metacritic score vs user score

Whenever metacritic scores are mentioned in a game review, only the critic score is talked about. Why is that? Shouldn't user score matter more (than critic score) since it's the users for whom the game is made for? And why is there such a big difference between user score and critic score?

The secret is that Metacritic scores don't matter at all.

I don't know much about this because I simply don't follow metacritic or am at all intrested in reviews per say. I believe however, that user reviews often get "bombed" by users that might have gripes with things other than the game in question.

Because user reviews are...totally useless? Once saw this on a Steam game: Thumbs up "Anime tiddies", next one down Thumbs down "anime tiddies".

I rest my case.

My opinion is - despite the general consensus around these parts - is that metacritic is a useful tool. But as said above, the aveage of professional opinions gives much more valuable figure than user scores, simply because critics actually take time and put energy into evaluating given item. Users post garbage and often act reactionally, meaning they inflate or deflate their rating to make the final score closer to what they think it shoul be, which is simply fucked up, but will never change.

User scores on Metacritic are only used by fanboys to shill or by angry gamers to reviewbomb games of developers or publishers they don't like.

They have lost all legitimacy they ever had as actual reviews.

Yeah, user reviews are useless, especially when it comes to exclusive titles. They often will get bombed with 10s by both fanboys of the platform the game is on and 1s by fanboys of other platforms. Sometimes this stuff can get also twisted because the company did something bad, like crazy microtransactions etc. so as punishment people will bomb it with negative reviews. Sorry, user reviews are just useless. Unless you ask about the opinion on a game on some forum or spend some time picking out the normal reviews from the garbage fanboys/1 line ones.

And metacritic/open critic scores do matter, they definitely can guarantee bonuses to the dev team if a game achieves a set score. These days I recommend opencritic more than metacritic, it has a better UI and takes a bigger pool of sites and reviewers than metacritic.

Written user reviews for video games are perhaps the most worthless form of user reviews, which are already almost completely worthless.

There are a lot of 1’s and 10’s left by brand warriors.

Well, I'm going to agree with pretty much everyone else that Metacritic is kind of pointless and bad anyway, but user reviews are largely a cesspool of disgusting reactions to things like brand loyalty, right down the line to "this game has diversity in it? BLECH!" So, they're both pretty useless, but somehow user reviews, in my opinion, are extra useless.

Because they may not even own the game and half the "reviews" are shit posts

As someone who is a fan of both paradox games and the total war series, I have to dig real deep to find useful negative reviews that aren't just complaining about DLC pricing.

When I go on metacritc, the very 1st thing I do is read the very top user and critic review and very worst critic and user review.

The professional reviews are a barometer I look at but the user reviews are almost always mostly useless.

userscores are pointless when people use them to 'make a statement' or 'hurt a business where it matters'. Especially when doing so requires people to vote 1 or 10 to move the needle as far as possible by themselves. The score that they click on and the score that they might give in an honest appraisal of the product might be completely different from eachother.

Do we really need to pay attention to user reviews when games like COD MW2 & Diablo 3 have scores of 4.3 and 4.0 respectively ? All it says to me is that the devs of those games made a decision at some point that made a lot of people very angry. It doesn't tell me anything about the quality of the actual game.

The best thing about metacritic is that it can give you a good glimpse of how a game was received at release, which is nice when you're playing an older title. And it's a good hub to find the reviews that you might want to read. Sometimes when i don't know what i should play, i like to just scroll through some highly rated games to remind myself that i should play a certain alltime classic.

User scores are terrible because people don't use them correctly, nor care to. People will score or write a short thing up even when they hadn't played the game, or give a game an extreme score (like a zero or a ten) depending on if they liked it or disliked it, and generally, there's not much information to go by in those reviews. Though there are potentially fewer reviews to go by, and it's still an opinion of someones when it comes to professional Metacritic scores, they can still be trusted more because it's someone (which has the paid job of) giving an opinion on all the aspects a game has to offer and usually it's a much better-written text than 'Blah, bad boss fight. Zero. Point. Oh.' I think there should be a strict guideline for users that want to score something or write something up.

Yeah, I gotta agree with the others. User reviews tend to be very warped. The only useful part of them, for me at least, is that there is some amusement value in reading the 10 out of 10s and 1 out of 10s for games like Mass Effect: Andromeda. It's like watching a beautiful dumpster fire smolder as you roast marsh-mellows over a blaze of extremely polarized opinions.

Otherwise, I tend to find the critic reviews that are compiled on Metacritic at least somewhat helpful in avoiding the most horrifically broken or pitifully lackluster games. Heck, all the critical reviews of Destiny 2: Warmind giving it 5s and 6s out of 10 and detailing what a pitifully anemic DLC it is (that apparently also makes Destiny 2 a horrendous grind to get anywhere) saved me from wasting $12.00 on buying a discounted Destiny 2 at all. Instead, I bought some beer and played Far Cry 5... and I came out ahead on the consumer surplus side of things. Can't fault Metacritic for that. :-P

I mean, I spend time on Giant Bomb because I value a professional opinion about the games that intrigue me. So yeah, I look at Metacritic, then jump to the reviews by the critics I like most. Metacritic's alright for me.

I take it all with a grain of salt though and still haven't entirely forgiven Jeff G for being a grouch and panning Fallout 4, which was awesome godammit.

I'm sorry?

https://www.giantbomb.com/reviews/fallout-4-pc-review/1900-726/

Also, I think his console review was a 3 star one.

@sethmode:

Well, okay, see, Drew was sensible about it. In my memory, Jeff was pretty negative on the podcast which got my undies in a bunch. I've mostly unbunched them now though.

Well, yeah, because while he ultimately likes Fallout 4 he expected more out of Fallout 4 than it provided him leaving him ultimately disappointed.

Certainly take reviews in consideration to decide whether you should buy the game or not, but the enjoyment from the experience should come from your experience, not someone else's. Critic scores are often mentioned because those are reviews done by people who are certified to perform the job and post reviews.

User reviews can be really bad as not everyone utilizes the application to its fullest, but I think they have value because, well, those reviews aren't so different to us and their experience could reflect yours. Sometimes they show an interesting divide between the critics and the public. A recent example is Golf Story, which reviewed fairly well with a critic score of 78. However, the public has been far more positive on the game and it sits at an 8.6 user score. PUBG is another case where it has an 86 critic score but a user score of 4.5 (mainly from people complaining about it being poorly optimized). Mystical Ninja for the N64 is another where its critic score is 67 but the user score is high at an 8.5.