I often bemoan the fact that marketing or circumstances surrounding a game have a disproportionate amount of sway on the perception of quality in video games. “Bad” games can be successful and “good” games can be review bombed to hell. With this post I would like to look at why the situation surrounding a game is as important to its perception than its actual quality. I don’t think marketing brain washes people into liking games, but rather, it buys benefit of the doubt.
Recently, Highguard released to the dreaded “overwhelmingly negative” review tag on Steam, meaning most people had left a negative review. What interested me was that many of these reviews, even discarding the obvious review bombing ones, were written after fewer than 2 hours. I think this is a big sign that the game did not get benefit of the doubt. The terrible perception of the game from it’s failed marketing hadn’t afforded it that. So after 2 hours of not having a good time, the game was deemed bad and negative reviews were written.
I had a different approach to Highguard than many of these reviewers. I was actually rooting for it, I like a lot of the previous work of the developers. After 2 hours of play, there were a few things I didn’t like at all about the game, but instead of thinking they were bad, I was wondering why these elements were included. There had to be a reason, right? I had to play more to find out. I wasn’t necessarily enjoying the game more than most, but by granting the developers the extra benefit of the doubt, I didn’t leave a negative review (nor a positive one), and came back the next day to play more. This seems to be a trend as if you only take into account reviews with 2+ hours of play time, Highguard’s opinions are “mixed” rather than “overwhelmingly negative”.
This is something I’ve noticed throughout my journey in video games. If I’m invested in a game before I even play it, there’s a much greater chance I’ll like it. That’s exactly the job of marketing and franchises, getting you invested before you even play.
The first time I noticed this was in my early teens, when I pirated a lot of games. I noticed that I tended to like games I bought more than the ones I pirated. The monetary investment pushed me to try harder to like them, while dropping a game that cost me nothing was pretty easy.
This goes in pair with another of my big complaints in video games: tutorials are terrible. On average, the first hour of a video game is sub par. It does take some determination to get through these early parts to get to the good stuff. Without some benefit of the doubt, many good games would be dropped and deemed bad. Wanting to like a game is a really important factor.
Yes, I’m looking at 2 hours, not exactly high.
2 hours is arbitrarily chosen as a catch-all. You can finish some games and refund them within that time, it doesn’t work well in all situations. It’s not some objective measure of how much time you need to judge a game.
The example is a free game. There’s also a difference between moving on and leaving a negative review
Some games don’t need even 2 hours of playtime to see the flaws. It took me a single COD match to understand why I hate that kind of gameplay. Getting to some arbitrary time spent would be time wasted.
There are no free games. You still need to invest time and effort into the game. I got Star Wars Outlaws for free. I understood I’m probably not going to enjoy the game before the tutorial was over. I still gave it a shot under the same “benefit of doubt” idea and in hindsight I should’ve just put the game down when I got the first hint that I’m not going to enjoy it, because I probably would’ve given it a more generous evaluation. Instead I ended up with the opinion that the game is a waste of time because playing it was a waste of my time.
I agree there’s a difference between moving on and leaving a negative review and I think it’s stupid for people to leave negative reviews just to feel like they’re part of some kind of a zeitgeist. But the negative reviews don’t change anything because the reason a game is getting negative reviews is because it’s not a good game. Had Highguard been the new Overwatch it wouldn’t be in the overwhelmingly negative category even if the initial impression of the game was negative. Just look at Doom 2016, prior to launch it ticked all the boxes of being a bad game (development hell, tacked on multiplayer, poor marketing material, no review copies etc) but then it came out and people loved it. I don’t think the benefit of doubt would’ve saved Highguard. It simply would’ve made the trend from a nosedive into a steep slope and the “dead game” claim would just come a few months later.