Are negative reviews more useful to you than positive reviews when buying a game/movie/music/etc?

giant bomb reviews games?

dumb jokes aside- the construction of 'what is more useful- positive or negative reviews' isn't super relevant to my purchasing decisions if i'm being honest. they both influence me in what i presume to be different but fairly equal ways- but it's not like i have a default state that says i'm buying all games unless informed they're mediocre, or conversely i'm buying zero games unless i happen upon a positive review- there are (albeit a select few) franchises where my personal need to satiate curiosity will overpower any sort of critical consensus.

i'll tell ya what is utterly useless to me though- user reviews and perfect 10s. user reviews cuz why should i trust the motives of those randos, and perfect 10s because (for me) it kinda indicates an unwillingness to highlight shortcomings. sure, it's shortform for 'everyone should play this,' but it also kinda messages 'this is as good as it gets' and the pendant in me always is slightly annoyed at that (almost definitely more of a 'me' problem than a general one).

Reviews haven't been factored into my purchasing decisions for games in a long while. The majority of the time I know whether I am getting a game based on pre-release information. Most I'll do is use the opencritic/metacritic average to get a sense of the general reception if I'm on the fence, but I do not read or watch reviews for the purposes of deciding if I want to buy a game.

That's not to say I don't engage with review style content at all, but it's not the product style pre-release reviews. I highly enjoy long form critical analysis and deep dives that really dig into a game, but I engage with that type of content after I've played a game myself. I enjoy reflecting on games, movies, TV, etc. after I've experienced them myself through that type of critical analysis, but I have no use for product reviews.

Sadly, a lot of people are cynical now-a-days and this has factored into many reviews from gaming sites. I've played many games recently that have gotten bad reviews, but are actually not bad games at all. Reviewers seem to nitpick the littlest of things and make a big deal about them instead of focusing on the many positive things about a game. This is one of the benefits of having Game Pass and PS Plus, as I get to play many of these games in time and judge for myself. Recent example is Callisto Protocol, which is this months major PS Plus monthly free game. If anything it was a victim of being released around the same time the Dead Space remake was released. Reviewers made those comparisons and of course Dead Space would come out on top, because it is a superior game overall. But Protocol is not nearly as bad as people made it out to be. It's actually a decent shout out to Dead Space. Ghostwire Tokyo is another example. If people listened to negative reviews all the time, we wouldn't have gotten Evil Within 2, because many reviewers were brutal on the original game. Of course there are examples of games that are genuinely bad, like Red Fall, but there are also games where its over exaggerated like Gotham Knights, at least on PC. Again, Game Pass.

There are a couple of review channels that I follow, but I mostly do it out of entertainment rather than actually using their videos to inform my decision. Usually, I just watch footage on Youtube/Twitch and take a gander on Metacritic. 9 times out of 10 when it comes to games that I am looking forward to, I plan to buy them from the get-go regardless of reception e.g. Street Fighter 6 and RE 4 Remake.

A negative reviews is... probably more useful than a positive one when a... game is... bad?

I don't go looking for a negative review if a game is good if that's what you mean, i'm not usually trying to find proof or evidence that the majority is wrong.

In that sense and contrary to others that's why i find user reviews to be more useful than that of critics, they vary drastically and of course you can always find incorrect reviews that aren't useful, but the opinions and experiences of a thousand people is more useful to me than one person's personal preference, if i'm looking at one person's review it's usually for entertainment.

I mostly just look at Steam reviews when I'm interested in a game to see if there are any compelling reasons I should or shouldn't buy it. I'm looking for objective features, rather than people's opinions of those features. A good example is Redfall - people kept mentioning things about the game in a negative context, but to me, the things they were talking about sounded fun and interesting. I was lucky enough to be able to run the game well and I really enjoyed it. If people weren't complaining about it, I wouldn't have known I would like it.

I've always valued negative reviews, because i can then judge for myself if its SO negative i wont get past it, or if peoples criticisms i can tell wont actually effect my enjoyment of a game. Ive played alot of 6s that to me were 9s, because other peoples issues werent a hinderance to me enjoying a game.

As far as possitive things, i feel like i generally have a pretty good understanding of what a game has to offer from preview coverage. If a review is good, i can usually generally infer that things i thought would be cool are genuinely cool, and by default they dont get the same attention as i will give a mixed or poorly reviewed game.

Depends entirely on articulation.

Negative reviews are basically what reviews are for. By and large people only look up reviews for things they already want to buy, so a positive review doesn't really do much but confirm their hopes for the game. Negative reviews on the other hand allows you to avoid things that looked interesting but ultimately don't deliver on their promise.

The last game I can think of that I bought because it was getting good reviews was Stardew Valley, but I pass on buying games due to bad reviews probably at least every other month.

It depends on the content of the review. As long as they do a good job breaking down specifically what is good and bad, then the review is usually helpful. I've had it go both ways with negative reviews that made the game sound fun to me, and vice versa.

I often find that a negative/mediocre review is more useful than a glowing one.

A review that says "this product is awesome 10/10" says as little to me as "this product is worst than cholera 1/10". On the Internet is seems like every opinion has to be great or awful, with barely anything in between. However, a review that sits in the middle and actually tells me why something is not the best thing since sliced bread is more useful. If the qualms the reviewer has with something align with mine, it would affect negatively the purchase; if they don't, at least I will be informed of the issues, even those that are not relevant to me.

I admit that I do enjoy reading a good dismantling of something that has received generally high praise even if I never engage with it. Sometimes I'll come across a book--one that's getting all the accolades, a real "book of the month" type, and think that it sounds dumb as hell, so I'll look for bad reviews just for fun. This is certainly petty and silly on my part, but sometimes a well-written bad review can just be really entertaining to read.

As for actually finding use in a bad review for a game, I'd say not really? To use a recent example: Redfall got abysmal reviews. But I played through the story of that game twice: by myself and with other people. The reviews were of no use whatsoever to me. It wasn't perfect, but I enjoyed it and I found those reviews to be fall on a spectrum between having a few valid points and being utterly absurd.

A bad review isn't going to keep me from playing a game (or reading a book, or watching a movie) for a simple reason: I know what I like. If you look at my Goodreads reviews, you'll see that the majority of books get either 4 or 5 stars from me. That's not because I have impeccable tastes. It's because I'm pretty good at picking things that I know I'll like. Sometimes I get it wrong, but most of the time I'm more right than wrong. I know what I'm likely to enjoy more than any professional reviewer ever could.