Scores that games get at various news sites influence their sales. Developers are sometimes dissatisfied with low scores, because or this. Mitch Gitelman, who worked on the latest Shadowrun game, is one of them.
“According to OXM’s scale, a 7.0 indicates a game that has a lot of things going for it, but still has a few major issues, or something that limits its appeal. That’s fine for OXM, but an arbitrary value like that means different things to different people. I don’t think a 7.0 is a game that deserves my attention, and I’m pretty positive that most people feel the same way. The Xbox 360 version of Shadowrun is hovering around 70.3% on review score aggregators like GameRankings.com, and that number means radically different things to developers, reviewers, and consumers.”
It’s tough to see a game (or anything that you’ve poured a huge amount of yourself into) get raked over the coals. So I can empathize. Though a 70% is hardly abysmal, it’s still C- territory. I’m not going to detail why I think reviews are flawed, I’ve beaten that horse so many times I’m starting to get tennis elbow.
Link! (GamersWithJobs)