Back in the days of the NES, heck, back in the days of the Xbox, Gamecube and PS2, games were shipped as a whole package. Once a game had gone gold, it was done. If you bought the game, you got what you paid for. Reviews reflected that. Fable got a 9.3 from IGN. Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater got an 8.7 from Gamespot.
But now, in an age where downloadable content is sometimes as big as the games they support, developers can drastically improve a game after its release. A game's controls can be improved, made tighter. Pop-in can be reduced, and framerates steadied. Entire plot lines can be added at the drop of a hat.
All of this raises the question. When a game is shipped, is it ready for a "final" score? Or should reviewers be allowed to change their scores, based on drastic improvements? If a game such as Spiderman 3 had been given an update to improve it's many graphical glitches and framerate drops. Should a reviewer be allowed to change their past score to reflect that? If Alone in the Dark were given a much needed control overhaul, could its score be raised from a 3.5 to a 6 (ign)?
This may not be a really big deal as of yet, but I predict in the future, more games will be fixed and tweaked after release. There's those of you out there that may feel that if the game was released as a glitchy mess, the developers should just have to deal with the scores, sometimes though, they're forced to send out a crap product due to a publisher's demands. I just think that in the near future, review scores shouldn't be set in stone. Heck, even now game scores should be allowed to fluctuate. And it is my belief that the developers deserve at least a little credit if they're really trying to improve what they've created.
P.S. I also think PC game scores should have been allowed to change for years. I'm just focusing on consoles in this post.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
I think you make a good point about the fluid nature of games and the solid nature of reviews. I think that honestly the real jump should be to get rid of review scores all together. However, I am unsure that it would make any real difference TBH as the only time reviews get any attention is at launch when a bad review sees the game disappear of shelves swiftly. The problem will be getting sites to convince media sources to go back to games months or years after release to do reviews instead of writing big publicity seeking reviews of new games. User reviews will have to fill in the gaps.
Also worth thinking about would be if games that receive sequels (especially yearly Madden/FIFA games) should have their review scores moved up or down to show if the follow up improves upon it or not (these games geting 9/10 year after year makes a decision difficult). Also, what about older games; a launch game like Resistance FOM deserved a 85% at the time but 2 years on in a post COD4 world, should it be notched down to show how it compares to the best and most recent.
Just some ideas from me, interesting post though which should get much more consideration than it will get on this site.
The reviews in some cases should be changed. However at the same time they should not. Just because a developer can now patch a game doesn't mean they should ship a game with problems. They should get it right the first time around. Imagine the people who don't have access to the internet. Yes I know that seems silly but there are still alot of them out there. For them the game will remain the same after the patch because they have no way to access the patch. If the dev did the job they were meant to do this would not be a problem.
It really is kinda mixed but to be honest I think Reviews as a whole are broken. If I had based my purchases on the reviews I read I would have missed out on some of my favorite games of all time.
Sometimes I think that DLC has made developers a little lazy this generation because they know that they can always go back and release a patch for a game or something after the final game is shipped, but Last Gen. with the PS2, it was like developers strove to deliver the best the first time around and really they had no choice but to deliver the first time because there was no second chances last Gen.
But, I do think that a game should be Re-Reviewed if a developer releases a patch for it to fix certain issues with the game though.
I actually never considered dropping past review scores. I don't actually think that it should be done, but it's an interesting idea.
One thing that I left out of my post because it didn't fit in fluidly was that perhaps reviewers could add a new blurb at the end of an already written review, that would detail certain things that had changed with a patch. And perhaps add a "new" review score in the blurb.
Just a thought.
If the game changed because of a patch, and the patch addresses the problems, the game's score should be adjusted, as the reasons for the score no longer applies.