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What do you think about metacritic?

Joined
Oct 14, 2013
Location
Australia
I don't mean any particular game on metacritic. I mean the platform itself.
It's quite the polarising website. So what do you think of the website?

Here's my opinion.
On one hand the platform itself is a great concept. Get the average of the critic and the user scores so people have a one stop shop to know if a game is good or bad. However this concept which is great in theory, utterly fails in practice.
How?

The critic scores are mostly from gaming websites and gaming journalists. It's well known that some developers have asked these people to add or remove points from their reviews and change the overall score if the developer feels it's too low. Square Enix and EA are two developers that have done this of recent. Also many developers just cease to send you review copies of games if you don't keep handing out high review scores. Because many people need these review copies to generate content that gets lots of views, they just play along and often don't give games the score they deserve.

The average user score sometimes is accurate and at other times way off the mark because of review bombing. 0/10 or 10/10 scores for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the game itself.

Can Metacritic do anything about this? Not really as if they shutdown critic and user scores then their whole point of existing goes away. This is just an experiment with great intentions that in the end failed because everyone abuses the system for their own gains (ie not fairly reviewing games).
 
I think it can go to hell.

I think it's terrible that companies hinge staff bonuses on games getting certain scores on that site.

I also hate that people flock to it to reviewbomb games. Reviewbombing shouldn't be a thing to begin with but sites like Metacritic give it a platform.

I've never put any stock into Metacritic. I stick with the small pool of reviewers and friends I trust if I need reviews at all.
 

Kirino

Tatakae
Joined
Jun 19, 2010
Location
USA
I like it overall. The user score can be inaccurate and untrustworthy due to review bombing, but the critic score is more reliable and usually lines up with my own opinion, more-or-less. It's always going to be overly simplistic to reduce so many differing opinions to a single number, not to mention controversy over which critics are selected and excluded, but I've found it useful as a general guide and as a directory for seeing various reviews with differing perspectives.
 

Spiritual Mask Salesman

CHIMer Dragonborn
Staff member
Comm. Coordinator
Site Staff
I don't check metacritic often, but I generally agree with the critic scores and it's list of highest scored games.

I don't think I've ever seen a game given a collective score higher than a 99, and that was for Ocarina of Time. Obviously, the issues you bring up aren't really a problem exclusive to metacritic, but with video game journalism in general.
 

Mellow Ezlo

Spoony Bard
Joined
Dec 2, 2012
Location
eh?
Gender
Slothkin
I don't much care for it. My thoughts on media and entertainment often differs from the popular opinion, so the scores don't mean much to me.

I do like occasionally checking it to see what critics think of games I like, though, just for the sake of curiosity.
 

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