Apparently these few lines have turned the world upside down:
Go to Metacritic, which is destroying the video game industry, by the way, and check out the Tomb Raider: Underworld’s metascore. Right now it’s 78. That’s not good enough, apparently.
Which is to say that I dislike the practice of aggregating review scores, be it on Metacritic, Game Rankings, Rotten Tomatoes, etc. You can’t quantify opinion to begin with, assigning a numerical value to how you feel about a game—if you can tell me the difference between an 9.0 and a 9.1 you deserve a biscuit—but then to average several opinions together and wind up with a nice, neat “metascore” is absurd.
Twenty people reviewed this game, so we’re going to take their non-connected opinions, average them together, and come up with a single number that, magically, represents a game’s full worth.
I just don’t buy it, sorry.
(Specific to Metacritic, who made this site’s editors kingmakers? What magic formula do they use to assign weights to the different sites? To that end, what makes one review any more “valuable,” thus weighted more heavily, than another’s? I could go on GameFaqs and read a fan review of a game and learn just as much about the gameplay experience as I can by going to any one of the big gaming sites—IGN, GameSpot, and so on.)
As for the actual phrase, “destroying the industry,” that was meant to convey my annoyance at seeing things like “92/100 on Metacritic!” I see in advertisements. Again, that artificial number means absolutely nothing to me. Never mind that it’s an open secret that game publishers often times use a Metacritic score as a stick—your game had better get a Metacritic score of [XYZ] or you can forget about royalties.
I thank you for your time.
Newegg, Amazon, and many other companies aggregate reviews. The average is an interesting value since it gives you an idea of general trends. You then have the option to read a selection of reviews. It’s rare to find a movie or game reviewer you agree with 100% for a variety of reasons so it’s good to see the positive and the negative so you can make a more informed opinion.
Some game reviewers will get caught up in trivial issues and use that to batter a game. Others will overlook key flaws and give a game a glowing review. The more varied the reviews the more you know to take care before buying.
If every game reviewer pans a game, then it’s a pretty good sign you might want to stay away.
Far better to use these sites than to rely on folks at Penny Arcade or Shacknews who gush about mediocre games in the hopes of getting the social support they need to appreciate the purchase they made.
Aggregators will always be useful. But it’s up to the reader to make best use of them.
As a past employee of a very large game developer/publisher, I was explicity told that there was a direct correlation between revenue and Metacritic score. Right or wrong (and there’s no argument from me on your points above), the truth of the relationship remains. Higher score means more money. Until that connective tissue is dissolved, expect Metacritic and its ilk to keep steaming along, even with dubious value.
Being in the industry myself, it is common for independent game developers next gig to depend on it’s last product’s Metacritic score.
For the uninitiated, game developers actually make the products, and game publishers generally fund, market and distribute them. A product’s success or failure depends not only the developer’s execution, but the publisher’s control (they have all the cards). If a game is misdirected or unsupported via marketing by a publisher, this also leads to low Metacritic scores.
So the developer Metacritic fate – whether the developer is competent or not – is largely in the hands of the publisher.
All told, your “industry killing” description is apt, given that those actually making the products are being driven out of business largely due to Metacritic’s influence.
Agree with Detlev – it depends on what you use the Metacritic score for. The author is missing the value that many of us do derive.
The Metacritic score for a game title is very highly correlated with sales for that title and highly predictive of sales.
Would I personally buy a game based on a high metacritic score? No.
Would I bet that on a games ‘box office’ base on metacritic score? Yes.
I find it odd, and somewhat disturbing that people are actually forwarding the argument that a good metacritic score equates to good sales, therefore it is an important metric. You know what else equates to good sales? How big an ad budget you have for your product.
In fact, it takes a huge leap of faith to say that the review score has any effect on sales at all, given how closely game review scores seem to track ad budget. Just doing a quick check of several AAA titles, I had a really hard time finding a single one with a score under 80. Even big budget games universally accepted by critics as being far from one of the best games ever, still came in with scores of 80 or above. Even in series where some titles are universally accepted as being far superior to other installments of the series, the entire point range of the series is rarely over 5 points.
What is even more interesting is to see how radically scores of the same game fluctuate based on platform, and how heavily it was advertised on the given platform. Not to get too specific, but a few examples would be Halo 2 Xbox: 95 PC: 72, Skies of Arcadia Dreamcast: 93 Gamecube: 84, Grandia II Dreamcast: 89, PS2: 68, PC: 70. These are the same games, just with different release dates, and different marketing budgets. Sure, there might be some porting differences, but 20 or 30 points worth?
The argument seems to be:
Good scores = good sales = good game = scores are an important measure of the quality of the game.
However, you could just as well have the scenario where:
Good ad budget = good sales = good scores = scores are just another part of a publisher’s advertising arsenal, and have nothing to do with the quality of the game.
I have to agree with the author that scores have almost no meaning. At best they might be seen as a gauge of how popular a game is (which is in no way the same as how good a game is), and at worst they are just a metric judging how many ad dollars the publisher had to throw around.
L. M. Lloyd,
Did you actually read what anyone said? No one has said they would use a metacritic score to judge how good a game was to play, how much they would enjoy it.
Read what I said. Games with good metacritic scores sell more. I highly doubt this is a causal relationship, its not the metacritic score that is causing the sales. Could be a good game, or good advertising, or whatever…
Doesn’t matter, the score predicts sales relatively well.
So do you have a good source that discloses advertising budgets by title that I can use instead of metacritic?
I’m not sure I understand the nature of the argument against assigning a numeric value to game preferences. Sure, there is the problem of the heap or problem of the beard as they talk about in philosophy (IE no one can point out at what point a number of grains or a number of hairs on a face become a heap or beard respectively). So, sure, we can’t say all that well the difference between 9.0 and 9.1. That doesn’t mean there is no discernable difference between 8.0 and 9.0–quantification is fuzzy, but that doesn’t mean it is not useful.
In fact, its being fuzzy is the best possible argument FOR using critic compilers: if the difference between fuzzy values is often a case of ‘what the reviewer had for breakfast’, compiling and averaging is the most likely to yield an accurate and consistent metric for a game’s overall value.
So sure, we all have trouble picking out the difference between two colors which are right next to one another on the color wheel, but that doesn’t mean we lack color vision.
To the author of this article: learn not to extend your claims so far beyond the strength of your arguments that you come off as simply absurd.