phanboy4: It seems to me large companies try to produce hits by saying "Here, you, development house! Make us a new hit! A hit like that other game that came out a couple of months ago!" Then the advertising and hype juggernauts are started rolling, and the game is proclaimed a hit before it even hits the streets. Hollywood is currently guilty of this, too.
The music industry does this too, and even more blatantly. I often see commercials for new CDs using the words: "including the coming hit" and then the title of a song I've never heard. The thing is, a "hit" is a song that is played on the radio a lot, and the record companies decide, for a large part, which songs the radio stations play.
phanboy4: And as to the fact that all the games on GOG are getting absurdly high ratings, just because they're someones' favorites, that happens with new games just as often.
The thing about the GOG rating system, is that you can only rate the games you've actually bought here. Since the service is rather new, and the games are rather old, most people have so far bought only games that they already know and love. Games that they already know they don't like, they don't buy. So the GOG ratings are fairly skewed.
Since most people know most of the games already, it would make more sense to show how many copies of a given game they'd sold, but that's probably not going to happen. Otherwise, they should open up the ratings to everyone, not just the ones who have purchased the game from them.
phanboy4: Seems like every hyped game that comes down the pipe gets called "the best RPG/shooter/whatever game so far/ever" And then when something new comes out next year,
it is now the "best whatever ever" No matter how bad a new game is somebody that doesn't understand how rating systems are supposed to work will give it a 9/10.
You can't go by "official" reviews. Review sites are dependent upon getting advance copies of games from publishers. Unfortunately, this requires that they stay on the publishers' good side. Hence, you'll almost never see games getting rock-bottom ratings on those sites. If you want to know how good a game really is, read four or five user reviews.