Topic: Eurogamer drops review scores

[MysterD]

Eurogamer has decided to drop review scores.

[Cobra951]

As a result of these changes, we will no longer be listed on the review-aggregation site Metacritic.

No surprise, though I wonder if Metacritic will end up weighting reviews themselves, if this self-conscious fad grows before it dies a deserved death.  Entertainment has always been rated on one scale or another, and that will not change in the long run.  Pity that the politics surrounding reviews are motivating a loss of confidence in publications to do that.

[idolminds]

Hopefully these kinds of moves help to break the weird reliance people have with review scores. The distinction between a 9.5 and a 9.8 is basically meaningless and publishers basing developer bonuses on Metacritic scores is something really needs to go away.

But scores are still useful for a quick glance of a "Hey, is this worth my time?" kind of thing so it would kinda suck if they went away entirely.

[MysterD]

But scores are still useful for a quick glance of a "Hey, is this worth my time?" kind of thing so it would kinda suck if they went away entirely.

Well, Eurogamer kind of does have a 4 or 5 star system here, if you want to look at it closely...
...especially if you look at the section about how they tied their "not-numbered" system to Google's 5 star system:

When searching for reviews in Google, however, you will still see star ratings attached to Eurogamer reviews: five stars for Essential, four for Recommended, one for Avoid, three for everything else.

Google is a very important source of traffic for us, and it's vital that our reviews are made easy to find by being as featured as prominently as possible. The star ratings help a great deal with this, and we feel that the scheme I've just described is a pretty close match for our system that won't misrepresent our reviews. That said, it's important they are not misinterpreted as us sneaking a numerical score out there by stealth. If you see three stars against our review on Google, that means the game belongs to a broad middle band of quality - not that it secretly got 6/10.

So, basically....they're just not giving out 2's, when tying it to Google's star system.
If a game gets no score, it's more or less a 2 or a 3 - just they're giving it the nod to a 3, regardless.

[Cobra951]

See?  It happened already.  The general need for a scale has already outweighed their bid to be different.

[gpw11]

Yeah, it's a pretty dumb concept.  I mean, one one hand people take actual scores too seriously and I get how you might want to rally against that and just stand up for the strength of your content alone.  On the other, however, I only really read a review on something I'm interested in if I'm curious as to why it got the score it did.  A score is like a tease - a .5 second breakdown of what someone who experienced something I'm interested in thinks.  If I want to know more I click the link.  Cutting the score out doesn't do anything for them at all.