Kamiya: Gamers Look Too Much At Review Scores

NeoGAFer Dawg has been generous to translate an interview Dutch site 4Gamer recently had with Platinum Games developer Hideki Kamiya. The tweets Kamiya received about The Wonderful 101’s review scores has made him declare gamers pay too much attention to reviews.

Kamiya is on the road to promote The Wonderful 101, out now in Japan and PAL territories and coming to the US on September 15. He was asked about how one particular game reviewer had trouble building a bridge using a Unite Morph. Without needing a translater, Kamiya confirmed that he nodded with a huge smile on his face, to the amusement of watching fans.

Kamiya ended up talking about reviews when he was asked if he felt most gamers paid the right amount of attention to his games.  He got sick hearing about the Wonderful 101 review scores from fans, and it gave him the impression that gamers pay too much attention to them instead of trying the out themselves. He also points out he more frequently makes IPs from scratch than sequels. Overall, Kamiya makes games because he wants to, and he does not care about getting high scores.

However, he also thinks that the industry is partly to blame for this mentality, because it produces a glut of games at the moment, including inferior games. As a result, gamers just aren’t interested in trying new types of games anymore.

Kamiya is that odd developer that would have, at one time, dwelled in the mid-tier of gaming; his games are always unique and trying out new things, they frequently get critical acclaim and fan followings, but don’t usually perform as well as hoped. His comments point to the kind of developer he is, and how the current gaming climate is somewhat working against him. It’s under that prism that I see his criticism as a callout that the industry has left something behind they should not have.

Source: NeoGAF