Need for a DYNAMIC rating system

The current rating system doesn't make sense at all. I see really crappy games back in the 90s having ratings close to 10/10 and yet their sequels released recently have much lower ratings.

For example: Grand Prix II (released back in 1995) for the PC gets a rating of 9.5, which is one of the highest ratings for a PC game. Yet one of itssequel, Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix 4 (released in 2002) gets a rating of 8.0. The latter game was clearly better of the two.

Thatis not consistent rating at all. Ratings should be consistent all throughout the system, regardless of time.

So here's a suggestion:

Why not make the rating system "dynamic". This way, game ratings will be free from time. They will keep changing. What will happen is that when a much better game is released, score forall other games are dropped to accommodate for this better game.

Since the audio/visual hardware is really the only factor which ultimately determines the quality of a game, ratings should be adjusted accordingly whenever new hardware is out in the market.

Another way to display ratings could be to show the original rating (which remains constant and doesn't change over time) and also give a dynamic rating, which keeps changing as time changes to accommodate when better games and better hardware is released.

I know it would be impossible to keep changing the rating every day for every game manually, but there could be some sort of automatic script that could do this which alters ratings of all games whenever better games and better hardware is out.

Any other suggestions?

This way, game ratings will be free from time. They will keep changing...badzed

In my opinion, once a game gets a rating, thats it. I dont see how a game can become better or worse.

That doesn't make sense. Games that came out originally would eventually drop to zero, despite how good they are, not just how good they were.

In fact, the review system is dynamic for the exact reason you complain about. Games are rated based on how they stack up against other games on the same platform and genre. So, in your example, in 1995 there might not have been other competetion...In 2002, though, there probably was, and the game may have been better in an evolutionary sense, it wasn't the only game getting better. Tack on the fact that it's a sequel and not original, and the score should be lower unless there was a dramatic amount changed.

I suggest reading the review guidelines, too. link

It's certainly something we've thought about doing, as the thing about running a website is that anyone can see any review at any time. But there's no formulaic way to do that because some games hold up better than others. In order to do this properly, you'd absolutely have to do it manually.

Instead, as we state in our review guidelines, you need to take the game's time of release into account when looking at scores. Standards for games change, which influences the way we score our reviews. So, yes, at the time of its release, Grand Prix II was a 9.5, and Grand Prix 4 was an 8.0. But, obviously,you can't directly take that to mean that GPII is better than GP4.