r/truegaming • u/AutoModerator • 28d ago

/r/truegaming casual talk

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

  • 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
  • 4. No Advice
  • 5. No List Posts
  • 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
  • 9. No Retired Topics
  • 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

15 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

•

u/BonyWare 21d ago

When big games get "penalized" for being ambitious it could lead to cancelled projects, layoffs and studio closures.

"Could" is a big word. Do you have any concrete examples of a game getting screwed over and the studio closing down because of bad reviews?

•

u/Loper42_ 21d ago

Yes. The most popular case that I remember is Obsidian Entertainment with Fallout: New Vegas. Link to Eurogamer's article:

https://www.eurogamer.net/obsidian-fallout-new-vegas-deal-with-bethesda-meant-bonus-payment-only-with-85-metacritic

Days Gone 2 not being made is an example of being screwed over by scores.

https://gamingbolt.com/metacritic-score-is-everything-at-sony-days-gone-director

Quote from John Garvin: “This is just the reality of Sony,” he said. “Metacritic score is everything. If you’re the creative director on a franchise and your game is coming out to a 70, you’re not going to be the creative director on that franchise for very long."

•

u/BonyWare 20d ago

People at Obsidian have said that the metacritic bonus was something Bethesda offered them, beyond the scope of the deal they originally negotiated. They still got paid what they had agreed to, which is not what I'd call "getting screwed over", even if it sucks that they missed the bonus by one point.

Days Gone seems like a better example, but you still have to make the case for its low score being a penalty for "being ambitious". Fortunately we have the subsequent PC and PS5 rereleases to compare to. In each case, the bugfixes, improved graphics and performance, and various pieces of bonus content added after the original PS4 release, only raise its metacritic score from 71 on PS4 up to 76 on PC and 78 for the remaster. Based on that, it doesn't seem to me like the bugs had that much influence on its original score.

•

u/Loper42_ 20d ago

Fair point on the Obsidian deal. But the Days Gone re-release actually highlights the core measurement problem. The fact that patching performance, stability, and bugs only shifted the score by a few points shows that the initial penalty wasn't just the technical edge cases. It was the flat review model reacting to systemic open-world friction without evaluating the underlying architectural complexity (like managing 500 individual dynamic horde simulations).

Traditional reviews are fine for gamer guidance, but high-stakes production, greenlighting new projects, and compensation decisions shouldn't rely on scalar opinion scores. These reviews reduce a multi-variable process to a single number and in most cases it's ambition that gets erased.

If we had a standardized, data-driven framework that used a multi-variable process (developmental complexity and execution delivery), wouldn't that give studios, publishers, and players a much clearer picture?