Honest Game Reviews
Honest Game Reviews
Journalism is tricky in many industries but the games industry might be particularly biased.
Recently, I stumbled upon a podcast discussing games journalism. The title is (translated from German) “Are all games journalists bought?” Many commenters on social media seem to agree but nobody was able to suggest a better alternative. I’ll show you one.
The core problem seems to be that consumers like to get a review right at the release. Since reviewing takes time, the journalists must get the game in advance which requires close connections to the game publishers. This gives the publishers the power to blacklist journalists who are too critical. Thus, many consider the mainstream media reviews too positive to the points of being useless. A popular example is Cyberpunk 2077 which got great reviews in advance but had too many bugs to earn that praise.
What is the alternative? Aggregate ratings like Metacritic and Steam. The problem is that such ratings are not available right at the release. It takes some time until player ratings accumulate. Also, in rare cases ratings might get distorted by activism.
Let’s bring prediction markets into play. While waiting for enough ratings, we can make forecasts about the rating. This incentivizes people to quickly assess games.
Some examples:
Will Stalker 2 get a Metascore greater than 85? Currently at 60%, so it looks solid. Metacritic only shows a release date in September.
Will GTA VI's Metacritic Metascore be Higher than 95 after 2 weeks of the game being out? Currently at 53% which means quite high expectations. Metacritic doesn’t even show a release date.
Will Frostpunk 2 have a Metacritic score of 85 or higher as of July 27th? Currently at 71% and Metacritic shows a release in July.
What video game will have the highest score of 2024 on Metacritic? Current favorite is Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree and in second place Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Only the second one is released so far.
Unfortunately, numeric markets don’t seem to work that well. Maybe they feel too hard for many people. Still, I made one about Elden Ring:
This is a problem for pretty much all of journalism: If you are not friendly with your sources, you will quickly run out of sources. However, gamers should be more open to adopt prediction markets because they can be considered games too.
You might have noticed a gap since the last newsletter. I got distracted playing TTRPGs with my kids. Also, I don’t feel that motivated about prediction markets in general these days. After writing about prediction markets every week for over a year now, I still haven’t seen any great win. Neither has David Chee and he offers a 5000 Mana reward. Game ratings was another opportunity but how to make it popular?
Nuño Sempere wrote a similar post:
Forecasting hasn’t taken over the world yet, but I’m hoping that as people try out different iterations, someone will find a formula to produce lots of value in a way that scales.
In other news, Manifold is doing a big pivot. I haven’t formed a real opinion about it yet.
Maybe until next week, loyal readers! 😊