The average game quality rating has remained stable at approximately 82 out of 100 across 35 years of data. The 2020s are producing the highest average ratings on record.
Every year, someone declares that gaming’s golden age is over. That developers don’t make them like they used to. That the industry peaked somewhere between 2001 and 2011, depending on who you ask.
We checked. We pulled rating data from 5,000 games across 35 years. The average quality score hasn’t moved. It was 82 in 1993. It’s 83 in 2025. The golden age never ended. It never existed.
The Flat Line Nobody Talks About
Here’s what 35 years of game ratings look like when you plot the average by decade:
The average barely fluctuates. It’s 81.8 in the nineties. 82.0 in the 2000s. 81.9 in the 2010s. And 82.7 so far in the 2020s — the highest decade average on record.
If anything, the current era is producing slightly better games than any period before it.
More Masterpieces Than Ever
The “they don’t make masterpieces anymore” narrative collapses under the data. Games scoring 95 or above on IGDB’s aggregated user ratings:
The 2010s produced more than six times the masterpieces of the 2000s. Games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Undertale, Hollow Knight, and Celeste redefined what a perfect score could look like. The 2020s are on pace to surpass that with Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Hades already in the 95+ club.
The industry isn’t making fewer great games. It’s making more of them, faster, across more genres.
The Real Shift: Volume, Not Quality
What has changed is the ratio. In 1993, roughly 73 games in our database got enough ratings to measure. In 2024, that number was 166. The volume of games has more than doubled, but the top tier hasn’t grown proportionally.
The result: your chance of randomly picking a great game has stayed about the same. But the haystack is bigger. There are more mediocre games because there are more games, period. The signal-to-noise ratio feels worse even though the signal strength hasn’t changed.
Year by Year: The Consistency Is Eerie
| Year | Avg Rating | Games | Notable Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1999 | 82.3 | 122 | Chrono Trigger (re-release, 98.9) |
| 2005 | 82.3 | 124 | God of War |
| 2010 | 81.9 | 143 | Red Dead Redemption |
| 2013 | 81.2 | 202 | Grand Theft Auto V (99.7) |
| 2015 | 81.5 | 221 | The Witcher 3 |
| 2020 | 82.6 | 201 | The Last of Us Part II, Hades |
| 2023 | 82.9 | 165 | Baldur’s Gate 3 |
| 2025 | 83.2 | 111 | Highest single-year average |
Pick any year. The average is within 1.7 points of every other year. That kind of consistency across three and a half decades, through the transition from 2D to 3D, from disc to digital, from single-player to live-service, is remarkable. The medium changed completely. The quality floor didn’t.
What Actually Changed
Three things shifted that make people think quality declined:
Nostalgia bias. The games you played at 14 hit different because you were 14. The data doesn’t care about your childhood. It measures games against each other, not against your memories.
Visibility. In 1998, you heard about 20 games a year. In 2025, you hear about 200. Most of them are mid. The great ones are still there, but they’re buried under a mountain of content.
Monetization backlash. Microtransactions, season passes, and live-service models made people hate the business of gaming. That resentment bleeds into how they perceive quality, even when the game underneath is excellent.
The 83.2 Year
2025 sits at 83.2 average — the highest single-year average in our dataset. That number could shift as more ratings come in. But the direction is clear: the floor is rising, not falling.
The games industry hasn’t had its decline. The audience has had its reckoning with growing up. You didn’t stop finding great games because they stopped being made. You stopped finding them because you stopped looking with the same eyes you had at 14.
The data is right there. 5,000 games. 35 years. The average hasn’t moved. The golden age isn’t behind you. You’re standing in it.