Gran Turismo 7's Outage Highlights The Problems With Live-Service, Microtransactions, And Game Reviews
Gran Turismo 7 opened to rave reviews when the embargo dropped, currently sitting at 87 on Metacritic with a total of 104 positive reviews, just four mixed, and zero negatives. We gave it 5/5. The customer score, however, is a very different beast, having plummeted over the past few days to 2.0, and this whole debacle has revealed a lot of issues with the modern gaming landscape.
It's not too unusual for the Metascore and the User Score to have such a disparity between them. Tens and zeroes are significantly more frequently applied scores by users than by critics. Reviewers may give perfect tens (we did, for example), but they're used more sparingly. And zeroes? As in, there is not one single redeeming quality in this game and staring at a blank television screen for 30 hours is a better use of your time? Critics will almost never give that, because it's our job to weigh up what a game does well and what it does poorly, consider how important each of those factors are to any given game, and come up with a number. Users tend to use ten as 'I like it' and zero as 'I don't like it'. You'll often see comments from users on their own scores to this effect. They will give a game a ten, then in the mini-review say it's an eight, but they want to raise the game's average. Likewise, most of GT7's zeroes come from the fact it had a huge, 30-hour outage where the game was unplayable, and when it returned it was harder to grind to get around microtransactions. The zeroes from users don't often mean 'nothing about this game is good', but rather they're used as a protest - in this case, what they're protesting is fairly obvious, and arguably quite just.
Related: Gran Turismo 7's Laid Back Vibes Are A Relief After Forza Horizon 5
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