Statistically Speaking: Metacritic's "Best Games of All Time" 

*Schrodinger's double A

Who's calling it dead? I'm not sure how common it is in western game development but in Japanese game development there's quite a lot of AA developers out there.

Dunno, can't remember the last time I played an AAA game. Even the best of them can't seem to hold my interest. Life's too short to be wasted on products for "everyone" rather than ones that seem to be tailored just for me.

Those types of games did die, around the end of the last generation. When THQ went bankrupt is kind of the big moment when it was "officially" dead. But since then they've made a comeback. THQ is even back, in name at least. Yet a lot of people are still stuck in that mindset of that part of the market dying. They haven't paid attention to it coming back. Perhaps it has something to do with the name. "AA" is a relatively new term. I don't remember it being used back when that sector was still alive before.

AA will eventually take over AAA if AAA developers can't figure out how to reduce their game development cost. The biggest advantage AA gaming has over AAA is how their games are sold at the same price as AAA games (if not slightly lower) despite having much lower development cost. This allows AA developers to take more creative risks thus their games have more personalities than AAA games. This is accompanied by the fact that most AA games are published and marketed by AAA publishers themselves. So as a game publisher, it is much safer to bet on AA games due to higher profit margin. That explains why Japanese niche franchises are gaining more popularity than ever in Western market for the past decade.

link?

@@bensmith2269 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-1hAnvqyfFiM.html

Hey hey people

Those kind of reviewers are so damaging to the industry. They just suck at their jobs and dont comprehend the big picture. Its really sad.

@@FredHerbert999 it wasn't even a real review. Just a passing joke on another review entirely.

Only 8 games from the last decade broke the top 100 so it'd have to be mentioned a lot in those reviews to appear. If his data was from all games in the past decade "dark souls", "souls like", or "soulsy" may be the most used terms by a mile

The media only jumped on the Dark Souls train once word of mouth made it popular. Like mentioned at the start of the video, this top 100 list is incredibly influenced by marketing budgets.

Because Dark Souls is not as popular as people think. Or rather, it’s harder to get into for the time a reviewer would need to critique it. No doubt it’s one of the best things to happen to games in the past decade but I know a lot of people who hated the series and only came around to it after HOURS of trying again and again. Ben Crowshaw and Gavin Dunne come to mind as far as people who didn’t like the game but came around to loving the series.

It's almost like reviewers don't actually use that title as much as people like to claim they do.

It's the dark souls of phrases!

I saw that same video man!

Ya but how many new genres/mechanics were created in the past 20 years verses now? I mean there are certainly just as many great movies (probably moreso) than in the past, but nostalgia aside, there will never be another Godfather simply because it broke new ground for others to follow. Most of those high scoring games of the past created new genres, or refined them to such a degree as to be unrecognizable from their roots. Not much in the groundbreaking happening now.

@@quintessenceSL That's because you're not paying attention. I have a list of extremely original (and great) games just this year. Outer Wilds, Baba Is You, Dicey Dungeons, Disco Elysium. Of course, we can't know yet if these games will result in new genres because genres only form over time. Plus in the beginnings of a medium new genres form much quicker. It's harder to do something wholly original when a lot has been done already. And sure, no one's gonna make another Godfather, but they don't need to since it already has been. Yet this year we've had an amazing year in film with films such as Parasite, The Lighthouse, Marriage Story, Uncut Gems. All great films in their own right. What was special about The Godfather was its marketing moreso than the film itself. Everyone knew it, everyone watched it. Art House films don't have that pull anymore but that's also due to industry juggernauts like Disney pushing them off to the side. In artistic industries we're seeing the same development as with retail and Walmart. Juggernauts completely decimating the competition.

welcome to george town. his stuff never disappoints and always surprises.

@@quintessenceSL The big ones are all the Dark Souls, Dota, CCG influences everywhere. Never mind a ton of mobile and indie games setting trends and changing things up regularly this past decade. If anything, the 00's were all about refining genres invented in the 90's. And improving on storytelling and production values. Where the 10's saw a lot of creativity and influences from all over, because game development opened up and it's way easier for anyone to start making games than it ever was. At least that's my experience.

Oh You comented it again, awesome, I totally agree 💜

I'd also like to say the same about the niche Japanese franchises that have been gaining popularity over the decade. They're still not the best selling games, but they go to show that a good niche product will have good audience retention. I'm hoping that Death Stranding proves the viability of niche AAA projects.

I mean, I doubt these two games sold as well as those big AAA titles. Is this really "trouncing" them?

@@JukaDominator That is like a larger discussion about if you really think money is an indicator of worth and or "excellence". Which, again, larger, bigger discussion but I believe it's something that's very subjective. Which I think was kinda the point George was making in this video, or at least one of the points (sorry my English is not the best)

@@alucardhellsing5466 I know a lot of people don't agree, but I do think money is a big indicator, since you wouldn't have bought the games if you didn't want them. You satisfied someone's needs, and that's a big deal.

I got a new game for you, an action, person, RPG. You in?

Guess thats the genre where the camera is turned off.

Metacritic lists Action Man: Raid on Island X with the "action" tag but not the "person" tag. Shameful.

Action adventure modern person shooter or Action adventure modern shooter person __¯\_(ツ)_/¯_*_*

its from 3rd person and 1st person because its 2 words

A man can dream.

F***ing Bethesda, man, the signs were there...

Its fucked up more when you realize that Zenimax the company that owns Bethesda wanted it to put obsidian in such dire situation financially so they can buy them out

@@mattskirble6845 Thank god that didn't happen.

@@Josep_Hernandez_Lujan maybe that's why outer worlds sucked so much

Gott'em!

I'd still consider that my favorite game

And it's stuck on the Vita. Should have been ported on PS3 and PS4

calm down with the commas bro you edited some out, better

Was on ps2, obviously not the golden edition with extra content. There are a few ways to play it on computer though.

Also known as the only reason to have a PS Vita. And not for long because an emulator just booted it.

The reason for that was that the previous decade was literally the wild west, genre conventions didn't really exist so much. I mean, think about the term Rogue-like. The genre name itself just refers to the archetype, which at that time was novel and new. I think the late 80s started showing that 'iterations are the new thing' and coming off a high like the early 80s where every game felt like no other game before it would definitely be a downer. I know it's a large reason I play less new games myself as the genres being iterated that are popular aren't especially my steez and I think there's are more unexplored territory in the medium than what's been charted. I'm glad indie games exist as they're not confined to financial risk based decisions like a lot of officially published/marketed games are. I don't get to play so many of them, but there are ones that when I see them, I have hope that eventually that one game will influence someone in the publishing business to okay it since that other person proved it could be done and done enjoyably. I mean, tabletop games have been around far longer than videogames and they're still coming up with wild ideas for new ways to play. Did you know they have a game with no real pieces and the game is literally getting 6 people to argue? I mean, that's insane to think of, but tabletop games will go there. Videogames...eh...they rely too much on audio visual and mcguffening and other details that aren't actually the game itself. I think until that paradigm culturally shifts, it's gonna be a mostly boring ride in the mainstream. Maybe there will be a mainstream renaissance once all the 'whales' get beached.

What happened with Obsidian?

@@KwarterCraft bethesda basically held a ton of profit of new Vegas from them, because they were 2 points short of the required threshold on metacritic. It forced obsidian into a few dozen layoffs. Not only was it absolutely scummy, but it's made bethesda even more notorious now, as new Vegas is still the considered the best of the fallout games released by bethesda, along with bethesda revealing itself to be a horrible company that makes shit games

@@KwarterCraft Pretty famously Bethesda had Obsidian produce Fallout:NV on a tight schedule. They were told they were given a bonus upon a review score of 85. They got 84. They got nothing.

it didnt force obsidian into a few dozen layoffs. they lost out on a bit of money as per the agreement but the layoffs happened during development of a canned third person action game with microsoft

@@BillyMaizes/videos Not only that but Obsidian were given only 18 months to finish the game and much of the criticism New Vegas got was from technical errors that were entirely Bethesda's fault.

One of the things you should keep in mind when looking at reviews through the ages is thinking about the idea of 'games journalism' itself. Like many cultures, it was just a fan driven thing at one time, not anything you would ever even hear about in schools or colleges. It's a very young medium (computers themselves being the actual medium, automated interactivity being the prime delineation here) and so it's worth noting that even in interviews with national magazine editors like Steve Harris from EGM, he'll happily tell you 'We were just kids having a good time and didn't know anything about what we were doing'...much like the majority of early adopters of the industry itself making the games. Also, it's worth noting that Japan, where a lot of early games were also coming from, as well as the UK had very different attitudes toward both computers and games creation and are a bit of an extension to their general attitudes toward pop culture and media in addition to how they treated the shifting tides of technology itself and the 'computer invasion' as it were. I can't speak with any authority about Japan, but it's clear early on that there's a level of respect for games as a medium that ran along side their respect for animation (it's obvious to anyone looking at America's animation output that it's still viewed as 'for kids') and in the UK, their 'computer literacy programs' meant that there was widespread adoption of computers in general and therefor a pretty vibrant range of people who might make and play them. Compare that to the US where 'computers are for business' kind of attitude and marketing and there starts to be some real huge differences in the origins of what most would consider the three epicenters of gaming history. I don't know if any of this makes sense because I'm probably rambling at this point, but I've been into gaming as a culture and history for a while now since modern games actually don't interest me much at all, at least in the mainstream sense. Call of Shooty, Sporty Game 2k20, etc. don't interest me at all. I don't care how good a game looks, I don't play them to oogle at graphics because I can do that just watching a Let's Play video, so I spend a lot of my 'gaming time' these days just looking at general culture around the time gaming became a thing. I would also like to offer a correction to the video as well: Arcades in the late 70's and early 80's in every country was mainstream and made TONS of money. There's a reason why Time Warner bought Atari in 1981. However, I suppose in this context he means 'big AND sustained' since America did go through the crash of '83, but that has more to do with short sighted general capitalism and quarterly earnings vs. quarterly projections than games themselves. I tend to believe a good game is one that you'll play for 20 years, and that's really hard to tell a company that depends on selling at least one big title every year.

Gaming in the Clinton Years

As hilarious as that quote is, DKC and DKC2 do really hold up. The gameplay is timeless.

This but unironically.

Too be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Donkey Kong Country.

george wood will never not be relevant

Very well said.

Truerly incredible Facts being speweed here :O

youtube commenters

@@NickHunter nice system of checks and balances we got going here

Well, there was a loose, nebulous collection of gamers who tried that, but the critique-men didn't respond well _at all_ to being critiqued. Like, *at all*

Matt brought this up

@ShoLKAN Most of the people who participated in GG were left and center left people. I wonder who gave you this contrary impression. Certainly not the media figures who were being criticized... surely a person of at least moderate intelligence would see that they have everything to gain by slandering their critics and not addressing their core critiques, right? By the by, that's called an ad hominem fallacy. The actual kind; not the way it generally gets thrown around online.

Review scores really just feel like an endcap on a games marketing.Just get enough people all hyped up and collect your 8+ to shove em through the door with.

If a game isn't bad then it's good. --Dysphoria Blue 2020

@@phreakinpher That's not what Dysphoria Blue is trying to say. He's simply stating "if the game made a lot of money, it'll surely have a good score no matter what" The fifa games make tons of money but barely change the formula in any way in the series, and imo is just a boring soccer game. Yet, Metacritic has been giving the games at least above 80% every time (except fifa 2020 which 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 got a 79%) "Just because (insert AAA title here) has an 84% on Metacritic does not mean I'll play that game" - Dysphoria Blue 2020

The scores are so inflated now. They're pretty meaningless anyway, but even moreso these days. Even without factoring in everything that comes along with it, like the skeevy things publishers do to manipulate scores.

bioshock infinite might just be one of the worst games i've ever played, it had so many terrible game design decisions that ran contrary to its intent, had obviously cut content hanging in plain sight, absolutely god awful writing direction that contradicted itself left and right, used cheap storytelling techniques to cover up their lack of planning and rushed development, had cheap shocks to manipulate you emotionally that didn't even tie into the theme of the game, and used the name of its predescessor to try and sell itself on the idea that it might have been more than a half baked game rushed out the door it didn't even leverage any of the things they spent time establishing in the first half of the game. it's so half baked its embarassing. even looking at it for what it is, a linear campaign shooter, it has such massive glaring balance and pacing issues that they had to use elizabeth to spawn an infinite amount of ammo and medkits as a crutch to make the game even beatable 94% on metacritic. game reviews don't mean anything

THIS GAME WILL GET YOU LAID

Oh, good ol' NAViGaTR.

WELL I LIKE IT BUT THERE'S DEFINITIVELY, OBJECTIVELY, A LOT OF THINGS WRONG WITH ME.

Donkey Kong Country is truly perfect. If you do not get this amazing new generation of Donkey Kong Country madness, you are stupid. Yes, I know it's insulting, but that's also the truth. If you're a true video game fan, you will not hesitate in the slightest bit to "buy this piece of gaming history." - George Wood

literally in that same boat, because i forgot to ask for the number of a girl who i just spent all day with, but i accidentally left my lunch bag in her car so im hoping she'll be back but pretty sure thanks to my stupidity im going to be alone a long time

@@jose2226 I feel you bro, had my fair share of regret and anguish from lost opportunities. Now I'm alone, lost, and rotting..

Greetings fellow humans aboard the S.S. Nihilism!

@@CommieApe now the question is, how do we get out ?? If we can at all

What makes you guys feel this way? It's not a rhetorical question; I've dealt with (well, still am dealing with) depression and I find it helps to actually describe the situation in objective rather than subjective terms. So, I mean, what is the sinking dinghy of your life? A divorce? Looming renal failure? IBS? Bankruptcy?

I honestly feel like it really depends on the game, the franchise, and the state the franchise is in but I can definitely see where your coming from.

"Its the exact problem film is dealing with." Well yeah, because its the easy way to make money. But sequels and fresh ideas aren't mutually exclusive. It's just the executives and the higher-ups preying on people who want a continuation of their favorite franchise, it being Fallout or Pokémon, and pushing out mediocre games because, like metacritic scores show, brand recognition is the only thing that matters for people to buy and love their games.

I dunno. I've been playing games for nearly 30 years, and I've played stuff in every genre and played all sorts of experimental games, but these days what I enjoy the most are games that just go back to the basics with stuff like mario-style platformers. Nothing beats that simple joy for me. I've played the Shovel Knight games dozens of times each. Being experimental and pushing limits for its own sake is cool and we definitely need that. But it's often that the experimental one isn't great but the subsequent games that adopt elements of the experimental ones but try to make coherent games out of them end up being great. Just like with music. You get crazy stuff like Stockhausen, but then the Beatles listened to Stockhausen a lot (especially Paul) and then adapted elements of Stockhausen into their own better songs that were actually good to listen to as songs, not just as experiments

You pumped for their new game coming?

@@vilapimpducky4626 My friends and I are. Enjoy it!

George just lost another dollar there.

Your profile pic. I require the source. That is some high quality shitpost material

George clicks confirmed

ethan philpot Google shaggy rei, not my own content unfortunately lol

+

+

*Fewer

thanks Stannis :p

You may be more grammatically correct but I swear "less" still sounds better.

@@bunnyhopshow no one says fewer anymore, it saddens me

@@bunnyhopshow I'm gonna guess this is because "less editing" sounds more natural, even when the wording of "fewer errors" is technically correct

@@bunnyhopshow "slightly less" is a bit of an established phrase, so I guess that's why it rolls off the tongue better.

hmmm in my opinion that would be a fitting non-clickbait title for this video

What was actually removed?

Editing errors.

Quantitative justification for anything will never best qualitative. You can have 100 dixie cups, but your glass can be used a million times.

They're too busy superfluously messing with the layout every few years and being concerned about "hate speech" to add actual features to the site.

The problem with that is that a video could amass a lot of likes and traffic before being "revised" to be completely different. If you could keep the same url for a different video, you could release and entirely new video with inflated statistics and a history of traffic on just the first day it comes out. This might not be so bad for youtube, but it definitely has been a problem on amazon. On amazon, a seller can make a page for an actually good product, and then completely replace what product is being sold on the same page while keeping the same review score and reviews. This can lead to a whole lot of scams where defective products have good reviews and will make it seem like the product isn't a cheap knockoff or something like that. RU-vid videos aren't exactly capable of the same kind of scam, but it would be possible to mislead people if you could just replace the existing video on a particular page to revise it.

You mean like the annotation feature that it used to have? Because the loss of that feature is still the biggest loss to RU-vid that I've ever seen.

@@tinkerer3399 Yeah, I agree. I have no idea why they got rid of annotations, they were literally the best thing youtube had ever added to their site.

Kevin Bromley I wish it was more popular. It’s easily my favorite game of the last ten years and I just stumbled on it on game pass, I’d never heard of it, nobody’s talking about it. It was a life changing unforgettable experience and I hope the studio gets to make more.

If it wasn't for Metacritic's modern action adventure shooter bias, Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix would be the greatest game ever made.

Hello from next year.

The point he was getting at is the mechanics, experience level of the player, maybe even their income all affect the overall impact of a game on a person. Whereas film, unlike games, does not change so drastically between people. You will not find someone who 'wasn't skilled enough to make it to the end of a movie'. You will not find someone who can't watch a movie because 'their computer isn't beefy enough to run it'. etc. etc. The tech and a person's success with the game as intended by the author (strange how we used to call them authors but now they're developers, like...they make buildings or something) very much change how a game is perceived. I'm sure you remember the reviewer playing Cuphead 'badly' recently meme'd....Again, movies are pretty easy to consume as intended.

"Check this out" that's a nice name for a new series I have to say

No

Postmodern Critique. It's neat. Lol

Undr Capitalism*

@@aturchomicz821 🤦‍♂

No DMC 2 is da best game

The Outer Wilds. It's sort of Groundhog Day in space and it's damn good.

I'll share that sigh with you for sure

Very yes to this sentiment. I often ask people what makes them play a game again and none of them say graphics, sound or story. It's the gameplay itself. It's not that those things can't enhance the gameplay, but rarely does someone say "I played Doom for 20 years because I can't get enough of that engrossing story". I say rarely because I figure someone's going to comment after me saying that's exactly why they play through the original missions over and over.