But to reply to your point, again – we are talking about what a recognisable tier of quality is.
Mario 64, Red Dead Redemption, Celeste, Breath of the Wild, MS Flight Sim – these are all games that plenty of outlets gave 10/10 to. I’m happy to go along with them all as 10s.
But I don’t like them all equally. I could rank them, and I’m sure you could, from most to least favourite. But I can do that while accepting they all sit in the same tier.
So to move from that tier to the next, we need an appreciable difference in quality.
In fact, we need an appreciable difference in quality between every tier, otherwise why would a game not have had the higher number?
And if we apply that appreciable difference in quality down from 10 to 9, then 9-8, then 8-7 – you’re at an ‘OK’ game.
If you’re not, then the tiers did not have an appreciable difference in quality between them.
Lets look at IGN’s ten point scale for an example of the desperation outlets go to in order to fill ten tiers:
10: Masterpiece. All good.
9: Amazing: Fine.
8: Great. That’s a synonym for amazing. And if a game is a recognisable tier down from amazing, it’s good, not great.
7: Good: belongs one higher. If the above is good, a tier down is OK.
6: OK: a game that has dropped four tiers from the best is not OK. It’s substandard.
5: Mediocre: Means the same thing as OK. They just wanted something saying ‘average’ to be in the middle so they repeated themselves.
4: Bad: they kind of skipped over sub par and the tier above is actually bad. The idea that a game five recognisable tiers down from the best is anything but bad is absurd.
3: Awful. It’s awful that this list is still going on.
2: Painful. A painfully tenuous synonym for awful that they have to use as there are two tiers left.
1: Unbearable. I’m sure it was unbearable for whoever had to write this to think of this many ways to say ‘it’s a dumpster fire, don’t buy it’.
Clearly too many tiers.