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.
Had the game gone down for maintenance during the review period, I'm not sure it would have moved the needle on many scores. Reviewers deal with things like that from time to time, and the understanding is usually that it won't happen once the game is out in the world. You know all those day one patches players complain about? We play without them, so we see why they're needed. When we're told ahead of time what they include, we can gauge our reviews around them. Horizon Forbidden West had texture pop-in for most of my playthrough, but I didn't mention it because it was fixed by the time anyone else would get their hands on it.
There are still some deep flaws in the review process in games, from tight turnarounds for codes, limited distribution/late embargoes to disguise poor scores, and the lack of diversity in voices, with many reviews noting their own lack of expertise on cultural or political issues, then rather than offering some research or an attempt at analysis, we instead get excuses of ‘I'll let someone more qualified than me speak on this,’ followed by no attempt to make that possible, or elevate examples when it happens.
These are all underlying issues, but what GT7 has done is the most exploitative tactic in the review business. The downtime has been getting a lot of discussion, and as a Chad Single-Player Enjoyer, it would have annoyed me too. But that's how it works in the live-service biz, and it's a bigger problem than just GT7. The worst thing here is that the game you got back after the outage is markedly different from the one you had before it happened.
Grinding has always been part of Gran Tursimo to an extent - you aren't really supposed to fly through it, only racing on each track once. You're supposed to soak it up, unlock new cars, drive tracks in new ways. The problem is GT7 let you buy your way through this grind, only a lot of fans quite liked grinding. GT7 seemed to be counting on players spending money, so the retooled version, just weeks after a hugely successful launch, now makes it harder to grind (and therefore, easier to spend money). The official reason is that the devs can’t explain the details, which doesn’t exactly throw off suspicion. Would we have given it less than 5/5 had it launched with this system already in place? Would that 87 Metascore be lower? We can't really say - but it feels like GT7 gave us the best version of the game, cashed in the high score, then made it worse in order to profit. It wouldn't be the first game to do so, Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled launched with no microtransactions, just coins you could earn in game, then after the review window Activision claimed it had heard complaints that coins took too long to earn offline, so rather than up the rate, a way to buy them with real cash was introduced. You'd have to be very foolish to think this was not the plan all along.
Reviews matter as much or as little as you want them to. They're the earliest piece of critical analysis any game receives, and in many ways the most definitive. They're also just someone else's opinion about a game you haven't played yet - just a number someone else puts on a toy you haven't played with. Then there's the fact the same site might have given wildly different numbers depending on which reviewer was assigned, the fact different sites use their scales differently, and the fact some sites don't use numbers - or even a recognisable rating - at all. Reviewers can feel, to outsiders, like gatekeepers. We get paid to sit around all day playing video games, right? And we're not even as good at games as you are, and we have the gall to give New Game an eight when the trailers show it's clearly a nine. You don't get much sympathy outside of the industry when you complain about the review process, partly because it's so alien and partly because 'playing video games all day isn't a real job'. But the review process here was designed to trick us all, and as live-service, always-online, pay-or-grind games become more prominent, the problem is only going to get worse.