Game Reviews and The Impossible Problem of Bugs

ign.com:

When I reviewed Star Wars Jedi: Survivor back in April, I gave it a 9 after playing through its campaign on PlayStation 5 without major issues… only to wake up the next day to hear horror stories of the PC version performing terribly. (This gave me flashbacks to when the same thing happened with Batman: Arkham Knight in 2015). The same month, Luke Reilly had to hit Redfall hard in his review with a score of 4 after numerous bugs drained the lifeblood out of what was already not a great time. At a glance, this certainly could give the appearance of reviewers being inconsistent: why does one game with a reputation for bugs get raked over the coals while another “gets a pass?” Like so many other things it’s not nearly that simple, and to a large extent there is no one-size-fits-all solution for game critics to employ when it comes to something as notoriously slippery as bugs – but we do our best anyway.

There’s never been a game that doesn’t have bugs of some sort, but they’ve become an even hotter topic of discussion in the extraordinary gaming year of 2023. We’ve seen troubled launches of the likes of Redfall, Jedi: Survivor, and Baldur’s Gate 3, which – underneath the near-universal praise – has sparked a conversation about how many bugs are acceptable in highly ambitious games.

Completely understandably, people don’t like bugs (except when they’re hilarious and happen to other people in montages on YouTube) and want fewer of them in the highly anticipated games they lined up to spend at least $70 on. That’s something everyone – consumers, critics, and developers – can agree on. But when bugs inevitably rear their ugly heads, conflicts arise. Gamers rightfully want reviewers to do their jobs as consumer advocates by