These days there’s reviews on anything; cars, restaurants, films and of course video games. Newspapers, websites and magazines all have people whose duties are to evaluate the experience of something. In many cases it’s relatively straightforward, mostly with technology: effectiveness of features versus cost, ease of installation/use etc etc. With things like food, films and video games it’s far more difficult to write reviews that’ll keep everyone happy. Ask any group of people their thoughts about a film and you might get as many opinions as there are people present.

Video games are just as dividing. Halo 3 got a review score of 94 on Metacritic but many gamers would rate it far lower. Some of the more addictive games I’ve played received relatively low review scores in comparison to games that didn’t hold my attention for long. The question with reviews is always this: are reviewers writing for anyone but other reviewers?

When asked at DICE Summit 2009 a panel of game developers said that they generally don’t consider the thoughts or opinions of reviewers when creating games. Some point out that the true hallmark of a successful game is its sales, others mentioning the fact that especially for casual games a review is useless, since it likely won’t be read by the person who buys the game. Others point out that reviewers are easily swayed by effective marketing (literally how sumptuous the spread and bar were at an event) and that they’re generally concerned about different things than consumers, reviewers giving more weight to story, voice acting and music. Overall they all stated that for one reason or another the Metacritic scores don’t mean all that much to them.