The reason for the difference in the ratings of critics and players called tolerance

The gap between the ratings of game critics and the players themselves has always existed, and it became possible to document it with the advent of the aggregator Metacritic in 2001. And the data provided by blogger Seymus Young prove that in recent years this gap has become more noticeable.
A similar picture is observed in the field of cinema. The scandal with the ratings of the blockbuster “Still fresh in my memory”Star Wars: The Last Jedi“. His “professional” rating on Metacritic reached 8.5, while the viewer stopped at 4.5. Then the legendary “Russian hackers” were blamed for this.

The blogger compiled graphs of average ratings for all games and calculated the difference between them over the years. And it is easy to notice from the graphs that since 2014 this difference has become more and more noticeable. While critics’ ratings mostly range around 70 out of 100, players rate new projects lower by 11 points on average.

Average ratings of critics (left) and players (right) by year

Charts tried to analyze the portal UNZ. And I came to the conclusion that in many respects this was affected by aggressive monetization and projects that go unfinished. But isolated cases suggest that critics often overstate for the sake of tolerance. While for players the manifestation of the current political agenda is an occasion to lower the score.

An example is a series of games with a noticeable gap. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (86 vs 67) and Far cry 5 (78 vs 61) – games that attack racist views, backwardness and religiosity with a very average gameplay (as estimated by a journalist who did not play any of them).

IN Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (83 vs 67), there are noticeable references to the Black Lives Matter movement, “Black Lives Matter”, while the plot looks incomplete, and microtransactions are woven into the gameplay.

Finally, Fallout 4 (84 vs. 55) was full of allusions to the Underground Railroad, a system for transporting slaves before the US Civil War, but its gameplay looked faded compared to its predecessor, Fallout: New Vegas.

A graph in which the ratings of critics and players are combined

Journalists conclude that modern politics of tolerance, “awakening” and feminism forces critics to give high marks to the games in which it manifests itself. At the same time, players are rather critical of her.

A striking example is the Kingdom Come: Deliverance. “Progressive” critics and professional equality activists ganged up on her because of the absence of national minorities, and the average rating dropped to 76. But at the same time, players rated her 81 points.

The inverse proportion of the gap in estimates in the case of Kingdom Come: Deliverance in the calculations showed a reduction in the gap in estimates in 2018. But in reality, it demonstrates the opposite: critics and players evaluate completely different sides of the game, and this gap will continue to worsen as the strength and scale of “progressive” propaganda grow.

The difference between the ratings of critics and viewers

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