Metacritic weighting system report "wholly, wildly inaccurate", site says

News by Brenna Hillier Contributor

Published on March 28, 2013

A presentation at GDC 2013 gave a list of weightings purportedly used by Metacritic to determine how much a publication's review scores affect a title's average rating, but the site has vehemently denied the report.

The list does not come from Metacritic itself, but was produced by a team of researchers led by Adams Greenwood-Ericksen of Full Sail University. During a a talk titled 'A Scientific Assessment of the Validity and Value of Metacritic', Greenwood-Ericksen said Metacritic has confirmed it applies different weightings to various critics.

Looking at existing averages, the team or researchers created a hypothetical model of how Metacritic applies this weighting, and than checked it against the next six months of results, finding it "almost entirely accurate", according to Gamasutra.

The list of weightings has been published in full and you can check it out below, but Metacritic has responded by saying the information is "wildly, wholly inaccurate".

"They are simply their best guesses based on research. And here's the most important thing: their guesses are wildly, wholly inaccurate," a representative for the site wrote on its Facebook page.

"We use far fewer tiers than listed in the article. The disparity between tiers listed in the article is far more extreme than what we actually use on Metacritic; our publication weights are much closer together and have much less of an impact on the score calculation. Our placement of publications in each tier differs from what is displayed in the article. The article overvalues some publications and undervalues others. In addition, our weights are periodically adjusted as needed if, over time, a publication demonstrates an increase or decrease in overall quality."