I'm really not a fan of this. Opencritic's entire point is to filter out the garbage and be a great way to see a summary of reviews from professional critics. One look at Metacritic's user reviews and you know it's just going to be flame wars of fanboys and haters.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah me neither. I really did not need user screaming to muddle the clarity of my review aggregator.

[–] PunchingWood@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Ehh.. lack of user reviews are exactly what made OpenCritic better than MetaCritic.

It will probably just end up the same as MetaCritic. Where anyone, including people who never played the game, can leave reviews. And it'll sooner or later just degrade into yet another review-bombing platform where you'll find absolutely nothing constructive in the user reviews (both negative and positive review spam).

~~Also, walling the user score details behind a forced registration is just shit tier level.~~ Apparently that's just to post reviews, can't see individual user reviews yet I think(?)

I'm curious what argument the people that are just downvoting comments in this thread actually have. These days nothing good comes from gaming platforms that have user reviews. It's just a cesspool of haters, trolls and fanboys circlejerking over 0s or 10s and hardly anything constructive and unbiased in between.

[–] Krakaval@jlai.lu 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

These days nothing good comes from gaming platforms that have user reviews.

I disagree, users review on Steam is really helping me before buying a game.

[–] PunchingWood@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Steam had to change their review platform with a 'Helpfulness' system, because that's how bad user reviews on Steam got. And it still doesn't really work that well.

Like 90% is just people joking, meme-ing, trolling and review bombing.

[–] Krakaval@jlai.lu 3 points 1 month ago

There is the summary of the review notes and the evolution over time. Then there is the text comments associated to the notes which is sorted by helpfulness. To me this is a good system and by browsing 2-3 pages of reviews I think I get an accurate idea. I think I never got misleaded by a game with overwhelming positive reviews rating. Of course there are still players with 1000 hours in the games giving 0 stars review with comment « this game bad » but there are also plenty of useful reviews.

When I see a game on sales on the Epic store, I first go to the steam reviews before deciding. I don’t think I’m the only one doing that.

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

I've found that Steam reviews are especially useless for visual novels and games with anime girls. I am open to the concept of a visual novel, and really enjoy the Ace Attorney games, but maintain 99.9% of them are trash, with none of their excess dialog trimmed down. They all have reviews saying Overwhelmingly Positive though, because anyone who would take the chance to try that genre - a small segment of people - will enjoy it.

I also really wish Steam would implement a Helpfulness system for Guides, since most games have Guide pages that are just filled with meme posts, eg; "How 2 win: Pick OP character, enjoy victory".

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I have a feeling they're looking for more revenue streams and need to generate more user engagement

[–] PunchingWood@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah I don't doubt that it will most definitely trigger people to visit the site more, especially if they get to engage with the content like that.

Had kinda wished it was something else than user scores though. Or some other way of reviewing games instead of the same as other platforms.

[+] helenslunch@feddit.nl -3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

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[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ah yeah I forgot how everyone consumes their game ratings by release date, not by game. My bad.

[+] helenslunch@feddit.nl 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

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[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

No I did not, you seemingly want a by-date system for the site, which feels quite a bit weird considering how people usually use review sites. Hence the prod at your comment. Basically, adding a site like opencritic to an RSS-reader makes no sense, and I say this with someone running multiple custom filters over nearly 120 subscriptions for my daily news dose.

[+] helenslunch@feddit.nl 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 children)

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[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Hrm, I'll be honest then, you're the very very first time I hear someone wanting to consume game reviews meta aggregation in a chronological way (instead of by-game). Not once seen this sentiment before.

I dunno, it's just not how people use these pages I would assume. You create search shortcuts for them, not RSS feeds. You want to look up what various reviewers at large say about a specific game, more so because this changes over time (so would a feed udoate each time the score changes? Only once on the very first review? Only once it stops updating for X time? What if that takes months?). It's the polar opposite of once you have 2-3 reviewers who mirror your personal take well where you might want to know each time these people post a new review.

[–] Ashtear@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago

Here's a second person, then. It shouldn't be too surprising; anyone that works in games media will tell you that new releases are what drive peak engagement.

RSS can be similar to their Twitter feed, with a curated set of highlighted games once a certain amount of reviews are in. I already get a dozen feeds that have reviews in them anyway, and I often read them even if I'm not already interested in the game. Why not an aggregate? I'd subscribe in a heartbeat.

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

There's no exact point in time at which "the aggregated reviews" are one finished article of news. One bootlicking review site will have its review of a game out in the first 3 hours to be the first place people read. Then, another detailed reviewer will spend a week investigating the game's systems before providing a more nuanced review.