Eurogamer is doing away with review scores, and instead implementing a 4 tier system. The first three are Essential, Recommend, & Avoid. Then the final tier is games that carry none of these, so they are “games with some qualities to recommend them but about which we have important reservations. This is where you’d find, for example, a sports game that provides no meaningful advance on last year’s model, or an indie game with beautiful artwork but irritating design, or a well-made action-adventure with a dull storyline and samey gameplay.
What does this mean for Metacritic or Google?
To paraphrase Eurogamer, this basically means no Eurogamer from this point forward will be on Metacritic, due to the lack of a score. As for Google, when searching for Eurogamer reviews you will see a score attached:
- Five Stars – Essential
- Four Stars – Recommended
- Three Stars – Everything Else
- One Star – Avoid
This is due to lots of traffic being driven to Eurogamer via Google, but it does not mean that the games have secret scores.
Is this a growing trend is games media?
Rock, Paper, Shotgun (RPS) have always had their own system for reviews, a column simply known as Wot I Think, these are unscored reviews allowing the reader to have a mental image of what the game is, and if they would like it. RPS has always has had an unscored review system, but not many sites followed suit until now. Recently Joystiq announced that they were doing away with review scores, that is until AOL decided to shut them down. Now Eurogamer has followed suit.
So with all this in mind, the two questions I want to ask are:
- Will more sites drop scored reviews?
- What do you prefer, scored or unscored reivews?
Leave your responses in the comments bellow.
Header image courtesy of Eurogamer.
