at its worst around 2007 (influence declined after that due to a number of scandals, but hasn't gone away entirely).Primarily industry influence was through three vectors:1) Access journalism - This is alive and well in many sectors, you only give interviews, previews, or even review copies in some cases to journalists from publications you believe will be or have been favourable to you. As magazines needed those to sell in the late '90s and '00s, they were a big deal. Nowadays they're a lot less important, as part of the general decline in print media and also the fact that gamers who actually want to read things are more interested in opinion pieces, historical pieces, and so on than blathering previews. Plus, thanks to YouTube, you can send your previews directly to the customer in many cases! So this is less important than it was.2) Paying for massive advertising/takeovers - This was the biggest problem in the '00s. A lot of game magazine sites became dependent on game publishers advertising games on them, particularly on those publishers doing really big paid "takeovers" of the sites (i.e. banners on every page, etc.). This kind of influence was obviously very deleterious, because potentially if reviewed a game badly, the game publisher could either not work with you in future, or even pull current advertising. This wasn't theoretical, and we know that because of some scandals, but most particularly Kane & Lynch. Kane & Lynch was a somewhat experiment "grimy" shooter about being two nasty hitmen. It was kinda clever in gross '00s way, but not a very good game. Unfortunately, Gamespot had a paid takeover to advertise it and had been getting a lot of money from Eidos Interactive for advertising generally. So when Jeff Gerstmann quite correctly gave K&L a mediocre review (6/10), Eidos wanted their money back and threatened to never advertise with Gamespot again. Gamespot fired Gerstmann because they knew he had a non-disparagement clause that prevented him from telling the truth about this (though it leaked anyway).After this, gamers started becoming more and more cynical about takeovers etc. and this kind of "direct" influence has become a lot less of an issue, and games sites have generally become more transparent about this kind of thing. Also fortunately the rise of other people who want to advertise on games sites as gaming becomes bigger has helped.3) Parties/social influence - Game publishers, particularly their marketing department, were generally a lot closer with journos in this era (like, 1996 through 2008 particularly), and almost always of a similar age/background (straight white male middle class gen-Xers). So you got a lot of boozy coke-y boy's parties with strippers or near-strippers or the like, and a lot of people wanting to not get others in trouble and so on, so there was a lot of quiet influence this way.This broke down in the late '00s with the rise of basically-independent gaming sites who had journos who weren't in on all this, and also the rise of more diverse and younger journos, because this sort of boy's club stuff doesn't work well when you've got a lot of women, non-white people, LGBTQ+ people, people younger and less coke-hungry than the marketers, and so on.All this said, whilst things have improved, most sites are still basically using % score between 100 and 70 for almost all games. That was true as far back as like, 1996/1997 though. And it's less true now than even a few years ago.TLDR is:A) Review scores have in general been lower for several years as "credibility" becomes more important to gaming sites.B) All the worst industry influence is significantly reduced from its peak, which really was that 2006-2008 strike zone.</blockquote>

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