| abstract | - If you take a stroll on professional game review websites, you will notice that score tend to be in the 6.0 to 10.0 range, even if they're nominally using a ten-point scale. This is called the four point scale, which is also sometimes called the 7 to 9 scale. Two takes exist on why this is so. The first view considers the four point scale to be a bad thing, and holds this as evidence of a website's lack of integrity (often toward mainstream outlets). The accusation is rarely leveled at the writers themselves, with the blame usually placed on a site's editors or Executive Meddling. The game journalism industry, like all forms of journalism, thrives on access. Game magazines and websites need to get a steady flow of new games, previews, and promotional materials directly from the publishers in a timely manner, or they're irrelevant. Unfortunately, the game industry does not have to provide this access, and games review sites and magazines are far more reliant on the companies that produce the games than movie critics are on movie companies; indeed, since most websites are expected to provide their content for free, industry advertising is perhaps their most important source of income. There are murky tales of editorial mandates or outright bribery, but the whole system is set up so that providing a highly critical review of a company's triple-A title is akin to biting the hand that feeds you. This is especially true of previews, which tend to have an artificially positive tone since if a journalist pans a game the company didn't have to show him in the first place, he's unlikely to be invited back to see any of their other work. As such, you're unlikely to see major titles, even awful licensed crap, get panned too hard in for-profit publications. The other view considers the four point scale to be the result of a perfectly reasonable way to award and interpret review scores. This can be understood fairly easily by comparing with the way school assignments are graded. In any given class, people will usually get scores ranging from 60% to 100%, with the average being around 70-75%. This then leads people, both reviewer and reader, to expect scores to mean something similar to what they already encountered in real life. Getting ~60% means "this sucks, but it can still be considered a game", ~75% is "average", ~85% is "decent/solid" and anything above 90% is a mark of excellence. Think of just how hard it is to actually get lower than 60% on an assignment. Even if you hand in complete crap for your essay on the Punic Wars, it will be hard to get much lower than 60%. For you to get under 60%, you pretty much have to turn in something that goes beyond "not being good". Unless you write in another language, forget to include the last 3 pages of your essay, and accuse Napoleon Bonaparte of engineering the Punic Wars to cause the September 11 attacks, you probably did enough done to get passing grades, despite not having mastered the material by a long shot. Game developers that achieve this level of suck quickly go out of business, which in turns explains why games rarely ever get scores below 60%. This also explains why there are few games that get under 75%, as most game developers know that churning out sub-par products isn't good long-term business practice, and those who don't know it quickly learn the lesson. The situation with the four point scale has lead some reviewers to drop rating scores altogether, or favor an A/B/C/D grading system. Professional reviews tend to keep a rating system to reduce the chance of being misquoted or misinterpreted, as it will be evident that you did not mean the game was "excellent" if there's a big "6/10" or "D" at the end of the article. The same basic concept applies to every industry; reviewers tend to place things in the upper half of whatever their reviewing scale happens to be, and for the same reasons. Of course, if reviewers get too negative there's always the risk of fan backlash, because Reviews Are the Gospel. Contrast So Okay It's Average, where being just below this scale is acknowledged to have some quality, if not a lot. See also Broke the Rating Scale and F Minus Minus. Examples (by subject):
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