Gamers Needs Your Expertise

User Reviews Are Great!

No one loves video games more than gamers, and it shows.

This biggest problem with user reviews is that they take too long to show up after a game is release. A bad game can have a lot of hype and positive press, leading to lots of release day orders (or even worse, pre-orders), before gamers can figure out they've been lied to.

While we think user reviews are the best resource, gamers need something they can use to share their opinions on a game before it comes out. Right now, the conservative about video games before release is pretty one sided, mostly left to comment sections.

Game Sense uses an advanced scoring system to allow news stories and videos to count toward a video game's score before release. You can post videos and news stories, and other gamers can react to those posts based on how that post makes them feel about the game.

Consider a video game trailer posted on Game Sense. The trailer is over-hyped, and you can see through it. You can post the trailer, explain why it's over-hyped, and then react with a low score to that post. This will then affect the game's score negatively.

This gives gamers a voice before a game is release. One that they desperately need as great games slide under gamer's radar while horrible games with huge budgets are shoved in gamer's faces relentlessly.

By allowing gamers to react to posts, it gives them the chance to change the score. The score sends a clear message to other gamers whether a game is good or bad.

We Worked Hard to Reduce Our Conflicts of Interest

No surprise, most gaming websites have conflicts of interest.

There are three major forms of conflicts of interest plaguing video game media today.

The first, is game media's reliance on publishers. They depend on maintaining good relationships with a publisher in order to get access to information before other sites. Being the first to release a big story means tons of traffic, so maintaining these relationships is important. And part of maintaining these relationships involves treating those publishers better than the others and making sure not to anger them.

Game Sense is completely user-focused with only gamers making posts. This does away with the gaming site having conflicts of interests with publisher relationships.

The second major one comes from user review sites that also double as a store. These stores know that most people will buy a video game on impulse if it's on sale or there's enough hype, even if they'll never play those games for any amount of time (if at all)! So, they have little reason to try and convince you that you should not buy a game, unless it's absolutely horrible. Which means they have little reason to show you negative scores, reviews, or anything that makes the game look bad.

Game Sense works by finding interesting Amazon products based on what gamers are posting about. We don't collect any personal information while doing this. We believe this to be far superior, because it shows gamers interesting stuff based on what gamers have shown interest in. No personal information, no tracking, no trying to shove a game in your face to try and get it to buy it. Game Sense works backwards from most affiliate links, removing a popular conflict of interest.

Personal politics are completely unvoidable in the current year. There's a very vocal minority that seems to have a disproportionate amount of say in video games, and they love to inject their personal politics into video games and gaming media.

Game Sense is about freedom of opinion and expression, but the one place we draw the line is gamers posting personal opinion as fact. You are free to discuss how politics affects a game, but putting your personal politics into posts is not allowed. We want to build a place focused on video games, not personal politics.

Fake Reviews Are The Worst

But they're easy to spot.

Writing fake reviews is a big business, growing so large that even the FTC has had to step in for cases like Amazon. We don't think it's possible to stop fake reviews, the benefits for people selling things massively outweigh the cost.

Our solution to dealing with shills and paid, fake reviews, is to give gamers a chance to react to those. At Game Sense, a fake review can end up actually hurting a game's score based on gamer's reactions. Most user review sites treat all user reviews the same. Game Sense lets gamers decide on how a user review should affect a score.

Most fake reviews can also be spotted easily because the accounts are new and don't usually post about several different things. Game Sense rewards gamers who are active and posting, rating, voting, and commenting on games by giving their actions more weight. However, it's not a "social credit score" type of thing, it only checks how much you've contributed and your opinion or actions aren't used to decide anything regarding the authenticity of your posts.

Freedom Of Opinion Is Important

Knowing what games are good and bad starts with freedom of expression.

We believe in giving gamers the right to speak freely about their video games. The only situation where we have a problem is if people are using personal politics to attack or promote a game. These types of people have shown in the past to be extremely hostile and a net negative for gaming communities.

Game Sense is dedicated to giving you the right to speak freely about any games you want, and to say almost anything you want about those games.