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).
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).