zlacker

>>tortil+(OP)
For me the the only review service that is worth any salt is for video games and it's Steam Reviews

-Requires the reviewer to actually own / play the game

-Highlights the amount of time played so you can easily filter out people who just dismissed

-Lets you know who got the game for free or reviewed the game in early access

-The magnitude of votes is shown which lets you know if it is a niche title or mainstream blockbuster

-Gives you a timeline of votes so you can see changes over time and see if there are any review bomb cycles happening

It's not perfect but I find it wild that people think there is any value in these movie review aggregator sites when you can't even verify if the person watched the movie at all and these guys can just spam votes. Worse yet there isn't any incentive for the site to change this since more traffic means more eyeballs for ads.

>>miamib+Mg3
Other than review bombing as you say, I largely agree.

Well, maybe one more caveat: user expectations as they relate to the genre or company. One thing I noticed while browsing the hidden gems list* -- which have games with extremely high ratings -- is that there's a LOT of hidden object games on there. I think there's one cat series that appears like three or four times. And some more conventional genres like RTSes or action RPG's are hardly present at all.

I think this is due to expectations: people don't expect a lot out of a hidden object game, they're generally very simple, and a small indie title can easily meet those low expectations. Whereas a genre that has included many big budget titles, people have higher expectations, even larger, highly experienced dev teams have a hard time pleasing everyone.

* https://steam250.com/hidden_gems

>>Tulliu+3q3
If a thing is well advertised, then it will never be a “hidden gem”, because people know about it.

But also, lists like that also implicitly often are euphemisms for “titles that are good, but cater to non-mainstream interests, and so never achieve vitality.” Hidden-object games get (probably unfairly and mostly self-perpetuatingly) classified as “girly games” — which leads to major game reviewers and journalists just completely ignoring them when they come out. So a good hidden-object game will almost always, inherently be a “hidden gem.”

>>derefr+ms3
Fair, but mostly I'm talking about how certain genres have some extremely highly rated games that simply don't have a lot going on, because of user expectations being very low. This distorts the ratings to an extent, since a 95% for an RTS is generally going to be much harder to achieve than for a hidden object game.

>>Tulliu+Et3
Surely if you’re looking for a game you pick a genre first, then look for the best reviewed game in that genre. It’s not like someone who wants an RTS game is going to choose a hidden object game instead because it has higher reviews.

>>imgabe+aW3
It really depends. I absolutely do sometimes look for great games without specifying the genre ahead of time. That's part of why I've used the hidden gems list in the past.

Some games are so good that you may want to play them even if you're not the biggest fan of their genre. I guarantee you plenty of people played Undertale without being big JRPG fans.