Earlier this week, IGN posted a TikTok video featuring a discussion about why so many games reviewed at the site end up scoring a seven. If seven means good, shouldn't most games clock in below that? If most games are good, doesn't "good" stop having any meaning?
It's a worthwhile topic, and it's good for sites to provide a clear metric for what certain scores mean. A reader may interpret a five as "awful," so it's helpful to have a resource you can point to that states, "No, a five is just mediocre." But the IGN video included a line of reasoning that stirred up a bit of controversy, and led to the tweet being deleted: "If you've never heard of the game, we probably wouldn't review it and it probably isn't that good anyway," one of the hosts says.
That statement is building on a point I agree with from earlier in the video: that so many games are released on a daily basis that it's literally impossible for a website — even IGN, the biggest gaming site in the world — to cover everything. Outlets necessarily make decisions about what games they think are worth covering. Those choices are based on several factors, but the interest of the site's audience and the interest of its writers are chief among them. If a game isn't interesting to either party, then barring a major hole in the release schedule, there's a good chance it won't get covered.
In a perfect world, games media would have the time and resources to review every game released. But that world hasn't existed in decades, as the rise of digital storefronts and indie games have caused the number of games released to far surpass the amount of writers who can possibly cover them. For indie games with a small audience, the amount of clicks a piece draws will rarely warrant the amount of time spent playing it. This is a problem in every industry — tons of independently produced feature films get released on YouTube every year that will never get professionally reviewed — but it's especially pronounced in video games.
Depending on the length, finishing one triple-A game can take you from as long as watching five movies (say, a 10 hour game) to as long as watching 50 movies (say, a 100 hour game). If we assume that the median length for a big release is 25 hours, that's about 12.5 movies. It's also five-eighths of a standard work week, which doesn't leave much time for anything else.
There are plenty of real, material problems that make it difficult to seek out smaller releases, but that doesn't mean critics or audiences shouldn't make the effort. Some of my personal favorite articles I've written have been on games that most people didn't know about yet. Back in early 2021, when I was still a freelancer, I had some time at the beginning of the year to look around on Steam and see if any interesting games were bubbling up below the radar. Very quickly, I stumbled on Cruelty Squad, a neon bright immersive sim that looked like nothing else I had ever seen before. It was selling well and gaining an audience, but it hadn't gotten much attention in the media yet. I reached out for a code, played it, pitched a story on it, and wrote about a very cool game before most other people had. As Cruelty Squad got bigger and bigger over the course of the year — it now has 9,620 reviews on Steam — it felt rewarding to have been there early, pointing interested readers toward a cool game they might not have discovered otherwise.
I've repeatedly been on the other end of the recommendation, too. I love the Butterfly Soup games, a series of visual novels about the relationships among a group of queer Asian-American teenagers on a club baseball team. I would have no idea the game existed if I hadn't heard Danielle Riendeau talk about how much she liked the game on an episode of Waypoint Radio. Butterfly Soup 2 ended up topping my game of the year list last year, and it's easy to imagine a world where I never even knew it existed.
If you're interested in finding games outside of what's being marketed to you or is being played by your favorite streamer, there are plenty of ways to broaden your horizon. Itch.io is a smaller digital storefront where you can find tiny games from independent creators. You can pick up the free games each week on the Epic Games Store, whether you've heard of them or not. Scan through the Popular Upcoming tab on Steam and wishlist all the games that look intriguing. Attend a virtual festival like Steam Next Fest or LudaNarraCon. Pull up the Xbox Game Pass app, hit the D20 icon, and play whatever random game it serves you.
It can be enriching to get out of your comfort zone. I don't have much experience with RTS games, and they kind of overwhelm me. But, I've reviewed a few over the years. Same goes for racing sims. Neither is my favorite kind of game, but if you want to have a well-rounded approach to the medium (and, I would argue, to life), you should look beyond the stuff that is being most aggressively marketed to you. It's a rewarding experience to find something off the beaten path.