Comment on "Benefit of the doubt" is a very important aspect of a game's success
Grailly@piefed.social 2 days agotherefore the higher the playtime in the ‘window’ of reviews that you look at, the more likely they are to skew high. Yes, I’m looking at 2 hours, not exactly high.
Two hours is the window for a refund, so I absolutely make a call within 2 hours. 2 hours is arbitrarily chosen as a catch-all. You can finish some games and refund them within that time, it doesn’t work well in all situations. It’s not some objective measure of how much time you need to judge a game.
specially a new / expensive game - hasn’t engaged me within that time, I refund it and move on. The example is a free game. There’s also a difference between moving on and leaving a negative review
Goodeye8@piefed.social 1 day ago
Some games don’t need even 2 hours of playtime to see the flaws. It took me a single COD match to understand why I hate that kind of gameplay. Getting to some arbitrary time spent would be time wasted.
There are no free games. You still need to invest time and effort into the game. I got Star Wars Outlaws for free. I understood I’m probably not going to enjoy the game before the tutorial was over. I still gave it a shot under the same “benefit of doubt” idea and in hindsight I should’ve just put the game down when I got the first hint that I’m not going to enjoy it, because I probably would’ve given it a more generous evaluation. Instead I ended up with the opinion that the game is a waste of time because playing it was a waste of my time.
I agree there’s a difference between moving on and leaving a negative review and I think it’s stupid for people to leave negative reviews just to feel like they’re part of some kind of a zeitgeist. But the negative reviews don’t change anything because the reason a game is getting negative reviews is because it’s not a good game. Had Highguard been the new Overwatch it wouldn’t be in the overwhelmingly negative category even if the initial impression of the game was negative. Just look at Doom 2016, prior to launch it ticked all the boxes of being a bad game (development hell, tacked on multiplayer, poor marketing material, no review copies etc) but then it came out and people loved it. I don’t think the benefit of doubt would’ve saved Highguard. It simply would’ve made the trend from a nosedive into a steep slope and the “dead game” claim would just come a few months later.