At this point, I just assume any commercially successful software game is optimized to extract every last cent out of the target audience through subtle psychological brutalization.
Surely there are exceptions, but it's like buying from Amazon: it takes too much work to sort through the ripoffs. The fun is spoiled because it requires constant vigilance and active resistance to avoid spending too much money.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." — War Games (1983)
Ratings anywhere can't be trusted. The higher the profile of a critic, the more incentive there is to corrupt them, and the more likely it is that their published opinions are just shilling for the commercial entities that own them.
I doubt very many are directly on the take, but I think there's a lot of semi-conscious self-censorship and score / review disconnect that goes on at the well known sites, for all the talk of a hard wall between editorial and advertising. And there's a lot of "content" that is just very thinly veiled PR for an upcoming release. I also think there's a good deal of corruption and nepotism around stuff like the IGF and IndieCade, from my experience swimming in those circles (I did an MFA game design at NYU)
I was mostly just joking around, but I do think there are reliable ways of finding good games:
-look at player scores/reviews on Metacritic
-look for games with many reviews on Steam that have Very Positive or Overwhelmingly Positive ratings but that you've never heard of
-Tim Rogers (look, I kinda hate the guy too, but he's the real deal)
-More seriously (and this is the best option), blogs / Discord communities / Twitter walls of good indie devs like Michael Brough, Zach Gage, Terry Cavanagh, Stephen Lavelle, etc. Like, check out freeindiegam.es, or join Brough's Discord. I am old so I don't know the new waves but you could scroll through a few hundred listings on Itch, look up some Twitter accounts from there, and find them. Most of the very best stuff is of course not on consoles at all but on PC, web, and mobile
>At this point, I just assume any commercially successful software game is optimized to extract every last cent out of the target audience through subtle psychological brutalization.
Is your idea of "commercially successful software game" the top charts on app store or something? There are plenty of games on PC/consoles that are successful and not microtransaction laden.
Surely there are exceptions, but it's like buying from Amazon: it takes too much work to sort through the ripoffs. The fun is spoiled because it requires constant vigilance and active resistance to avoid spending too much money.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." — War Games (1983)