Image alt text: An image of Steam’s top 10 best-selling games at the time of posting, three of which are marked as “prepurchase”
I checked the Steam stats and noticed that in the top 10 best selling games by revenue, there’s three games that aren’t even out yet. If we ignore the Steam Deck and f2p games, it’s three out of four games. They have also been in the top 100 for 4, 6, and 8 weeks respectively, so people just keep on buying them. I would love to know why people keep doing this, as the idea of pre-ordering is that there is a physical copy of a game available for you on release, but this is not a concern with digital items. So after so many games lately being utterly broken on release, why do people not wait until launch reviews to buy the game? If you touch a hot stove and get burned multiple times, when does one learn?
It’s true, I feel like instinctively people think videogame reviews were good at one point because it seems odd a whole industry exists that never did the thing it does reasonably, but even going back to 80’s and 90’s magazines, slop got 5’s while classics in retrospect got 3’s in many cases. Videogame reviews have always been marketing propaganda with no relationship to reality.
It did the thing reasonably for the time and the context, I can tell you that first hand.
The set of values was just different early on and so was the purpose of reviews.
It’s weirder to me that the audience consensus ended up being that game reviews are meant to be consumer advocacy, like they’re crash test reports for cars or something. I find that depressing. I’ve always gotten mad when reviewers tell you whether a game is “worth your time” or “worth your money”. What do you know of my time and how I want to use it? Or what value I put in money?
Ideally art criticism is about finding a view on a piece of work, an intellectual framing for it, and sharing it with the audience, and there was a brief time of sheer hubris where a few critics thought that was more or less what they were doing.
And then influencers happened and streamers became a thing and now it’s something else. A bit of community curation, maybe.
In the 80s and 90s? It was targeted marketing for a thing that nobody knew about. You didn’t read a review to know if a game was good, you read it to know that it existed, whether it did anything technical that was exciting and perhaps if it did the thing that the arcade game you already knew was doing. A four star review was often on the basis of “sprites big”, and we were all fine with that.
Well I can tell you I spent MANY months of saved allowance at the expense of keeping up with comics I followed and going to the arcade with friends (that bus fare alone is 1/200th of an NES game) for MANY a stinker game with great reviews in the 80’s and 90’s, and I was NOT fine with that.
Hah. That’s what you get for playing on a closed system instead of copying computer disks and tapes like us normal people.
I certainly cared a lot more about that cost in the 16 bit era when I was on a console instead, but by that time there were fancy things like VHS tapes with footage of games and demo kiosks and stuff.
But all through the 8 bit era over here there weren’t ads for games anywhere. Not on TV, not anywhere else. Today we’d say magazines were about discoverability. Without them you were limited to whatever was on the cover or the back of the box. It was a crapshoot. At least in reviews you got some screenshots and a description, distorted as it could be.
And it’s not like I was immune to that, either. I had my nose glued to the computer shop every other day staring at Barbarian or Space Ace, which barely count as games by modern standards. I don’t think I ever thought to question whether playing them was any good. That barely felt like the point.
That is also all tinged by it being a formative period and growing up and so forth, so most of us are unreliable narrators, I suppose.
I had an Atari ST and a relative was in the 80’s ST piracy scene so I’d get massive stacks of pirated cracked games on floppies, which was AMAZEBALLS, but the basic level design on those games was almost universally with a few, mostly, late exceptions UNMITIGATED ASS. I totally had your thing where I never actually questioned if James Pond or whatever was “good” but I still intuitively knew the design on the console games was better and there was no social cache or ability to multiplayer with your bros on a normal gamepad (I maintain every Atari joystick ever was ass).
Meeeeh, I’m with you on some bits, not so much in others.
I agree that controller design was much, much better on consoles. I agree that we didn’t understand the technical limitations that made computer action games so much worse. I remember at best we could tell when a game was “fast” or not, but had no concept of framerate, and we were disproportionately obsessed with parallax scrolling but didn’t parse the value of smooth scrolling nearly as much.
But design wasn’t universally bad at all, we’ve just refocused on different things over time, so the list of games that hold up does not line up with what was exciting at the time at all.
I can play Eye of the Beholder right now and have fun. That’s up there with modern entries on that genre today. I can play Lemmings and have fun. I can play Monkey Island or Loom and be absolutely delighted. Civ 1 is simplistic but the core of what’s good in the series is there. Ditto for Sim City. I can play Another World or Prince of Persia, that’s a genre playing to the strenghts of that hardware.
It’s just at the time we were all freaking out about Gods instead, which is barely playable. Or about Dizzy, which is shallow and inscrutable. It was all happening at once and nobody had an understanding of why things were different from other things. It was a beautiful mess and we mostly didn’t even realize.
To keep it on topic, writing game reviews at the time must have been impossible. Nobody knew what they were talking about, and those who did were making games, not writing about them. We couldn’t tell what good looked like on that area, either.
I agree it was impossible in the computer space, but I feel like publications of the time reflected that in the computer space. I forget the name of the publication, but I used to get an Atari ST magazine that came with a demo disk every issue in a bag with the magazine, and its focus was less “here’s what to buy” but you actually got demos of most games they covered, and it was more like, “here’s what’s going on in Atari ST stuff” idk that they even had numerical ratings. I also don’t remember there being a print media space around DOS games in the same way to begin with. On the other side, console gaming magazines were like “THIS IS THE HOT SHIT BUY IT NOW 5/5!!!” And then the game was a scam.
It was probably regional, but here there was definitely a split between the computer-focused print media and the console-focused one. PCs tended to get top billing among computer platforms in that space before the micros died out altogether and it was just PC and consoles.
It was all marketing/hobby stuff, though. The Atari ST-specific media feeding into their mini console wars with the Amiga and so on… I don’t see it as the computer brand magazines being more informational and the console ones being more arbitrarily marketing. It was more that the branded magazines were worried with selling you the computer and the multiplat publications were selling you the games.
The mismatch I remember was less between reviews and end result (reviews were less the point than maps and walkthroughs anyway) and more the mismatch between advertising frequency and quality/availability. I don’t remember Night Breed the movie from watching it or from the marketing of the movie or even from playing the game, I remember it from the six month long carpet bombing of magazine advertising we all endured from it.
The review stuff was mostly about them being written by kids who didn’t understand game design, were given something to play for free and seeing something the market had arbitrarily decided mattered in isolation. There were exceptions and people who had the writing skills or the insights, but it didn’t matter because the readers didn’t have the ability to differentiate the two, either.
I would argue a lot of them still don’t and treat whatever vestigial reviews we still have as a shopping catalogue instead.