Yeah different review systems can be a tricky thing. Watching what I said in retrospect, I think I misspoke and I feel I need to clarify.
It's true that the US grading system typically considers anything under 60% to be a failure, but with a lot of out of 10 systems on major sites, it's anything under a 5 is true levels of bad. So while I said that a 5 is poor, having examined a number of rating system guides, I'm also going with it means meh/average/middle of the road. But no one wants a product to be a 5 or meh, so in that way, it is kind of a failure.
Example:
https://corp.ign.com/review-practicesInterestingly, the UK grading system does seem to be kinder than the US one:
So there is a bit of a distinction between rating and grading, and after looking, I have yet to see an out of 10 system on a review site that considers 5 to be a failure. I just confused myself by conflating the two in the podcast.