Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Early Reviews of Video Games Are Trash

 


Here's my hot take. Early video game reviews, are total trash. If a video game is within it's first year of releasing, it is not fair to judge it at release. Multiple bugs will need to be removed and multiple hot fix patches need to be applied. It is way more fair to judge a video game after six months to one whole year later. That is twelve months from it's launch date.

I get that it is nice to get a preview of a game as soon as it comes out. Even I want to get a general sense of what it is and how it entertains, but as a whole, it should never be judged with finality until it has baked in the oven a little longer. I'm sick and tired of hearing news outlets, and so-called reviewers trash games before they have enough time to get really good. It happens over and over, time and time again. I've seen it countless times over the decades of being a gamer and I've been gaming close to fourty years already.

Why do people overlook this trend? If you are a true gamer as I am, then you need to let go of people's early opinions of a game and just let that game get better. Some reviews might be accurate at even six months after release, if the game development team has worked out the major wrinkles.

Bad opinions and negative reviews early on, can severely damage the long-term success of a video game in it's early stages. It is a proverbial shot in the foot.

In so many cases, video games are rushed by deadlines and greedy, impatient investors who want to push an incomplete mess out to the public, only for the product to be shamed. This inexplicably causes the game's development team to scramble even harder to accomplish the post-release fixes.

Critics don't create the video games. Media and publishers and reporters are the individuals that make-up whatever they want to get more readers. Are they really focusing on the big picture. Are there even enough outlets that can actually wait six months to one year to review a video game? Do these people exist? Yah they do. I am one of them. Real users that make their own opinion, without being influenced by others. If you're in a hurry to be the first at everything (reviewing anything at launch), there's always going to be degree of letdown and disappointment.

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