I think it would improve the system, though it might not "fix" it completely. TW2 had a riduculous number of 5-star ratings (i think it was around 500?) prior to its release. Good grief.

My lesson learned is: if everyone gives it a bad review, it probably blows (MOO3). Otherwise, watch youtube videos of gameplay, read a synopsis of gameplay, and ask yourself "is this my kind of game?". "Good" reviews, while they might be genuinely helpful, are not worth the effort of sorting through the chaff.

Most helpful is to solicit opinions of the GOG community directly, but I don't think anyone wants to see a flood of "hey would I like this game whywhy?" threads.

I am a little irritated at people who review games on here from the perspective of "this was incredibly awesome back in the day." I really honestly don't care how awesome it was back in the day... I care how much fun it will be now. Simply emoting about how amazed you were by such-and-such game as a child, or how many hours you put into it 20-odd years ago is really not that helpful to those of us who are trying to pick and choose the games that have truly aged gracefully.

Those and the, great but I'll wait for a sale or too expensive reviews are incredibly useless. I don't want to take away to write a review pre-launch because someone may very well be playing the game at that very moment on their machine or recently. They are good old games afterall, not games that all copies have been removed from existence and haven't been played for years. If you figure a GOG should work, someone playing it post launch on gog but still use a disc or diskette version, those reviews should count too because they're reviewing the game.

Reviewing games badly because they lack free extras? Makes me want to chuck those people down a flight of stairs.

Oh yeah... those are bad. Don't see too many of them, though. At least I haven't...

I don't think there's anything GOG could do to make the reviews more fair. People just should make the decision not to review a game they haven't extensively played in the recent years, which they obviously are not going to do. People are always going to give 5 star reviews for those childhood favorites they haven't touched in 20 years.

The only way to go around this issue is to ignore the average rating and read the reviews. You can skip the ones that go "OMG I looooved this game as a kid I played it all night long BEST GAME EVER!" and just read the reviews that obviously have something relevant to say.

Blocking reviews from people who don't have the GOG version IMO wouldn't make any sense because it's not like the game hasn't been out for years already. In fact you would expect the first reviews to be reliable from people who *don't* own the GOG version. They probably already have the game and they've had time to play it, unlike those who post a review just five minutes after buying it.

EDIT: I wish GOG would reward those who post reviews that are voted useful by the community.

User review systems will always be flawed and never be reliable. They're cute distractions. If you want to know about a game on GOG I suggest looking up unedited gameplay footage on youtube.

Question: does anyone READ reviews? I've never bothered to write any because I've assumed it's a waste of time.

When reviews here turn into "The previous reviewer is an idiot" chains, they become fun to read. Otherwise, there's no point to them.
Although I do read reviews at GamersGate - they're the easiest way to find out about issues, bugs, useful tweaks and mods. You'd think people would write only "Great" and "Sucks" and grab their blue .50 or .15, but no. Weird.

If I come up a new game e.g. in GoG I am not familiar with, I usually go to check the user reviews in MobyGames. I usually find them somewhat reliable.

The problem with user reviews (compared to magazine reviews) is that sometimes mainly the people who feel very strongly (positively or negatively) about a game review it. That can give either a skewed or split view on the game, as if people only either love or hate the game. But then, strong reviews normally have more information on what was either right or wrong in the game, instead of mild "It was ok, I guess..." reviews.

On the other hand, the users are not pressured to make favourable reviews just so that their magazine can get extra perks (e.g. "exclusive previews") and ad money from the publisher in question, and they also seem to pay more attention to how e.g. the DRM affects the end-user, ie. analyze the final game, and not some review version that may or may not have same drawbacks as the final product.

The user reviews in GoG I don't trust as much because as said, some seem to praise any game just because it is in GoG (in order to support GoG), and review games they haven't played recently (or at all).

Let's not forget when the opposite happens with fanboys. Try giving slightly less than perfect review for Gears of War 3 or Starcraft 2, you will just stuffed with so many negative ratings yourself that no one will even see your review. And even though you might bring up legitimate faults the fanboys won't let you get a wise word in.
So it can work both ways and I'm not sure which is worse. Black and White, case and point.

Like other commenters in this thread, you assume people reading reviews have no clue. I for one seek out reviews such as yours by checking the "least helpful" reviews. Most are useless but some of the most helpful reviews are "not helpful". By rating them as "not helpful", fanboys allow me to find contrarian opinions. Otherwise they'd be hidden in a mass of reviews.

Lol, to be honest I do the same thing when reading reviews of popular games. I like how Metacritic an GOG organise reviews on this basis.

I read reviews. In fact, I'll often go through every review AND look at unedited gameplay footage before buying a game (unless it's an obvious purchase, like the recent D&D games, and even there I looked at most of the reviews before buying). And, on top of that, it's not unusual for me to go back and read reviews of games I already own. Finding out what other people have to say about a game is interesting to me, and sometimes getting someone else's viewpoint or opinion of a game's best features help in getting yourself into the right mindset for appreciating a game (which I've found to be very important, especially with very old titles that are pretty detached from modern mechanics and trends).