Today I learned (thanks to 9gag community) about a feature on website of Red Value Gaming (they write gaming news and make reviews that are actually worth watching).
So, what is it all about?
One picture tells more than a thousand words.
You can rate a game from $0.01 to (1.25 * {game initial price}) and an average rating will be shown on site. You can make your opinion with rating public by writing an optional review.
Why does it matter?
Isn't money all that matters in gaming industry? Haven't we all be told to vote with our wallets? Yet nothing except various forms of individual protests has been done in that matter.
Also, during recent trends of microtransactions, I have seemed way too many reviews where the reviewer couldn't bring themselves to lower the rating because of microtransactions or unbalance, seeing how those things can be improved post-release. By voting with money instead of more abstract stars, such problems are easier to resolve - we all can tell how much money we want to spend on something, and this decision is rather quick.
This way of voting also eliminates another important issue - lack of rating inflation/outdating. The highest rates on Metacritic belong not to the best games we have right now, but to >10 years old games that were revolutionary in the past. And very often you won't want them to receive less than 10 out of 10, due to impact they had on the industry. But are those the best games we have right now? Newer games cannot reach such ratings when they are just an evolution, not a revolution. But years of evolution do matter. For someone just starting their adventure, would you recommend Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit from 1998, or the one from 2010? Touhou 6 (2002) or Touhou 11 (2008)? But the former ones were more impactful and original, so how would you rate them? Money-voting deals with it this way: I'm sure I wouldn't pay $60 for Half-Life 2 (2004) today. But I wouldn't regret throwing $10 (I know HL2 is on $1 sale every few months, that's beside the point). So a index of game success would be how slowly the game rating decreases and how well the game can compete in ratings with modern ones.
Imagine Red Value Gaming becoming the next Metacritic. Sure, there are always many people that never do any research before their purchases, but we could expect a bit more pressure on companies looking for easy money. Meanwhile companies like CD Projekt would get a valuable feedback of how much they can push price of their games (Witcher 3 stays around rating of $60 even though it has been over 2 years since its release now, with many fans trying to vote over maximum $75). I think it would have a positive impact on the whole industry in the end - trends would be much more visible, so less companies would end up investing in dying genres.
Which games are supported?
I expected to see only the games released on major platforms like Steam. But it turned out the site uses a massive database that includes almost every game released on digital distribution platforms or on CD/DVDs (of course, with exception of itch.io and dōjinshi games - there are too many). And if a game is missing, you can contact site admin via their Discord - I certainly did, learning about some system internals in process. By the way, I turned out to be the first person that visited their Discord - that was very unexpected, I must tell you :).
What can I do?
Visit the site, vote for 3 games and write 1 review. It's amazing what small contributions can achieve.
Post scriptum: English is hard - https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Third-person_pronoun#/English.
By the way, this is my first post on steemit, so I'm open to any feedback :)
You need to do an ‘introduceyourself’ post use that as your first tag other than that this was a great first post and I will be looking forward to more like it.
I love grabbing a bargain especially when it comes to games a lot of the ones I recently purchased I got at a good price like The Last of us remastered and Battlefield 4 both £8 each on PS4.
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