8 Worst (But Likely) Outcomes Of The #GamerGate Scandal

4. 'Reviews' As We Know Them Get Abolished

The very nature of reviews as point-based systems that can dictate everything from your general mindset - "That's such a 6/10 game!" - to how much bonus someone who's worked for years on a project should get when the scores roll in, is something that the gaming industry is still jostling with. Ex-G4 wordsmith Adam Sessler has spoken out against Metacritic scores affecting peoples' actual lives in the past - Fallout: New Vegas dev Obsidian missed their bonus by ONE point after release - and since then his then-new site Rev3 Games has employed more of a generally summative sentence to their reviews, rather than a numerical score. Kotaku too have been sporting a simple "Should you play this?" conclusion, with others like Giantbomb, IGN and Polygon sticking with five stars or 10-point scales respectively. In this rather visionless quest for ethical clarity it's also seen the practice of assigning numerical scores to reviews come under scrutiny - how exactly does something get awarded whatever it then ends up with? How does an individual's personal preferences weigh-in on that, and how much of this is transferred across to you on first-view, without getting to know the reviewer? In the end the only way we can envision the majority of people being happy - those who don't want to actually get stuck in and follow a review team to learn their individual tastes - is simply doing 'Let's Plays' of titles where levels are just played through; letting the public decide how everything looks. It's part of why gamers on Youtube have taken off so much, as many see guys like AngryJoe or TotalBiscuit 'telling it like it is' instead of being constrained or pushed in a certain direction by a larger target-driven publication.