In general, the gaming industry is corrupt. The only sure-fire way to know how good a game is, would be to try it out for yourself. I don't know if they've introduced these kind of services in other countries, but Gamefly is a much cheaper alternative to renting, given it costs about $8 for your average rental for 5 days here.
Its worthwhileness depends on how good your taste in games is to begin with ;-) Let's assume for convenience that you can rent every game you're interested in using the cheapest $16/month plan. If you rent a game and then decide to buy it, you gain nothing. But if you rent a game you were thinking of buying and then decide you hate it, you've saved the price of the game. So let's say you buy X games a year that cost an average price P, and your coefficient of taste (% of games rented/bought that you like - naturally mine is close to 100%) is Y. One year of the cheapest Gamefly would cost 12*16 = $192. Your expected annual profit/loss on Gamefly would be... P*X*(1-Y) - 192 Ta-da! Let's say I buy one $50 game a month and I'm a little slow, my coefficient of taste is an anemic 60%. Then I'd save $48 in a year. If my taste improved to 68%, I'd just break even, and connoisseurs more discriminating than that lose money. If you buy only $30 DS games at the rate of one a month, you'd have to have a cringe-worthy 46% taste coefficient or lower to break even, implying that on average you would actually do WORSE by buying a game that looks good to you than by not buying it. And of course the numbers are even worse if you buy less games per year. The type of person who buys just 4 $50 games a year and would break even with Gamefly would have to have a 4% taste coefficient, implying that without guidance he selects games he hates more than 19 times out of 20. A guy like that would probably have given up on video games long ago ;-)
TC, I think there has been a gradual "Changing of the Guard" in regards to video game journalists.. and how they are presenting their "news/Review etc" to the video game consumers... While there are still a few people out there with the "experience" to write a good informative peice.. the shift has been to a more entertainemt focused style, instead of a more in-depth news style... But at the same time the Video Game industry is a hard beast to cover well as it has many parts and alot of its inner working (deals etc.) are under lock and key with NDA's and such.. just some thoughts
colour me impressed by your analysis :clap: I love statistics although I suck at math I also agree with MitsuruX and others that have made similar remarks. I think we all agree that we, as gamers, deserve "proper" coverage, even if we are a small percentage. I think there's enough space on the internet for an organised and well funded yet deep VG Journalism portal. Numbers in reviews can't represent quality, what's sufficient is to just list pros and cons in the writer's view and let people decide for themselves.
I've thought the same thing, especially reading any review by ign.com. Usually I feel like I'm reading someones high school senior year report. What I think the industry needs is something like the Comics Journal in the comics world, which is a magazine/website run by gamers who have been into games since the late 70s and have seen it all. As for now, I literally go on screenshots and videos when deciding to buy a game. Message boards can be a mixed bag but if a game is particularly bad, you'll see many posts devoted to it pretty quick.
Apparently, because I'm pretty sure your collections would be much larger if you had gotten rich in the process... Really, it comes right down to the whole "rent to own" idea. You know you're paying extra money for something, but then again it's really all a test or temporary solution. Especially if there are a lot of games people want to play, and they can only afford so much. Easiest way is to rent, and to go through that many games in a short amount of time (especially the Christmas season in the states) requires either deep pockets or a cheap source. Heck, with most Gamefly accounts, if you rent 2 games in one month it's paid for itself.
I was thinking in regards to something like Sports writers, who while still deal with a lot of behind closed door issues... do not have as wide of subjects that they have to wade through...
The whole promotion combined with review aspect of large gaming sites always makes the site look hypocritical. They hype the game endlessly then review time they slam it or drool over it. The worst example of this I've seen is on the tv show XPlay that runs on the G4 channel. Adam Sessler, whose considered a "hardcore and respected" gamer, had the designers of the Terminator Salvation game on the show and commented how great the game looked and played. A few weeks later in the actual review they slammed it. Now this may be a bad game, but going from full promotion mode to get people to buy the game, then switching gears a week after release with a real review is a bit suspicious. I think a real review site should have nothing to do with the promotion of the game so they don't look biased in any way. Roger Ebert, pulitzer prize winning movie critic, will never review a Russ Myer movie since he once worked with Myer. The integrity that exists in other mediums doesn't exist in game journalism, yet.
I tend to go to sites like Gamespot, look up reader reviews, find one that rips the game apart and see what the reasoning is. Some of the reader reviews are actually decently written and I can kinda tell when the person has a somewhat like mind. I don't like ass kissers. None of these games we play are perfect and I want to see some criticism. It helps me get a feel for what the game is really going to be like. Some of the "pro" reviews are good though. Some of them really do go in depth and try to take the game and look at it in the grand scheme of things past and present. But when I see something like a 10/10, I know it's nonsense because IMO it's not possible to release something that works so well for everyone. However, I also realize that there are people out there that are MUCH less picky about their games than I am. So it's really all subjective in the end.
Fact is that game reviewers and such are merely journalists, and get hired on thier credentials more than game playing skill. May not have been so true back in the EGM days of yore but definetly is today. And anyone you see on TV or in a video, they're not even journalists, they're actors. It was mentioned here already that they're selected on thier ability to read cue cards and look good, and that's the truth. These people don't actually play any of the games any more than the anchorman actually researchers a story on the 6 o'clock news. In the case of cable news they're a face to put legitimacy on the network, in the case of IGN it's to make you think they're cool. You're less likely also to get a scathing review of a current game made by a large company from the mainstream gaming media (i.e IGN, Gamespot, Gamepro, etc.) becasue if a company sees you repeatedly slamming thier games, then all of the sudden you stop getting games to review in the mail. So you'll always see them give a "balanced" review, even when something is a complete piece of crap.
All of these are right on the money. In my country, games journalism on TV and print is made by hipsters who know nothing about gaming culture. A friend of mine did work for Atomix (the least-worse gaming magazine in Mexico) for a while and he is extremely cultured in video-games. He was laid off recently, though, and now he works at a local newspaper, doing general "Journalism stuff". He said that, to be a proper games journalist, you had to try everything at least once. Back in the day we were "purists" and didn't like many commercial games, but he became very well versed in GTA and Gears and whatnot (without forgetting his 15-year love affair with 2d fighters). I don't know whether his fellow journalists became well versed in old games, or obscure japanese titles. I doubt it. I don't know if many of the hipsters on TV and Print know games beyond Halo and GTA - or understand the level of gaming history that is, for example, shown in this forum, but some gaming journalists still do. They are a minority now, unfortunately. That is the state of all cultural industries in today's world, is it not? For every person that knows computers enough to use them in an advanced manner, there are 300 "interwebz" people who installed "MyWebSearch" or "Gator" willingly on their "google". For every wine connoisseur there is 50 drunk fratboys; for every old anime fan who knows stuff from the 70s, or who imported VHS tapes back in the day, there are 17800 narutards. Is the world going wrong or have we grown up?
I think the man who most deserves this title is Michael Pachter, every single analysis or prediction he makes (recently with this gen) has been dead wrong and im sure he makes more than minimum wage
