Paid Reviews on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? No, Definitely Not…
The conspiracy theorists have gathered once again and this time it’s over the recent release and scoring over on Metacritic of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Our review was done by our man Rory Wood who admittedly gave the game a glowing review of his own. and scored it with a rare perfect 100. As stated, acclaim of that nature is very rare and now the user reviews over on Metacritic are getting tanked with suggestions that the game is only garnering such high scores due to Nintendo ‘paying off’ journalists.
Currently sitting at a rating of 98 for journalist reviews, Breath of the Wild is a fair bit lower on user reviews sitting at 7.5 out of 10. That’s a solid spread but many users have resorted to rating 0 out of 10 for so called ‘high scores for cash’ from the Big N.
Some of the comments from users are fairly direct, albeit written like a kindergarten child. One user, who rated the game a 0 out of 10, wrote, “A Zero from me too, i never played it, and i wont ever play it, i give this game zero, not because its bad. But because of payed reviews, and **** overhyped and blind Idiot reviewers giving this game mostly 100% only because its Zelda. Kill yourself **** idiots. When this same game wouldnt be called Zelda it maybe became 80%.” Another added: “Wow the paid reviews and nintendo fanboys on here to boost the score just goes to show you what a joke this game is, the top *reviews* aren’t even reviews they are one sentence long. Zelda botw is a appalling open world game. Giving this the title of a Zelda game is insulting to zelda fans.”
Further complaints go into the fact that Nintendo supplied many media outlets with Switch units so they were further compelled to falsify a high score. Well, as is standard practice in the industry units are given to many outlets before launch because they need said units to review the launch line up. This is a practice that has gone on for years and has never encouraged us to falsify scores. We’d imagine that any other outlet with a shred of integrity would say the same. Complaints that journalists should buy their own copies are everywhere and the fact is that for most independent sites, that’s an impossibility. In the case of COGconnected it would leave us broke with over 40 reviews a month running through our hands. Do we give out low scores? You bet… honesty trumps everything else and if a game stinks we tell you. Unless you’re IGN or one of the other big sites, cash flow isn’t why we do this and money is extremely tight.
Luckily most people who understand the review process can look past things like zero rated user reviews on Metacritic. They get how the system works from start to finish. Considering there’s no way to prove that a user reviewer even played the game you’d want to take any comments there with a grain of salt. It makes it easier to ignore them when they’re the equivalent of ‘for a good time call….’ written on the wall of the crapper at your local watering hole too.