@TadGhostal @sfb Thanks! I'm glad to hear you've enjoyed what we've done. We've seen there sure is the "variety gamer" type who plays a wide variety of games. But it does appear it's a minority type, with most gamers mostly focusing only on a couple of genres/game types, some even to just a couple of titles. Obviously there's nothing wrong with any of these preferences.
Regarding user ratings, positive selection bias is very likely in play. It does make one wonder however, how relevant the neutral, non-selectee view is? As in, how relevant is the opinion of people who haven't played the game? How reliably can one say a food is "bad" without tasting it, or that a car is "bad" without having driven it? But you're probably right that a professional critic may be able to take a game more at face value if it's just thrust upon him/her to review as a job assignment, as opposed to a person looking up a title in store and spending his/her hard earned cash to buy it. If so, the system is kind of working.
@KeeperBvK Thanks for the feedback, but you're off the mark. That particular point was a minor thread in the inteview, so I didn't want it to get more long winding than it already was. So I picked the Steam average as one example. I could have picked more, like how Neon Chrome sports a 4/5 star user review average on US PS4 with 540 ratings, same 4/5 in EU PS4 with 840 ratings, again 4/5 for Xbox One (US) with 124 ratings. I could go on, but I think it's clear a lot of players do indeed rate that game, and most of our games, to 4 or 5 stars, or 80-100 points. So it's not a case of me being terrible at my job, and most of the time gamers overall would do good by assuming that most developers aren't terrible at their jobs, as game development isn't so easy that people terrible at it would get far, or get to do it more than a very short time.
There is a mystifying aspect to the relatively significant difference in how gamers and critics view games. It's not all mystery though, as I do get the part where critics somewhat need to reserve the higher scores for the very few absolute best releases of each given year, or better yet, attempt to use the full range of scores available. The average gamer may not play nearly as many games per year as a critic would, so a gamer may well rate anything he/she enjoys a lot very highly. And, of course, the amount of critics is very low compared to gamers, so the chances of a game ending up reviewed by a critic who's not very into that type of game or theme are real.
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Re: Feature: Chatting to 10tons About Its Prolific First Year on the Switch eShop
@TadGhostal @sfb Thanks! I'm glad to hear you've enjoyed what we've done. We've seen there sure is the "variety gamer" type who plays a wide variety of games. But it does appear it's a minority type, with most gamers mostly focusing only on a couple of genres/game types, some even to just a couple of titles. Obviously there's nothing wrong with any of these preferences.
Regarding user ratings, positive selection bias is very likely in play. It does make one wonder however, how relevant the neutral, non-selectee view is? As in, how relevant is the opinion of people who haven't played the game? How reliably can one say a food is "bad" without tasting it, or that a car is "bad" without having driven it? But you're probably right that a professional critic may be able to take a game more at face value if it's just thrust upon him/her to review as a job assignment, as opposed to a person looking up a title in store and spending his/her hard earned cash to buy it. If so, the system is kind of working.
Re: Feature: Chatting to 10tons About Its Prolific First Year on the Switch eShop
@KeeperBvK Thanks for the feedback, but you're off the mark. That particular point was a minor thread in the inteview, so I didn't want it to get more long winding than it already was. So I picked the Steam average as one example. I could have picked more, like how Neon Chrome sports a 4/5 star user review average on US PS4 with 540 ratings, same 4/5 in EU PS4 with 840 ratings, again 4/5 for Xbox One (US) with 124 ratings. I could go on, but I think it's clear a lot of players do indeed rate that game, and most of our games, to 4 or 5 stars, or 80-100 points. So it's not a case of me being terrible at my job, and most of the time gamers overall would do good by assuming that most developers aren't terrible at their jobs, as game development isn't so easy that people terrible at it would get far, or get to do it more than a very short time.
There is a mystifying aspect to the relatively significant difference in how gamers and critics view games. It's not all mystery though, as I do get the part where critics somewhat need to reserve the higher scores for the very few absolute best releases of each given year, or better yet, attempt to use the full range of scores available. The average gamer may not play nearly as many games per year as a critic would, so a gamer may well rate anything he/she enjoys a lot very highly. And, of course, the amount of critics is very low compared to gamers, so the chances of a game ending up reviewed by a critic who's not very into that type of game or theme are real.