The Fallacy of “Audience Aligned” Reviews | Unpacked

When a game maker actively seeks to silence dissenting critics, makes you wonder how they feel about their upcoming games…

Really good video and totally agree with the criticism of the metric. It's honestly really disappointing to see people responsible for making great art fundamentally misunderstand the role of that art within the ecosystem. Makes me think that perhaps Moon makes great games in spite of its leadership rather than because of it.

Well this has really soured me on playing anything released by Moon studio in the future. The first Ori was utterly mid. Won't be picking up the sequel or anything else if the guy running the show is an egomaniac of this type

This is kinda happened to film criticism in the 2010s at least in the Youtube space where the algorithm is so limiting to cultural bandwidth. Superheros were ridding high. The biggest channels were aligned with that popular concensus and looked at everything from a nerd culture coded, lore based, perspective and it was tedious, limiting to discussion and I hated it.

Criticism is an art form in itself. We can think of Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, and Yahtzee. I listen to Yahtzee every week, not necessarily because I plan to play the game, but because his insights provide a deeper understanding of the gaming industry, game development, and even other games I might play where I might notice similar themes. However, it doesn’t matter whether or not a critic agrees with the audience. Otherwise, Call of Duty and NBA games would be the top-rated games of all time.

Criticism is an art form in itself. We can think of Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, and Yahtzee. I listen to Yahtzee every week, not necessarily because I plan to play the game, but because his insights provide a deeper understanding of the gaming industry, game development, and even other games I might play where I might notice similar themes. However, it doesn’t matter whether or not a critic agrees with the audience. Otherwise, Call of Duty and NBA games would be the top-rated games of all time.

Yahtzee immediately comes to mind, I love some games that he doesn't like, I don't like some games that he loves. He is still one of my favorites though. We can all agree to disagree, everyone has different tastes and opinions. It's supposed to be one of the things that makes the world great.

Complaining that a critic doesn't agree with the crowd (be it the rest of the critics, or the public at large) is always ridiculous. No one's obliged to agree with the crowd, and if one doesn't want to read a critic who doesn't agree with the crowd, there are plenty of other critics who will tell you what you want to hear.

The last critic I really aligned with, meaning I understood them well, was Totalbiscuit. Now, that's mostly because I stopped putting time in to get to know critics, because I get my games from looking at whats up on steam, then zipping through any old gameplay video to get a vibe of the gameplay, then just play it. After I might go to critics that present their thoughts well or at least in an entertaining way. Gives me more to think about, as you said. I weirldy noticed a big shift for me while doing that (and also using plugins to simply remove steam reviews entirely, only checking reviews and scores well after having my own opinion of a game): There are a LOT of "mixed" or "mostly positive" games I massively enjoy now. More often than the extremes in the positive direction. Might be because the games are definitely flawed in some way. Makes it more interesting to me. Like a guitar using a grungy sound, slightly too loud or too quiet, is sometimes more interesting than perfectly mixed guitar that perfectly describes the essence of guitar.