After doing a bit of legwork to confirm the reviews were posted by employees, the site contacted Telltale, which said it doesn’t make a habit out of censoring its employees’ online actions.

“However, it is being communicated internally that anyone who posts in an industry forum will acknowledge that they are a Telltale employee,” said the spokesperson. “In this instance, two people who were proud of the game they worked on, posted positively on Metacritic under recognizable online forum and XBLA account names.”

As of this post, there are only three critic reviews posted to Metacritic, with Cheat Code Central handing it a 6/10, Game Informer giving it a 5, and 1UP doling out a D plus.

User reviews, are a different story all together, and when combined – even with the now five 10/10 scores, and one 8/10 – the average score comes out to 4.3.

Speaking with CVG, Doyle wouldn’t comment on which publication it was, or what exactly these “corrupt practices” entailed, but said due to thus particular incident, the site has been enforcing a strict set of guidelines and said be believes reviewers can “absolutely be bought”.

“On one occasion I did discontinue my coverage of a publication’s reviews because of what I considered to be corrupt practices,” said Doyle. “There are many reasons why I would drop somebody [from games review listings]. There’s corruption – people can be bought, absolutely.

“It [comes down] to a number of things: It’s the quality of the analysis, the quality of the writing; do they have an audience; are they respected in the gaming community… is there a reputation for scoring integrity? Are they going to give a 4/5 and say it’s one of the best of the year, and then give another game 4/5 and say it’s really a letdown.

“I’ve got to see that they’re being responsible internally with that scoring. If they’re not – if they’re being irresponsible, or being contrarian or ridiculous, which happens all the time – I won’t pick them up.”

The co-founder has said some sites have been dropped due to the reviewers “not taking their responsibility so seriously”.

Doyle’s admission to CVG comes after his appearance on the ABJumpShoots podcast.

In an interview with ABJumpShoots, Doyle – who is also the games editor for the site – says that in order to get the balance right on review scores, reviewers need to “review all the shit.”

He mentions that review writers need to look at everything so it could “get that precision on the low end to reflect the precision on the high end.”

You can listen to the full interview at the link. Thanks, D’Toid.

Angry gamers have taken to the score-aggregation site to voice their complaints, with accusations that the availability of day one DLC is a “slap in the face”.

In addition, some PC gamers are unhappy about the game’s supposedly console-centric nature – an in-game message apparently refers to not turning off the ‘console’ whilst the game is saving. Further complaints have focused on the length of the game.

At the time of writing, the game’s critic score sat at 95/100 for the PC version, whilst the user-rated score was a lower 7.3/10 – 185 of the 729 user ratings were negative.

By contrast, the original PC version of Portal has received 2,071 user ratings, with only 38 being negative giving it a user-rating of 9.6.

It’s worth noting if you’re thinking of heading over to Metacritic that some of the user ratings contain plot spoilers.

It just goes to show that you can’t please all of the people, all of the time.

In case you don’t already know, Portal 2 was released for PC via Steam earlier this week. It’s available through UK-based high street retailer Game today and the PS3 and 360 versions available tomorrow, April 21.

According to Metacritic co-founder and games editor Marc Doyle, the firm has decided not to re-implement developer scores on the site because developer resumes are not as detailed as the site would like, and also because it believes the games industry doesn’t credit staff on projects the way it should.

Speaking in an interview with GI.biz, Doyle said Metacritic still plans to build a developer database, but will forgoe assigning any numbers to those listed in the future.

“We have no plans to bring it back,” he said regarding developer ratings. “Right now we just want to see if we can build the database, take a shot at it, see what we can do.

“If [developers] worked on 30 games and we can only show four and then we take on this score, which is really just an average of those games in our database for them, then that’s not fair. We discussed it as a team and it made sense to just drop that overall number whilst still trying to build this database which will be difficult, but we’re going to give it a shot. It’s needless to put that number on it though.”

Scores for individual developers have been live since last summer, but the addition was only recently noticed by developers. Some complained details regarding their development history was not included, or Metacritic didn’t cite specific releases.

“We’ve found it very tough in some cases to say who has been responsible for a game,” admitted Doyle. “I think that is an issue, of the industry not needing or not wanting to put that information out there. I don’t know exactly what’s behind that, I haven’t discussed that with too many publishers.

“If by this issue coming about in the last week all of a sudden the publishers and developers are like: ‘Yes, let’s standardise this whole system’, and everyone wanted to go out there and in every game attach their credits, then we could hire someone to simply input that into our system. But… I don’t necessarily see that happening and I don’t think you see that happening.”

“That’s ultimately the goal of Metacritic: What should I watch, what should I play? Not necessarily to fuel some larger discussion over what person is more worthy than some other person.”

We’re guessing it’d probably average, oh, about an 85.

After launching a system that slapped numbers on individual developers last week, Metacritic‘s elected to take the controversial career grader back to the drawing board until further notice. Games editor Marc Doyle explained:

“Although our credits database (which is powered by our sister site GameFAQs) is growing, as our users’ feedback has indicated, it is a work in progress and is not nearly as comprehensive as it needs to be to accurately provide a career score for these individuals. As such, we have removed that career score from the pages dedicated to creative individuals behind games on Metacritic.”

“We are still very much committed to building a credits database, and welcome your participation in that process,” he added.

Well, clearly. After all, Randy Pitchford is worth at least a 90 – what with those dreamy eyes and that… wait, that’s not what this is about?

All known credited developers are listed on the site now, and searchable by first and last names. High profile developers such as Randy Pitchford, Cliff Bleszinski, Peter Molyneux, David Jaffe and Richard Garriott each scored 83, 86, 82, 83, and 66, respectively, as an example of the rating process.

According to Gamasutra, Metacritic obtains the data through GameFAQs, and Gama notes that the information obtained through Metacritic’s parent is “far from complete,” as quite few industry vets told the site their “Metacritic page represents only a partial profile of games they’ve shipped.”

Metacritic notes that to keep the developer’s profile up-to-date, one needs to submit any changes or additions to their portfolio to GameFAQ’s.

One multiplayer developer told Gama: “Man, it’s bad enough games are judged by Metacritic. Now I’m going to be, too?”

Go look up your favorite developer’s score through here.

The top ranked game in the newly-launched section is World of Goo, with a metascore of 96 based on ten reviews.

Other notable high-ranking entries include Dead Space, NBA Jam, Tiny Wings, and Hot Springs Story.

A collection of other lesser-known titles have accumulated a surprising number of reviews and reached the higher ranks, which suggests this may be the app hunter’s new go-to for hidden game gems.

Thanks, CVG.

“Making good games just isn’t good enough,” Zelnick said. “I believe good is the new bad. … Games need to be great.”

“Unlike many other entertainment business – there are just a few – ratings by Metacritic and others’ reviews really can influence the success of a newly-released title.

“In fact, if your ratings go below a certain level, it can really hurt your ability to sell the title, and above a certain level can make a real difference in your success.”

Take Two clearly takes this seriously, and it shows in the company’s recent christening as Metacritic’s highest rated publisher.

“Our ability to have high scores over and over and over again is a huge competitive advantage, and that advantage drives sales, it reduces risk and creates profits,” Zelnick said.

Zelnick’s comments were part of a presentation at last week’s Wedbush Morgan conference, as reported by Gamasutra.

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The company had an average score of 77.5, with titles from Meta rated in its yearly Game Publisher Rankings in Best Overall Release, Best Original Release, Worst Overall Release and MetaCritic Users Favourite.

RDR was the Best Overall Release as well as Users Favourite, PJ Winterbottom was Best Original Release and Major League Baseball 2K11 was the Worst Overall Release with a “so-so” 52.

Second on the list was Nintendo with Super Mario Galaxy 2 being its best release with 97 scored for a company total of 76.1, followed by Capcom in third with its biggest release being Super Street Fighter IV and a company score of 74.5.

Microsoft and EA finish off the top five, pipping out Activision.

There’s more of the list through here.

Game Informer has given Halo: Reach its first review score, according to Metacritic, handing the Bungie shooter a 95/100.

According to the blurb posted on the site:

“Any disappointment series fans felt after ODST should be completely washed away thanks to Reach. Make no mistake about it – this is the true follow-up to Halo 3. It’s also a perfect way for Bungie to part with the series it turned into a phenomenon.”

Metacritic cites GameInformer’s October 2010 magazine as the source, with the review published on page 92.

That’s good news for Halo fans, then.

Reviews for the last Bungie foray into the Halo universe go live at 5.00am UK/midnight US – which is when the embargo lifts.

Halo: Reach is out September 14, officially.

Thanks: GamingHeaven.

MetaCritic has released its half-yearly report, showing an increase in review scores for the period, despite NPD reporting sales are down when compared to the same six months last year.

So far this year, seven titles have received a score of 90 or more while three titles – Super Mario Galaxy 2, Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect 2 – scored over 95 percent.

The top game in the same period last year was Street Fighter IV with a 94 percent average.

At the other end of the scale, 16 games received scores of 49 or lower in the first half of 2009, down from 25 in the same period last year.

The highest rated game of the year so far is Super Mario Galaxy 2, with a review average of 98 percent.

PS3 has beaten out PC, Wii and Xbox 360 to finish on top of Metacritic’s first annual Game Platform Power Rankings.

With five games included in the top 10 for the year, PS3 titles garnered an average Metascore of 72, with only 7 percent of titles created for the console garnering a “bad” score.

In comparison, Xbox 360 which came in third behind PC, its games averaged a Metascore of 70 percent, with 11 percent scoring badly with 51 more games released for the year than PS3. Seven of these games received a “great” ranking, while 10 on PS3 received the “great” rating.

While PS3 came out on top, followed by PC and then Xbox 360 – PSP came in fourth, followed by DS and Wii respectively.

Full thing through the link.

Via PushSquare.

A Cowen Group survey has revealed that game reviews are the “least important factor” to consumers when deciding on which title to purchase.

Instead, according to analyst Doug Creutz, gamers rely mainly on word of mouth and publishers should stop focusing on scoring a high review.

“We believe that while Metacritic scores may be correlated to game quality and word of mouth, and thus somewhat predictive of title performance, they are unlikely in and of themselves to drive or undermine the success of a game.

“We note this, in part, because of persistent rumors that some game developers have been jawboning game reviewers into giving their games higher critical review scores. We believe the publishers are better served by spending their time on the development process than by grade-grubbing after the fact.”

More through CVG.

Peter Moore says that user reviews pertaining to Wii titles are more relevant that Metacritic because titles that get a 70 can still sell millions of copies.

Speaking with Gamasutra, Moore said that when it comes to EA Sports Active, “We’re not going to Kotaku or Operation Sports on this one, we’re going to Amazon.”

“The thing is with the Wii, it seems to be for the gaming sites, it’s the last platform they review,” he continued. “It takes a time to get an actual review score. I would pretty much guarantee that just about every Wii game ships without a Metacritic rating because [reviewers] haven’t got around, to it or they’re not interested in reviewing it.

“I absolutely guarantee you, the thing we’re watching most closely now [with Wii titles] is things like Amazon – and I’ll go look at women’s magazines that have powerful websites, and then we look at what we call ‘mommy bloggers’.

“That’s where those people go for their information. They are not going to Metacritic. They don’t know Metacritic exists.”

More through the link.

Edge has posted its final format-specific review score graph thing, this one showing categorically that the vast amount of Wii’s games are pretty much terrible.

From Wii’s launch to the end of last year, four percent of the platform’s games have rated over 85 percent on Metacritic. That’s 12 games.

Fifty-four percent, or 155 titles, have rated below 65 percent.

We don’t really need to say anything else. Read loads more words on the matter through the link, should you need to.

GameQuarry is back, and instead of using Metacritic data to figure out consistency in publishers this time around, developers are under the microscope.

Scores were given a letter rating. A: 90 percent or higher (2 points), B: 80-89 percent (1 point), C:70-79 percent (0 points), D: 60-69 (-1 point) and F: 59 percent or lower (-2 points). Just like school.

At the top of the list of 1,700 companies? Visual Concepts, the Take-Two studio responsible for loads of 2K Sports titles, with grand total of 45 points. Ten of it’s games got an A, 40 were ranked B, 11 got C’s, 7 were given D’s and 4 were given an F.

The top twenty list is as follows:

1. Visual Concepts
2. EA Tiburon
3. Nintendo
4. EA Sports
5. Neversoft Entertainment
6. Konami Tokyo
7. Harmonix
8. Sports Interactive
9. Intelligent Systems
10. Valve
11. Rockstar North
12. BioWare
13. EA Canada
14. Criterion
15. Bethesda Softworks
16. Raven Software
17. Firaxis
18. Insomniac Games
19. Infinity Ward
20. Epic Games

GameQuarry has published a list of the most and least consistent publishers according to review scores. Rockstar is at the top, Ubisoft at the bottom.

The research firm assigned points to each scoring bracket in the Metacritic system. Two points were awarded for games in the 90-100 bracket, 1 point for 80-89, zero for 70-79, -1 for 60-69 and -2 points for anything with a Metacritic average of 59 or below.

Rockstar received a total of 19 points from 23 titles and Ubisoft received the lowest, with -148 points from a total of 237 games.

“Using this method, publishers who may have created stellar titles, would also be penalized for each low scoring game and given no credit for average games,” wrote the report’s author.

Dave Perry wrote on his blog that this data may provide an interesting argument over the validity of using Metacritic data in the industry.

“This is based on Metacritic data, and let’s just say many of my friends are having a VERY heavy discussion (right now), on the validity of the Metacritic data. (So this is incredibly timely and will add fuel to that fire for certain!)”

The report author did note that the data does not “reflect trends towards an increase or decrease in quality trends”.

A consistent publisher may be may in fact be trending towards a decline in quality whereas a publisher on the Least Consistent List may “trend towards an increase in quality”.

More through the links.

In response to Splash Damage studio director Paul Wedgwood’s claims that Metacritic pressure on devs was “ridiculous,” Sega Europe president Mike Hayes said that reckons Metacritic provides “objectivity into the business.”

Hayes added the caveat that the meta-review site needs to be used sensibly, however, if factored into future developer deals.

“The first thing is that we’re always trying to put objectivity into the business,” he told GI. “We’re a creative business, and how do you put objectivity into it?

“But at the end of the day publishers will always want to do that, particularly if you’re spending USD 20 million – you have to try and find that objectivity, and it’s going to come from how much it costs, when it’s coming out, and how good the game is.

“I don’t think you can get away from that, and Metacritic provides a service that gives you a part of that,” he explained.

“If you’re going for a high-end PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 game and you want to break out in the genre, or something like that, you have to target that quality – because otherwise you don’t have a hope in Hell,” he went on.

“There’s too much evidence that shows games which score below a certain level in certain genres are not going to cut through.

“However, there are other genres and other platforms where we wouldn’t put a developer against that score, because it’s more about the brand, the license, the release timing – it’s probably something that in the Metacritic basket of reviews, they’re not going to look at the same things that we’re going to look for when making a game,” Hayes continued.

“So when we’re doing developer contracts, we won’t say to every developer we work with that there’s a target in there. But where we’re spending a lot of money, and the score is essential to the success of the product, absolutely I think there’s a value in it.

“We value the scores that we’re given by the media – it’s a very good way of measuring it – and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for publishers spending that much money to have certain expectations of quality levels. But to demand it on absolutely everything wouldn’t be right at all.”

By Mike Bowden

Splash Damage studio director Paul Wedgwood has said that the fact some developers’ bonuses are dependent on a MetaCritic average is “ridiculous” and he feels the percentage scoring system on games reviews needs to be looked at.

“Personally I think it’s ridiculous,” Wedgwood told GI when asked about an instance where a dev team was require to get 9′s rather than 8′s.

“In the film industry, four stars is an amazing score. I think it’s a really good idea for a developer to go to a publisher and demand that they get an additional bonus for achieving a certain review score, but it shouldn’t affect their royalties or anything else. If you have a high-selling game, you have a high-selling game.

“We know that some websites score quite high and some quite low, but in general, all websites tend to score between 60 and 100. There’s never a 37. It’s as if that whole section doesn’t exist, so zero starts at 60, so three stars, and goes up to five. It’s just not really an accurate enough measure.

“I think that if anything, the games press should take the pressure off themselves, and just go across to star ratings, which for films is nothing more than a recommendation that you buy it, watch it when you get the chance, or rush out and see it straight away, and it’s your personal recommendation,” suggested Wedgwood. ”

It’s not a ‘score’. If that was all you did, nobody would hate you guys for it.

“Out of ten is a good start,” he went on. “Percentiles put too much pressure on a journalist to justify an exact score. It puts too much pressure on the developer to try and identify these criteria that lead to very specific point increases or decreases, which is not at all what the developer should be focusing on.”

More through the link.

By Mike Bowden

In an interview with 1UP, Metacritic games editor Mark Doyle has confirmed that user voting on games scores before they ship is to be banned from the site.

Doyle also confirmed that Metacritic’s registration process is to be bumped up so users will be forced to provide more information than just an email address.

“Even before the enhanced registration portion, we’re going to disallow voting on games before release,” he said.

The move comes after user scores for console exclusives such as LittleBigPlanet, Resistance 2 and Gears of War 2 were sabotaged by platform fanboys.

Had to happen some time. Thousands of fanboys have dragged Gears of War 2 and Resistance 2′s user ratings on Metacritic down to 2.6 and 5.3 respectively, despite the fact that only a handful of people in the world have yet to play either game.

Metacritic games editor Marc Doyle has moved the address the issue, posting the following on the Gear 2 page:

My advice for our faithful users is to focus your attention on the Metascore for this game and not the thousands of user votes, most of which have been submitted before said users have played the game. This is a gaming community, and if people want to stuff the ballot box, there’s not much I can do at this point. When we upgrade the registration requirements for participation on the site in the near future, this type of thing won’t happen. We’ll post the full legitimate user reviews upon the game’s release. As always, thanks for using the site.

Metacritic averages have risen astronomically in importance in recent years, and are now heavily quoted as references to quality by the biggest names in the industry. While this incident is limited to user-scores, it’s the first notable time high profiles games have been sabotaged in this way on the site.

Privately, many in the trade are exasperated by the use of Metacritic as a global average, as it makes no allowance for regional trends in review scoring. Put it this way: it’s not just readers that can be seen as rigging scores.

So, what do you do, Metacritic? Remove users’ ability to have their say?

Update: Looks as though LittleBigPlanet has fallen victim to this as well. Thanks, Shatner.

Peter Moore has claimed victory in EA Sports’ quality stakes this morning, by press releasing the fact that the sub-division’s games are, on average, four percent up year-on-year.

“Our laser-focus on innovation is paying off and we’ve gained a great deal of momentum over the past 12 months,” said the exec.

“EA Sports has delivered the top two highest-rated sports games of the current console generation in the past month – NHL 09 and FIFA 09.

“Critics are taking notice of the innovation we’re delivering to capture our core audience and captivate the masses with more approachable gameplay.”

Read the full thing here.

There’s another chart through there showing score-range for each publisher as well. Midway doesn’t do so great, as you’ll see.