everything commercial i have been attached to got horrible reviews ... so ... welcome to my world suckers 
My emotional cost of reviews only comes up as the sales stay down. Which in some cases is simply never to be seen. In the case of Force Unleashed, I'm sure that bonus would have weighed my emotions way down.
Face it, reviewers will only ever review things subjectively. And guess what, maybe just maybe that game wasn't made for them in the first place. If it sells 5 million copies, somewhere deep down the game must have some sort of redeeming value.
It is so easy to review a game (or whatever else) that it attracts many people who have no clue really. You can get a spot as a reviewer on some big local gaming site if you are 16 years old and you still get to influence at the very least a few 1000 people by talking about something you may have no clue about really.
But hey, what can you do. The public is harsh and very unfair and they are not too different from all those random reviews, only their opinion is more hidden and less influential (exceptions aside).
And of course there are also just bad games 
I would expect most people to have the emotional stability to take on the chin a review that awards the game a bad score and clearly justifies their reason for doing so, you can't really do anything in this scenario but be humble and find some choice quotes for your post-mortem. Though I find it very frustrating to read a review that is, itself, bad; even for games I won't play. Everyone here should be able to call some of those to memory instantly.
Yeah, its too bad what happened to FU and its staff, the game was great in my opinion. My only grip is that it was to short, but I still had a blast playing from start to finish.
Words cannot describe my lack of sympathy for someone complaining about middle of the road reviews for a middle of the road game that sold millions.
Wait, yes they can. I have a complete lack of sympathy for someone complaining about middle of the road reviews for a middle of the road game that sold millions.
Pffft, Kane & Lynch got horrible reviews, and that was something that I worked on for almost 3 years, and you don't see anyone from IO going around and whining like this. I guess the comparison might be slightly off, given that K&L was a pretty terrible game and semi-deserved all the bad reviews, but it doesn't change the fact that lots of people spent lots of time on getting it out.
They need to grow the fuck up and realize that not everyone is gonna love what you do, fucking babies .
Plus I think Force Unleashed was fairly mediocre the whole way through 
What made Kane and Lynch terrible? From that Jeff Gerstmann infamous review video when the game came out, it seemed like mostly "blah blah blah I don't like the characters the cover system is literally shit in digital form", and that sounded like it was annoying but not horribly deal breaking, especially looking at it from someone who loved the hell out of Freedom Fighters. Some of the features mentioned, like Player Two seeing a different scenario than Player One due to hallucinations/craziness sounded really neat. Never got a chance to play it though. It just feels hard to believe that IO could go from making Blood Money to making "terrible". 
The Metacritic for K&L is only a little bit lower than Force Unleashed actually, 67% for the PC version, 65/64% for consoles. Force Unleashed was 72 (averaged between platforms ignoring handhelds) 
edit; hehe mazy.. bad day?
what mazy said +1
Quote from JetsetlemmingWhat made Kane and Lynch terrible? From that Jeff Gerstmann infamous review video when the game came out, it seemed like mostly "blah blah blah I don't like the characters the cover system is literally shit in digital form", and that sounded like it was annoying but not horribly deal breaking, especially looking at it from someone who loved the hell out of Freedom Fighters. Some of the features mentioned, like Player Two seeing a different scenario than Player One due to hallucinations/craziness sounded really neat. Never got a chance to play it though. It just feels hard to believe that IO could go from making Blood Money to making "terrible".
Well, I think its a terrible game :G
Quote from Skjalgedit; hehe mazy.. bad day?
No, just speaking my mind.
Quote from JetsetlemmingWhat made Kane and Lynch terrible? From that Jeff Gerstmann infamous review video when the game came out, it seemed like mostly "blah blah blah I don't like the characters the cover system is literally shit in digital form", and that sounded like it was annoying but not horribly deal breaking, especially looking at it from someone who loved the hell out of Freedom Fighters. Some of the features mentioned, like Player Two seeing a different scenario than Player One due to hallucinations/craziness sounded really neat. Never got a chance to play it though. It just feels hard to believe that IO could go from making Blood Money to making "terrible".
I wish games would stop being judged on numbers and percentages. Rrrgh.
K&L was okay... wasnt horrible but wasnt great either~~~~~~~~
I would like to see some stats on review scores to sales and the correlation of the two.
I am not convinced that reviews really affect game sales. Maybe it does with the interwebs being so popular with the kids these days but I saw a lot of our sales come from just word of mouth.
You make a good game. People play it. They like it, tell a friend and he goes out and gets it. (or rents it, lol)
I think that most game that have been coming out lately are only about 80% there. It seems like Devs have been putting so much time into bringing there graphics up to "next Gen" standards that they let gameplay, AI, controls, and the bigger picture of making the game fun slide. Maybe they think they will have time at the end of the project to polish the fun and they run out of time. Maybe they just can't stand back from the game and see the blatantly bad things. I am not sure but until they do they will continue to push mediocre games out the door and end up with mediocre scores.
And yeah the folks that worked there ass off for 2-3 years will feel lousy.
I think over the past few years we've been in a extremely fast growing industry where everything 80% or over would just sell period. It didn't matter much where you were in the 80-90% bracket your game would basically sell very well. And talking about Kane and Lynch the game did break the million barrier (which may or may not break it even, but that's for another discussion).
The shift since Q4 2007 though has been that only the universally acclaimed titles will sell very well. That quarter was probably the busiest we've had in recent memory with CoD4, The Orange Box, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, Halo 3, Mass Effect, etc etc and this was I think the tipping point. 2008 on the other hand showed the public was simply not following all these titles anymore, and almost all multi million sellers had 90+ scores. The same 80-90% titles you could get away with a year earlier never met expectations, whether it was Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, Prince of Persia and multiple other Ubisoft titles. The only exception to that rule seems to be CoD5, but we all know we can safely chalk a good portion of its sales on brand power alone.
I think this trend is going to continue this year, and with the credit crunch affecting our industry the way it has, you better come out with your best game yet or you will be crushed by the few heavily marketed releases.
In that sense, I think reviews are both stronger than ever, and losing their importance. In other words, scores matter more than ever before, but the Metacritic average score rules them all, and once you get an average of 90% or above on your game, each individual review loses a lot of its importance. So just as only a handful of titles crush others, the same trend could apply to critics and I'll be curious to see how this evolves.
to be honest i dont really care about game reviews. most of them are paid for anyway and the people that write them have no clue. like that guy who reviewed open season and gave it a shitty score because it wasn't mature and challenging enough for him like his FPS games. well duh its a game made for kids. i trust user scores more than the actual review scores.
I remember there were a lot of interesting discussions a few months ago about the feasibility of cheaper made games with lower sales expectations. Stuff like Sins of a Solar Empire, which sold a few hundred thou copies, but made the publisher an insane amount of money, because the game's budget was minuscule in comparison to most "AAA" Titles. If you spend AAA money on a game and it sells less than a million, you panic. If you spend B+ money on a game and it sells over 100k, you're happy, basically.
These cheaper made games also tend to have more freedom to explore and experiment, as they're less of a massive investment, too, which is personally more interesting than Yet Another Popular Series Installment, or Game about Big Guns and Killing Hundreds of Things.
I don't really take games seriously enough that I need a game to be perfect, though. I just need a game to be interesting.
Quote from FuryoI think over the past few years we've been in a extremely fast growing industry where everything 80% or over would just sell period. It didn't matter much where you were in the 80-90% bracket your game would basically sell very well. And talking about Kane and Lynch the game did break the million barrier (which may or may not break it even, but that's for another discussion).
It actually sold close to 2 million copies on 360 and PS3 (Not sure how the PC did). The K&L project broke even, but the overall project had so much legacy that I'm sure there's some deeper losses somewhere.
I still use review scores to determine if I wanna get something that I've been kinda in doubt about. However if its something that really appeals to me, it'd have to get below a 70 metascore to change my mind.
Not to bring this back to K&L all the time, but I'm pretty sure that the marketing had a pretty big part in making it do as well as it did, with the kind of reviews it got. Lots of people at Io actually thought it was too much around the release, but it definitely spread some awareness about it. Whether the end result was a result of word of mouth is obviously hard to determine, but in this day and age good marketing is an absolutely crucial backbone to hitting the above 1mil mark.
It's definitely gonna be interesting to see how this holiday season pans out, lots of stuff on the horizon.
Quote from Mazybut in this day and age good marketing is an absolutely crucial backbone to hitting the above 1mil mark.
100% agreed
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