Tag Archives: metacritic

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.

Electronic Entertainment Design and Research has compiled a graph that says Nintendo has the highest Metacritic full-price software average of all publishers, as seen on Kotaku. The firm beats Microsoft into second place, who leads 2K at third.

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