Rating Clarifications

For the first five months of IndieLoupe.com’s existence, we used a star system to rank games. While internally we’d prefer to continue with that practice, there are some issues with it: foremost, that stars aggregate poorly when compared with ratings from websites using /10 or /100 scores. When star ratings are aggregated by websites such as Metacritic and Opencritic, a three-star rating (classified by us as a perfectly passable game which does everything it should, albeit without much fanfare) is listed as a 60%, which is typically interpreted as a rating which is relatively mediocre. There’s a significant discrepancy between what we mean and what that score relates to: game ratings are (bizarrely) more in-line with scores used in the US education system than the stars used to rate traditional media, which is what we had been initially aiming for. 

While we’re not huge fans of how high this makes game ratings trend, we’re not under any impression that our little website has much power to change what is now an industry standard. By continuing to use a star system, we would effectively be hurting the games we review, by giving them scores that are not representative of their overall quality and translate poorly when compared to other reviews. Particularly for games at the middle of the star system, which, by the nature of normal distribution, is where the majority of games end up falling, games end up with translated scores out of ten which are lower than what they deserve. 

Therefore, any games that were given star ratings have had their scores replaced with a 20-point, out-of-ten, score (i.e. to the nearest half). The conversion we used is listed below: