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miamibre

For me the the only review service that is worth any salt is for video games and it's Steam Reviews

-Requires the reviewer to actually own / play the game

-Highlights the amount of time played so you can easily filter out people who just dismissed

-Lets you know who got the game for free or reviewed the game in early access

-The magnitude of votes is shown which lets you know if it is a niche title or mainstream blockbuster

-Gives you a timeline of votes so you can see changes over time and see if there are any review bomb cycles happening

It's not perfect but I find it wild that people think there is any value in these movie review aggregator sites when you can't even verify if the person watched the movie at all and these guys can just spam votes. Worse yet there isn't any incentive for the site to change this since more traffic means more eyeballs for ads.

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Other than review bombing as you say, I largely agree.

Well, maybe one more caveat: user expectations as they relate to the genre or company. One thing I noticed while browsing the hidden gems list* -- which have games with extremely high ratings -- is that there's a LOT of hidden object games on there. I think there's one cat series that appears like three or four times. And some more conventional genres like RTSes or action RPG's are hardly present at all.

I think this is due to expectations: people don't expect a lot out of a hidden object game, they're generally very simple, and a small indie title can easily meet those low expectations. Whereas a genre that has included many big budget titles, people have higher expectations, even larger, highly experienced dev teams have a hard time pleasing everyone.

* https://steam250.com/hidden_gems

If a thing is well advertised, then it will never be a “hidden gem”, because people know about it.

But also, lists like that also implicitly often are euphemisms for “titles that are good, but cater to non-mainstream interests, and so never achieve vitality.” Hidden-object games get (probably unfairly and mostly self-perpetuatingly) classified as “girly games” — which leads to major game reviewers and journalists just completely ignoring them when they come out. So a good hidden-object game will almost always, inherently be a “hidden gem.”

Fair, but mostly I'm talking about how certain genres have some extremely highly rated games that simply don't have a lot going on, because of user expectations being very low. This distorts the ratings to an extent, since a 95% for an RTS is generally going to be much harder to achieve than for a hidden object game.

Surely if you’re looking for a game you pick a genre first, then look for the best reviewed game in that genre. It’s not like someone who wants an RTS game is going to choose a hidden object game instead because it has higher reviews.

Some games are genre-defying, and so fall through the cracks of classification schemes based on how good the game is to appealing to fans of particular genres (e.g. does Undertale appeal to fans of bullet-hell shooters?) while still being otherwise agreed-upon as "good." One of the purposes of a general, non-genre-specific "Hidden Gems" game list would be to help you discover such games.

It really depends. I absolutely do sometimes look for great games without specifying the genre ahead of time. That's part of why I've used the hidden gems list in the past.

Some games are so good that you may want to play them even if you're not the biggest fan of their genre. I guarantee you plenty of people played Undertale without being big JRPG fans.

Steam reviews are fantastic. It's one of the main reasons I don't touch the Epic store. I find it especially useful to specifically seek out the negative reviews on things to find out common gripes - it can reveal games with "mostly positive" reviews that I might love, and games with "very positive" reviews that I'm probably still going to hate.

I'd wish there were age of reviewers. What's good for a 13 year old isn't always for a 40 year old

> Gives you a timeline of votes so you can see changes over time and see if there are any review bomb cycles happening

And, if early, potentially game-breaking, bugs have been fixed. I've seen many games with poor initial reviews, due to performance problems, fixed in the next GPU driver release.

For a more extreme example, you have something like No Man's Sky, which is nearly a different game, which early reviews don't apply to.

Most Steam reviews are jokes or are otherwise not serious in a way that is not helpful to me reading them.

Sure, some are funny and witty, but they're still helpful and the user has to rate the game, not just write a comment.

There's the occasional "in joke" comment that usually only makes sense to people who're already past a certain point in the game (or reference a meme known about the game), but they're nowhere close (not even in astronomical terms) to being being the majority review type. Even then, they still have to rate the game.

Netflix when it was just DVDs had amazing community reviews.

The quality of reviews was really good.

I think a large part of that is that Netflix when it was just DVDs was in the age before systematic review abuse reached its current state of the art, and before it became profitable for companies to participate. Amazon's standout strength used to be its reviews!

I think it helped too that the volume of experienced film enthusiasts who would order dvds early in the Netflix days and write reviews was probably pretty high.

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