Video Game Journalists CRASH OUT Over New Ratings Site!

0:00This is Belie, one network, every topic, everywhere. So there's a new video game review site called videogamescritic.com that's supposed to be like, I guess, a Broughton Tomatoes type portal for game rankings. And they're also allowing users to rate video game news outlets. And some of the people working for those outlets aren't happy with the reviews they've been given. Isn't it fair, though, that you get away? Because they rate everybody else. Right. And then some of these places were in trouble because when games came out that they didn't like people behind them or politics associate with them, like Hogwarts, like I see, they deliberately gave it terrible reviews to try to tank it, but just against what their job is. So why isn't it different if people review them for accuracy, authenticity, you know, whether you're good or not? I mean, it's as fair to me.

1:00Well, because it's only supposed to work one way or supposed to listen to their opinions on things, but you're not supposed to give opinions about their opinions. This is me now. Yeah. And that is one of the biggest complaints with video game journalism. This is really interesting, though, that's the biggest story behind this portal. It's not even how the games are rated or ranked. And speaking of which, speaking of why this is happening, and you said about them being unfair to certain devs based on politics, the guy behind it is Thomas Mueller, who has had, I think is Mueller, but he's had run-ins with video game journalists before. They don't like his politics and like some of the stuff he said. He has accused them if I remember correctly of being biased against him in his games because of his politics and they call him like a gamer gator and all this shit. Yeah. Well, we'll talk about it. So that is factoring into it. How very dare you go, you know, create a site that ranks us, right? Kataku was so outraged that they put a whole article up about it.

2:04So we're going to read that and see what they have to say. Now I will be fair here, you know, in the interest of fairness. Over the last couple of months, I don't know if it's because the fear of foreclosure has set in or that there's been a change in ownership or what. Some of these video game outlets that used to be super political are not as political as they used to. Not to talk today. One of their early articles today was being really, really, really mad about the White House video game thing. Oh, okay. Well, they're, I mean, they're in trouble with their opinions. They're entitled to their opinions, but that like the, I guess the difference is that's all it was for the longest time. It was like for like eight or 10 years, every other article, even articles that had nothing to do with politics would somehow work in a Trump barb or something. Like you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I got, I got, I mean, like look, I don't think Trump's the greatest thing ever, but it's, you don't need to bring it up for every review you do. Yeah. And then this kind of stuff was never in video game reviews back in the day.

3:05Like if you read electronic gaming monthly, you'd have no idea who the president was, because they never talked about it. I never came up, right? It was relevant. Yeah. It wasn't relevant to video games. What's this have to do with video games? So we're going to talk about this. We're going to talk about them being big bad big bad before we get to a, before he end today further, please subscribe for more pop culture news, views and rants guys. You get woohoo if you do. Go out to clownfishtv.com as an opinion site. We're not actually game journalists. We just talk about games and comics and anime and whatever the hell interests us that day. So please subscribe over there. Clownfishtv.com. I don't know if we're on here or not, probably not. We don't know if they're that big or not big. We're not that big. Angry Joe's on here though. So we'll take a look at the site here. This is the, who can you trust? Okay. So again, coming from video games critic.com. Every press outlet and creator is rated by one standard. Do their verdicts align with what players end up thinking of the same game scale. Each reviewer uses is decoded, not punished.

4:07What matters is whether knowing their verdict tells you what the players will think and whose side they take when pressed and players disagree because there are a lot of games that were critical darlings, but the players hated them. But it's all, I mean, look, it's always been that way. There are some games that are classics that I remember got not great reviews in like a game spot or, you know, some of the different outlets they had back then, EGM, whatever it was. And even some websites are like, yes, franchises and going to go anywhere and they wound up doing gangbusters, right? So there are disagreements, but it does seem like it is more political and it does seem like whose palms are being greased, especially like who's advertising on the site. That's that's going to determine what we give, you know, this game. And IGN, I love how they just play it safe. Everything gets a seven. Yeah. You can't say they're glazing the studio or whatever it is. You know, they're saying you can't say that because they're not giving in a great review,

5:10but they're not giving in a bad review either because they want everybody's money for advertising. Play it safe, guys. Play it safe. But yeah, something out what's on here, Kataku has a 60 polygon as a 59. Game spot has a 58 games radar as a 54. And then they have creators here. Now actually, one of the bigger creators on here, I think was the gym acquisition, which I was very surprised by yet like a, or they had like a 77 push squares on here. They have a 69. I don't think anybody has like an 80s or at 90s, a slant magazine game pressure, RP gamer, 70. But yeah, it just goes down and down. I got to see who's at the bottom of the list. Or these are, these are YouTubers and podcasters. Who's all the way at the bottom? Let's see who the worst, the worst is here. Boomstick gaming 57. Mr. Maddie plays 62. Yeah. Gym acquisition has a 72.

6:11So I don't know. Anyway, let's talk about this. It's come from Kataku. No rest for the wicked director calls video game critics who have different opinions untrustworthy. Pay attention because his new site is the one source of truth for gamers. Sorry. So Thomas Mellor lead development on the Ori games and the forthcoming no rest for the wicked is launching a website. It's his answer to the metacritic and open critic, but fixes the biggest issue with those sites. They're a complete lack of saying just how much the gaming press sucks. They don't like it when when the tables are turned. They don't like it when it's done to them. I think it's, it's a good idea. Video games critic is a score aggregate site that describes itself as the one source of truth for gamers where players scores account for two thirds of the weighing over those untrustworthy and by implication untruthful professional critics. Well, sometimes I'm sorry. You were so bad that one of the cons made a joke about your integrity.

7:12Your journalistic integrity if four was a four or four era. No, journalistic integrity for talk. Kataku is a, you know, you walked it back to center somewhat, but a lot of you guys out, you went outlets that were giving PlayStation. It was a PlayStation five or was Xbox or whatever. They were reviewing them poorly because some people out there are poor. And the one was getting reviewed poorly because it had holes in the top and the person that reviewed it had a fear of holes. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was the, come on. The Xbox, a PlayStation. I think it was on polygon. And I can't really get guys name. I think it was like Ian something or other, but yeah, he had a PS5 review. So he gets a PS5 for free and he reviews it fairly for about two paragraphs. And then the rest of the article is about how much he hates Trump and the pandemic and how depressed he is and how poor people are. Yes. And how can he be sitting here playing this new video game console when, you know, the children are starving and then my next thing is then you pass it to somebody else who's actually going to do the job. Yeah, go find the homeless person and give them the PS5.

8:15You deserve a bad, do you do a different bad score for reviewing things that way? Yes. People that wasn't, which one was the game Hogwarts, like I see a one and they didn't play it. They just, I think it was a gamer. I think the gamer gave it a one because they like, what would you get? Yeah, you're not, you're not doing your job. You're just putting your own personal, you know, beef out there as, as articles. All right. So the methodology of the site is to take critical scores directly from open critic and then combine them with user scores created by performing some peculiar, trusted weighted math on steam reviews, giving greater weight to the ladder. Then with this information, the site is also able to tell you just how wrong or right a gaming site is by how far its own scores deviate from those of the masses. And this, uh, and as if this weren't already remarkable enough, this is even achieved for sites that don't give review scores like Kataku. Uh, so yeah, last year Thomas Miller lamented the dangerous cruelty of steam reviews after claiming being review bombed was going to bankrupt the studio. This was despite moons, latest game, the souls like no rest for the wicked, not being review bombed at all.

9:16And in fact, receiving mild criticism for a bad update to its early access version. Well, there are, I mean, look, if I'm being fair here, there are good games that get review bombed because people don't like the business practices of the company. Yeah. And, and you know, to be fair, that's what we're looking at. Like we need to be fair because it's either review bombed by the consumers, review bombed by the, um, people that are doing the reviews. So he then rather impressively declared that the press quoting him about being review bombed was proof of the failings of the press and he dropped in some transphobic remarks for finishing flourish. I need to see a, I need to see a quote on that. If I remember correctly, he was just talking about, I don't know if he was saying things specifically transphobic, but I think he was, he was basically like, look, wokeness is killing games and everybody's more concerned about D. I and stuff than the, the games being good. Right. We just need to make good games and worry less about the other things. Right. In a post on X announcing the new site, he wrote my main problem with the existing

10:17aggregators. Their sources tell you how the press felt about the game, not how players did. Uh, press still counts just can't outvote the people who bought the game. Well, I mean, it sounds with movies too. Their movies to get like a 30% on rotten tomatoes make all kinds of money. Well, I was gonna say that. That's what I was thinking of. Like when the critics give it a little score and they go by, now I try to weigh the score, but when they go by the critical only score, they, it could be, it could be a great movie, but they gave it crappy reviews a lot of times. It's because of the personal opinion about politics or something stupid thing like that. And then that's what it goes by. But it's, that's not review bombing when they do it. But when a movie's arguably a shitty movie and the audience review bombs it or reviews it poorly, that's review bombing. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a double standard for sure. Uh, so the other motivating factor behind the project is slightly more coherent. Uh, mail or once an aggregating site that takes account of updates and changes to games during the lifetime. So he talks about Nomean Sky, which got massively downvoted when it came out because it was

11:17about 5% of the game they promised. It wasn't what they said. No. And I'll tell you what, have with Nomean Sky and same thing happened, I think with mighty number nine and some other games people point to as being like, it was a huge failure at launch. Um, I think the audience pressured them to release it before it was ready to be released because they were getting impatient. So they basically put out what they had, which was a half-ass game and it got roasted for being a half-ass game, but people would not shut up about it. They're like, we want it. We want it. We want it now. We're not willing to wait another year. Give it to us now. So they get it now and it's half cooked. Well, we hate this. This sucks. Why is this game suck? I'm like, you're almost better off. I think in some ways, like not saying anything about it until it's ready to drop. But that's not how things work now. Yeah. But yeah, um, they said what they're doing is they're taking the old scores, which were not great and mixing them in with the new score. So Nomean Sky has a piss-poor score, I guess, on on meta critic because they're going

12:20by the old scores. And the game now is fan fucking, fantastic because they've had two years to work on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They said steam reviews only allow those who write them a binary choice. Either like it or they don't. There's no nuance. It's all notoriously prone to genuine review bombing. That is actually true based on disingenuous motives. That is actually true. But Miller believes that he has this under control. Well, I'm sure this will get review bomb too eventually. But basically they're, they're going in a math. But anyway, what they're pissed about is that they're being rated too. Yeah. When it comes back on them, that's what they're mad about. Yes. Right. So this person in the comments, Derb, Derboy 11 says every outlet and creator gets a trust score based on one question. When they review the game, did players end up agreeing? You can see who consistently calls games the way the player see them and who doesn't again, simple and fair. Finally, a website for the true heroes of gaming, people who openly disagree with critics and are vocal about it in a way that can be quantified and put to

13:23an algorithm. Yeah. I mean, this has always been the case. Like the difference is with video game journalism is that you did have this weird political angle creeping into the review. Well, that's not as for everything, because these people cannot separate their politics from just being fair. Like everything is about politics. And I got and they're like, I got myself a nice little cushy, warm seat that I could just spout off my politics 24 seven from masquerading it as I'm doing a journalism. And it's this people are getting sick of it. And it's been really a big problem in the gaming reviews and gaming in general. So let's see, Rebecca Valentine is a writer for Kataku IGN, et cetera. Mailers website doesn't know what to do with websites that don't put scores on games. So we may have some convoluted math formula to determine whether Kataku's underscored reviews are accurate or not. We've got Lister Mercante. She's still got to go out there. Okay. Neither one of these sites has scored reviews or easily demarcated recommendations

14:26calling a press disagreement with players of controversy is biased. You wrote each dot is a game, both this outlet and player scored. This is AI generated ass bias coming from her when she was deliberately cherry picking things out of an interview to make someone look bad because she wanted to stick at the grums. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's see that I'm saying is not. I don't want to hear anything about bias, sweetie. You can't take the high ground when you do shit like this, which is why gamers now literally doing the exact same thing back to them. They don't know about it pretty much. Yeah. I saw one of the screen grabs where the gymquisition was listed as one of the top trusted scores, which hasn't been almost 10 years since she's stopped doing scores. I think that was more like players like I don't know. See, gymquisitions weird. I actually watched a documentary on the gymquisition and kind of the decline of sterling before even before sterling transitioned. It was getting very, very weird and they had a very caustic relationship with the audience and they were actually celebrating every time they lost like a

15:27thousand subs on YouTube. It was wild. But back in the day, sterling was like a huge deal. People trusted sterling because he wasn't on the take. Well, I apparently still do. Apparently, I don't know. I mean, it's going to be really interesting. This thing's only been online for a couple of days now. But I think what they're pissed about more and anything is they don't want to be rated. They don't want to be reviewed. But they have no problem effectively destroying independent developers that they don't like them. Yeah. Well, that's not surprising. It's not surprising at all. So let's see. I'm trying to see who's on here. Do we have any of their like very, very bad like red? I don't think we have any. They're like red. That'd be crazy. But some of these I'm looking at them like either I've never heard of them or I know that they're actually fair. So I'm, again, I'm not understanding the problem. Like I get, I get the machine. Am I even around anymore? I don't even think they're around. I don't think they are.

16:27Wow. I have no idea. SVG, I think they're actually usually pretty fair. I don't know guys. I mean, here's the thing. I think with anything, if I'm being fair, I think you need to find reviewers or critics or content creators who jive with with your sensibilities to to find something you're going to like, right? If you go to a site where it's very obvious, they don't like certain kinds of games or certain kinds of movies or certain kinds of whatever. Or they aren't doing their job fairly. They're not doing their job fairly. Then yeah, I get it. But there are lots of content creators out there. There are lots of sites out there, lots of substats out there, lots of people to follow on social media that are going to give you kind of the straight, the straight dope on things, right? So you have to go find them. The problem is is that like the catacos and the polygons because they're so big and they belong to these conglomerates, they kind of drown out, I think all the independent voices. So people just kind of default to, oh, I,

17:29Jan said, Kataku said polygon said, okay, that's yeah, whatever is the one that has the most notoriety. Right. And it's like there, there are literally thousands of independent websites out there or content creators out there that do reviews go find them. And maybe that's what the purpose of this site is is to go find somebody, basically somebody who's kind of give you confirmation bias. Like I love this game. Let me go find a site that tells me it's the best game ever. I need to find somebody to love. I need to find me somebody to love your loves and like critics are never going to agree 100%. I'm hell geeky and I. We don't agree. I'm really, we sometimes we do, but we don't. Yeah, we're still married. I disagree with you saying that we, we rarely agree. Well, okay, so you agree more than rarely, but I'm just saying there's a lot of things, at least once a day, there's this agreement of some kind. And then I go sleep in the car and it's all good. You learn what's what? I learn what's what? And it's it's all good. No, but that's the thing. Like you're never going to find.

18:29I mean, this is the thing too. And we get this, we get this with people when we review stuff and we very seldom review things, but we do occasionally review movies or whatever. And I'm going to be doing more like a game and tech stuff. I think reviewing it, but that's my opinion, right? That's my opinion. I can only give you what my opinion is. And we get people in there like, well, I totally disagree with that. I'm like, oh, cool. Go make your own video on it. Like I'm not being a, like on AI. Yeah, we do, we do. We have a very, we have very different opinions about AI. But like, I guess my thing is like, you know, if you don't like our opinions and you want to tell everybody why this thing is the bestest thing ever, then go write your own blog post, go start your own YouTube channel. I'm not, I'm not being smart. Me about that. I'm not like, well, go do it yourself. Then no, I'm serious. Like go, go do it yourself. The good thing about us, not always agreeing is that sometimes you're half the audience is going to have someone they agree with at all times. But like, I don't know what, probably 20, 25% of time.

19:31Yeah, I would say it's pretty fair. I don't know. I think it's 35%. Well, I think it's 18.2%. That might be true. No, we do. There are some things that we do disagree on. Of course, at home then on here, but yeah. But yeah, but I mean, it happens, right? And let's. There's a reason why I put things where I put them. Basically I've learned the house is her domain and I don't mess with it. No, it's my office. I don't mind us. I need help. I just don't like when you put stuff away when you know where it belongs. My office is my domain. Don't mess with it because if I can't find shit, I'm going to get mad. I think it's funny though, because I keep joking that I'm going to go to his office and move everything around because he keeps doing it with my dishes. So one of these days, I guess it's funny. That's funny. There are her dishes because I don't get to eat on this. I might be on the floor with the dogs. With the dogs. Anyway, I tell this story. It was funny. It was just like, I asked my husband hours ago to I love the dishwasher and he didn't do it.

20:33So now he's searching for anically first phone that's on silent in the dishwasher. I would go on that far yet. Yeah, no, I would be very unhappy. Plus, it would be very expensive. The phones were like, I don't need to lose your phone. You do it plenty yourself. So we're all like, I do. I actually, this is a true story. I had to go by myself a bright orange phone case because I kept losing my phone because the case was black. And while the problem is every surface in my office is like a black table, a black stamp, whatever. So I couldn't see my phone because I'd lay it on the table and it was just like blend into the tables. I got myself this like hot orange phone case. My dad has everyone beat. He one time was digging a hole and somehow his phone fell as pocket or it was on the ground and he buried it. It got dug back into the hole and we couldn't find his phone and they dug up the hole and his phone was in the hole. Oh my God. It was ongoing joke.

21:34We cracked his phone screen trying to find it. It was a whole ordeal. But he, yeah, I think he dropped out of his pocket, honestly, and he didn't realize he did and he shoveled over it. Well I'm going to wrap this video up before I did myself a deeper hole. It's okay. I still love you. We still agree like 75% of the time or 81.8% of the time or whatever you say. It was 18.2, 80% of the time. Some like that. Yeah. 81.2% whatever it was. I guess. 91. No, 81. That's right. I don't know. Or 18.2.5. I'm trying to math. It's like Kingdom Hearts and number one. What? It's like a day. You know, just be fair about reviewing these people. Treat them in the way that you would want to be treated. Be fair about how you review them. I understand that if you don't like certain people, you don't have to like everyone. Everybody's for everybody and that's fine. But it's not an unfair thing to be able to review them in the way they review games and other developers. It's just that's just fair. All's fair in the internet.

22:35Okay. I got to get one more thing in here. Okay. I'm looking at RP. I'm looking at RP gamer. I'm looking at you guys. RP gamer was at one point in time. We're talking the 90s and early 2000s. Probably my favorite video game website. Right? Because I love JRPG. So it's like my favorite genre. Right? So I was on RP gamer all the time. I know what JRPG means. Yeah. Yeah. Right? So I actually applied for a job as a writer on RP gamer. Well, I didn't know this. Yeah. This is before we met and they shot me down. And then I guess they changed ownership a couple of years ago and I totally would have bought the site. I knew. I would have bought the site. Oh man. That would have been the ultimate FU. Well, I wouldn't have been FU would have been like I wanted to go back to what it used to be because I was out there. Yeah, but I wouldn't have been FU because they didn't hire you and they could have and you buy it. They could. But I don't think they paid anything. I think it was like a volunteer thing. It was just like I was I forget why I blew it. I think they said I was too worthy, which probably was true.

23:37Well, that's probably true. I love you best, but yeah, you're not worthy now. Now you're just like it's so funny. Whatever you can say in the least works possible. Okay, he's worthy in an article, but when he's trying to leave a condo, whatever's the fewest words possible. I'm old and I'm over it and I'm trying to be more. Everything is TLDR for him. Anyway. Yeah. And you actually have to ask questions. You're like, what does that mean? I'm like, well, it means this is like why didn't know that? It's like it makes sense in my head. It's just like I all have time to write the whole thing out because if I had time to write the whole thing out, then I'd just do it myself. So, but that now I got to explain. Anyway, we're going to wrap it up. Yes, sorry. Please, please subscribe. We'll talk later. Bye.