Xbox Live – Let us rate the games

Ever wondered what game to spend your precious MS points on, new to 360 and confused as what game to buy because of the overwhelming selection. Bored of searching the net to try to find review scores of a game.

Then carry on reading.

While browsing through the Xbox Forums I came across a thread that had an interesting idea. One that is so simple, that would benefit 360 gamers across the world. It was a post from Belcaw, I liked idea so much that I contacted him and asked if he could expand on his thoughts, so I could share them with the world.

Here are his musings on a games scoring system that he thinks MS should implement.

Ideally all community games would have an option available on the main menu that would allow a 1-5 rating (stars or whatever). But this would likely be problematic since it wouldn’t be very good for games that are already out. So, in order to provide compatibility to all games (XBLA, Community, or even full retail), they could implement it similar to how peer reviews are done currently. Just open the guide menu, select the ‘Rate It’ option and you could then either select a rating level, or if you’ve already submitted a rating, you would see details on how you rated it, how your friends rated it, and how the community over all rated it. The rating info should also be accessible from the game details menu, the one that lets you choose to Play or Delete the game. This option would only allow for the game to be given a rating if the full game was purchased.

Games should only be rated by the profile that purchased them. This would prevent people from messing with the curve by creating a bunch of silver accounts on a single Xbox and loading the ratings.

Finally (and potentially most important) is that the Marketplace would have a new sort category to go along with New Releases and Most Popular; there would now be a selection to show the Highest Rated games. Now we gamers can retrospectively get a perspective on what games we may have missed out on. And gamers new to live would have a great place to access older content that they likely would have missed and/or ignored otherwise.

Belcaw seems to have thought this through for some time and I pretty much agree with everything he asks for, although I do like scores to be out of 10 rather than 5, but that is just my preference.

In an ideal world MS would implement this in it’s entirety, after all they have been quoted several times saying that they want the 360 to become a social platform and this would go a long way to achieving that.

I want to see this in a future dashboard update and I would love to know your thoughts on Belcaw’s ideas, I suggest that if you like them, you pass a link to this article onto your friends.

Do you know anyone of influence at MS you could pass this piece onto?

I know the following people are on twitter majornelson, AceyBongos, MrPointyHead and SuperKaylo.

Trixie360 is the Xbox Live community manager and is also on twitter.

Thanks to Belcaw for giving us his time.