In March 2026, the open-world action game Crimson Desert launched more than half a decade after its announcement. The extended development time combined with the hype that comes with a World Premiere trailer at the biggest awards show in gaming garnered plenty of attention when the review embargo dropped. But when reviews started going live, the hype balloon seemingly popped, resulting in publisher Pearl Abyss shares dropping 29% on launch day.
That must mean Crimson Desert turned out to be a real stinker, right? Well, not if you actually read the reviews and understand how averages work. Out of a 100-point scale, aggregator Metacritic currently lists it at a 77 on PC, meaning “generally favorable.” Critic reviews gathered on Metacritic range between 45 at the low end and multiple perfect 100 scores on top. Sentiments about Pearl Abyss’ open-world epic are clearly mixed, but most of the reviews were at least somewhat positive. So why did the market treat it like an epic failure?
7 is the loneliest number
This article isn’t really about Crimson Desert, though it is a usefully recent example of an alarming trend. I haven’t played it and have no opinion about its quality, but I have been giving a lot of thought to how far our perception of an acceptable review score has come.
For the last five years, Sidequesting Editor-in-Chief Dali Dimovski has moderated a PAX East panel dedicated to discussing beloved 7-out-of-10 games. Along with the staff of Sidequesting, I’ve been a guest on this panel since its inception, which has given me a chance to revisit dozens of forgotten games that were simply good enough. Though we jokingly refer to them as “average” and “mediocre,” teasing each other over our picks, there are always a few choices that appear to be universally beloved by the panelists and audience. Blue Dragon. Dead to Rights. Brutal Legend. Nintendoland. Jumping Flash. MC Kids. Sure, these games and the dozens of others we’ve chosen had bugs or lacked originality or just weren’t the most memorable. But they brought us joy, at least for a little while. We used to embrace 7/10 games, so why do we shun them now?
First, let’s dig into what a 7 out of 10 (or 70 out of 100) actually means. It’s become shorthand for mediocre or average, though technically, it’s neither of those things. At IGN, one of the biggest entertainment websites in the world and an outlet where I sometimes review games, 7 quite literally means “good.” “Maybe it lacks ambition, has a few technical bumps in the road, or is too repetitive, but we came away from it happy nonetheless,” IGN says, listing examples like Yoshi’s Crafted World and Far Cry New Dawn. GameSpot also lists 7 as “good,” with “mediocre” way down at 5/10. According to PC Gamer, a score between 70 and 79 on a 100-point scale indicates “A good game that’s definitely worth playing. We like it.” Are you sensing a pattern here?
On the other hand, certain audiences and stakeholders treat that “good” score as the kiss of death. Publishers have long tied Metacritic averages to employee bonuses, like when Bethesda promised the developers of Fallout: New Vegas a nice payday if the final product garnered an 85 on the aggregator. Tragically, the Xbox 360 version landed at an 84, meaning “generally favorable.” In other words: not good enough. (A few years later, Bethesda stopped providing advance review copies to critics entirely.)
As Portal designer Kim Swift told Kotaku in 2013, “It’s pretty common in the industry these days… When you’re negotiating with the publisher for a contract, you build in bonuses for the team based on Metacritic score. So if you get above a 90, then you get X amount for a bonus. If you get below that, you don’t get anything at all or get a smaller amount.”
By my count, out of the 14,148 games on Metacritic with more than seven professional critic reviews, fewer than 400 of them have an average of 90 or higher. This reflects the prevailing attitudes about review scores in the modern era: If it’s not in, let’s say, the top 3% of all games ever made, it’s not worth celebrating.
Believe it or not, there was a time when a 7/10 score wasn’t synonymous with disaster. Just look at Red Dead Revolver, an enjoyable but forgettable shooter from 2004 with a 74 Metacritic score. Sales-wise, it performed relatively well at launch but didn’t crack the top 10 for best-selling games that year. Rather than shelve the entire idea, publisher Rockstar Games built on that foundation and eventually released two sequels in 2010 and 2018, both of which ended up being critical and commercial darlings. These days, Red Dead is one of Rockstar’s flagship series second only to the behemoth that is Grand Theft Auto; Red Dead Redemption 2 is the fourth best-selling game of all time. Yet if Revolver launched today with the same reviews and sales numbers, it would likely be considered a huge flop.
Not every 7 went on to become a juggernaut franchise, but they didn’t need to. Think about Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which had the backing of one of the biggest IPs in the world — a built-in hype machine. Despite its reviews averaging to a 73 on Metacritic, it got a sequel two years later. It didn’t change the world, but gave us some entertainment. Somehow, the Star Wars series survived.
Another example is the LEGO series that leveraged popular properties like Star Wars, Batman, and Indiana Jones. In my opinion, most of these games were enjoyable if not particularly challenging or groundbreaking. Other critics must have agreed, since many fell into that 70-80 range on Metacritic. That hasn’t stopped people from playing them, and Traveller’s Tales continues to make LEGO games to this day.
On paper, a 7 means the same thing now as it did 20 years ago. So why does it feel so different?
Expectation vs. reality
I talked to a handful of people actively working at game publishers to answer that last question, but I couldn’t find a definitive answer — and none of them wanted to speak on the record, even anonymously. Based on what I’ve heard and read, I have a few theories, but the answer is probably some combination of all of the above.
First of all, video games cost a lot more to make than they did 20 years ago. Publishers are historically secretive about game budgets, so it’s not easy to compare, but costs for AAA games have risen into the hundreds of millions. In order to make a profit, games of that cost have to stand out, which makes it easier to understand why a 7 wouldn’t be good enough. On top of that, gamers have far more options now, many of which are free. Why pay $70-$80 for a new game, even if it is good, when you can play Fortnite on just about every platform without spending a dime?
For another perspective, I turned to the guy who literally wrote the books on the business: Michael Futter, author of The Gamedev Business Handbook and The Gamedev Budgeting Handbook. “I guess I’m super confused why publishers still care about review scores,” he said. “Maybe because it’s measurable. But are they still a predictor of sales?”
From what I’m hearing, publishers absolutely still care about review scores. Do they affect sales? Honestly, it’s hard to say. Just as publishers don’t love to disclose how much money they’re spending, they also don’t like to tell the world how much they’re making. They often use terms like “shipped” instead of “sold” when talking about how many units they’ve moved, which isn’t the same thing. Retail vs. digital and subscription services like Xbox Game Pass have further muddled the connection between who played a game and who paid for it. Sometimes games with great scores sell millions of copies and sometimes they don’t. The only thing I can say for sure is that review scores offer no guarantees for sales.
“I think that there has always been an obsession with high scores, and using them as a cudgel by tying them to bonuses,” Futter said. “But now? You could ship a 90+ game and still get laid off.”
He’s right about that. Just look at Baldur’s Gate 3, which garnered universal acclaim and a slew of high-profile Game of the Year awards. That didn’t stop Hasbro from laying off almost everyone who worked on the game from the Dungeons & Dragons side before the year was out. Battlefield 6 was the best-selling game of 2025 and broke the long-running series’ sales records. It landed with an 82-84 average on Metacritic (based on platform), meaning it was positively received. And then in March 2026, EA laid off staff across all of its Battlefield studios anyway.
While the causes are varied and complex, the pattern is clear. The push for almost impossibly high review scores (and correlated sales) is coming from corporate overlords and often not consistent with historical data or the market reality. When games can’t meet these (possibly wildly unrealistic) targets, their developers suffer. As Futter put it, “I would posit that if publishers are, in fact, pushing the watermark higher it’s no longer to guide strategic investment decisions. It’s for their own bonuses and the shareholders.”
Perhaps that’s why today’s 7/10 feels more like a 5/10 did a couple of decades ago. “The change here isn’t the bar for ‘success,’” Futter said. “It’s the impact those scores have.”
Just throw the whole number away
Unrealistic corporate expectations aside, there’s no denying that the C-suite isn’t the only group focused on review scores. When I look back at some of my own 7/10 reviews — games I’ve played to completion and deemed “good” — it’s easy to see who’s focusing more on the number than the content. “Only a 7?!” one asked on my review of Tron: Identity. Another commented “Tron deserve[s] so much more” on the YouTube video review. Perhaps the most telling comment is “Another case of a review’s main body suggesting a great or an amazing game (8 or above) and its verdict giving it a 7.”
And that’s a niche game, meaning it garnered less attention than a triple-A review. When you look at a product with a lot more hype, like Dan Stapleton’s Starfield review on the same website with the same score, the divide between score and perception gets worse:
“Even when Microsoft spends billions of dollars they still can’t get it right. This was supposed to be THE game and they fumbled the bag har[d]…”
“No getting around it, this score is a huge disappointment.”
“In a world with hundreds of 9+ games, can’t be wasting hundreds of hours on a 7.”
“I, like most people, were surprised by such an average review score.”
Ah, the review scale: Where the average of 0 and 10 somehow comes out to 7.
Thankfully, not everyone shares these sentiments. In an extremely unscientific Bluesky poll, I asked colleagues, friends, and gamers what a 7 out of 10 means to them. The answers were fascinating. Mike Bithell, the lead designer of Tron: Identity, said “It’s probably interesting and/or experimental in some way.” Ray Carsillo, the former Reviews Editor of Electronic Gaming Monthly who’s since worked in community management and production on a number of high-profile games, said “A 7 is a good game. Maybe a little rough around the edges.” According to GameSpot’s Jason Fanelli, “Either it tries something unique but suffers from technical/narrative issues, or it plays too safe and doesn’t move the needle.” So not a rave, but not a failure either — and possibly something interesting and new. Or, as one responder said, “A ‘7 out of 10’ might still end up being one of your personal favorites!”
These responses have bolstered my belief that fervent internet commenters and C-suite meddlers don’t represent the majority of gamers, but that doesn’t solve the 7/10 problem. I’m far from the first to say it, but the best and most direct way to address the disconnect between review scores and their actual meaning is to stop using numbers entirely. Sure, they provide a useful visual guide for those who’d rather not read the content of a review, but the negative consequences like loss of bonuses, loss of jobs, and reviewer harassment aren’t worth it.
Looking at the evidence, it feels like those who get upset about review scores care far less about what the numbers actually mean than what the numbers represent. With so much money on the line, there’s little room to experiment or start anew. Twenty years ago, a 7/10 was a great starting point for a new studio or fresh IP. These days, it might be the end. Getting rid of review scores won’t stop executives from pushing unrealistic sales expectations, but it will remove one metric being unfairly used against the people who actually make games.
And maybe people will stop spamming my DMs because I didn’t like a video game as much as they did.
Leave a Reply