Why Metacritic Should Be Irrelevant

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Warren Spector, the man behind games like Thief, Deus Ex and Epic Mickey, explains why Metacritic should be irrelevant. Definitely good reading.

Metacritic be damned - I'll take an emotional connection with players and the praise of Disney fans any day of the week. My definition of success - notably empowering players to craft unique experiences and offering players things they've never seen or done in a game before - were well served by games that unarguably Metacritic'ed poorly.
 
sounds like he's only interested in positive reception of his games.
reasonable, but certainly not practical.
 
I trust metacritic user reviews but aggregation of a bunch of bribed critics? ehhh not so interested.
 
A long time ago I saw the movie "the Happening" I based this decision on the fact that Roger Ebert (RIP) gave it a positive review. His review was horribly wrong.

Reviews are not the final word.
 
Considering how terrible the gaming press is and how often Metacritic gets raided by "users" trying to down-rate or up-rate games, it is pretty useless. There are some reviewers out there that I trust, but not a single one of them will give a game a score of any sort, they just explain what they liked and didn't like and move on.
 
He may not like Metacritic, but the publishers the rest of the industry works under certainly do. And as long as they care, what he says has no impact.
 
A long time ago I saw the movie "the Happening" I based this decision on the fact that Roger Ebert (RIP) gave it a positive review. His review was horribly wrong.

Reviews are not the final word.

With games especially, you kinda need to filter through the reviews and remove raw information from the highly biased opinions. And the number at the end is generally useless, since it never matches to anything else and makes no sense.

Unfortunately, depending on your source, all the information you end up with is that it is a game with graphics and you do things.
 
A long time ago I saw the movie "the Happening" I based this decision on the fact that Roger Ebert (RIP) gave it a positive review. His review was horribly wrong.

Reviews are not the final word.

I liked that movie. I also like a lot of movies that usually get bad reviews. :/

Reviews are a good way to judge overall approval, but not really the quality of the item. Sometimes, they are right. Other times, they are very biased and skewed in one direction due to public perception and not the actual quality, which may be very good or very bad.

CoD, for example. A lot of people here hate that game (cookie cutter style, same game/different maps), but it generally gets great reviews everywhere.
 
Adam Sessler talked about this about a month ago. I think it's a shame the pressure developers must go through for a paycheck when making a game. You don't see the movie or music industry saying you don’t get paid unless your movie/song scores a 80 or higher on Metacritic.

The Real Problem with Metacritic - SESSLER'S ...SOMETHING

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqeiN4pqTjo
 
A long time ago I saw the movie "the Happening" I based this decision on the fact that Roger Ebert (RIP) gave it a positive review. His review was horribly wrong.

Reviews are not the final word.

Sounds like you dont actually understand Metacritic. The whole point is to get an aggregate of opinions, precisely to mitigate the scenario with a single review that you described.

Aggregates give you a better sense than a single view. I think they work, because in my own experience looking at an IMDB or Rottentomatoes score after watching a movie, my personal rating for a movie or TV show is usually right in line with the average.
 
Just check SimCity 2013 reviews, whoever gave it more then 6/10 is not to be trusted.

P.S: I bought this piece of garbage, but at least I got BF3 for free and up until now I played BF3 way more then SimCity.
 
CoD, for example. A lot of people here hate that game (cookie cutter style, same game/different maps), but it generally gets great reviews everywhere.

When they "review" CoD what happens is (there's an article about this somewhere) they fly them all out to Las Vegas, meet them at the airport with gifts (personalized pilot helmets, etc. etc.) then drive them to a 5 star hotel where they put them up for a few days giving them more stuff. In the room is a console and they can play it if they get time between gambling and room service, then flown back home to write their experiences of the game (it's disturbing how none of that was made up...or exaggerated...).

Then every year, the games industry holds a reward show. For it's favorite reviewer. The whole review thing is so corrupt, people would have to be pretty foolish to believe any of them, especially as they are reviewing the products of the people who pay their advertising. :D
 
The way Metacritic averages scores is incorrect. A game review site that uses a rating of 1 to 5 to score games will rate games at 5 (i.e. 100% to Metacritic) more than reviewers who use a 1-10 system or percentage. Mathematically a 5/5 is the same as 10/10 or 100/100 but when you're talking about reviews they aren't.

As well as that scores from different websites are weighted differently even if they give the review the same score, and no-one except Metacritic knows how it works. So that AAA game that's really a bag of crap gets 90%'s from the IGN's and Gamespots (i.e. the mainstream low brow sites) and keeps the game at a higher average than it deserves.

It's too ambiguous, and can be very misleading. Don't use it, or just use it to see who has reviewed the game you're interested in and manually google for that review to deny them the ad revenue.

They have too much of a say in how reviews are being done.
 
Either use it or don't. There is no reason to hate Metacritic. I find it useful - If a game or movie is being rated poorly by a large number of reviewers, it's highly likely I won't like it either. If it's getting extraordinarily good reviews chances are I will like it.

You can choose to either go off reviews or go off purely marketing. Tin foil hat crowd is going to cry out that reviews are purely marketing, but it doesn't work that way. I never saw any of that after working in the industry and still keep in touch with some old coworkers (who were producers) and they laugh this stuff off.

Lastly, to the complainers; CoD gets good reviews because it is fun. If it wasn't fun 20MM people wouldn't be playing it. Personally not a huge fan, but I know plenty of people who like it.
 
The problem with public reviews is evident not in just the game industry but everywhere reviews are used. The issue is that is that most people that review something bad do not do it objectively and often do based on their emotional personal experience. This often does not give a proper or correct way to score a review. I can hate something based on personal preference but still see it is still something good objectively.

For an example of what I mean let a Newegg review. I see people on there that say they are an "Expert" in level of understanding technology leave a bad, one egg review on an item, but when I look at what their review had to say. It is clearly obvious the person is a complete and utter moron. Should this review have any merit or impact on the actual product. No, because the person is clearly a moron and should never be allowed to touch a computer let alone give any kind of public advise or opinion on it.

Same goes for game reviews. I am all for flaming a shitty game and letting the Publisher/Developer know it through reviews, but only if they are objective, honest reviews. Not, "Your crappy game makes my computer overheat and freeze when I play it." One star review. That kind of review does no one any kind of good.

Quote of the Day "Just because a million idiots all have the same belief or opinion doesn't make them right. They are all still idiots" 'SGTGIMPY'
 
I don't bother with reviews anymore. I've played games that had great reviews that I was unhappy with, and I've played games that were absolutely panned by critics that I enjoyed immensely. Same with movies. What really irks me is the habit of review sites giving a glowing review to an alpha build, then destroying a game when they have the full version. Wait... you liked it, but now you hate it? Everything you liked back in the alpha that's still in the full version you suddenly hate, or ignore, but instead nitpick on irrelevancy A, B, or C? Oh, silly me, game released alongside megahit super title X by OMGHuge publisher, so.... money talks, right? How much cash did you get to pan this game by OMGHuge publisher so that they can sell more units and squash the upstart competition?

Give me a demo instead of a review. That way I can be my own judge.
 
Lol is full of shit, what ever you think of Metacritic Epic Mickey did so badly that it forced the closure of his studio Junction Point, and cause Disney Interactive to Fire a lot of people because they were supposed to make a profit by this year or risk being broken up. Ya I'm sure having infinity moved back a month and some of the revenue ending up in next years profit instead of this year hurt. But it is all spin to cover up Epic Mickey 2 did worse than Epic Mickey 1. That was Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360 and PS3 sales vs Wii sales for Epic Mickey.

I can't give details because I'm sure Disney would sue my ass, but Epic Mickey had such a bad review because of fundamental issue. Non-progression bugs that were not found. Being forced to play through the first 15 minutes of the game with out access to the second player. Having to do a normal sync with the remotes to be able to get the second player. Not enough advertising. The Wii controls suck compared to the Xbox controls. I could go on.

I don't think DI is going to get broken up because I think Infinity actually is fun to play and I'm hardcore gamer. But I think that Junction deserved what happened. I don't think the people doing the work are at fault just the people making the decisions. I also think if Epic Mickey 2 had not flopped so bad a lot of people in other sections of DI would still have jobs, myself included.
 
I don't bother with reviews anymore. I've played games that had great reviews that I was unhappy with, and I've played games that were absolutely panned by critics that I enjoyed immensely.
When I was a kid, I never went by critics or advertisements for games. Word of mouth has and will always be the way people find out about games. I had magazines like Nintendo Power and GamePro cause it was like crack to me, and I wanted the latest info asap. Too often I find reviews that were totally wrong. Some games were trashed badly by reviews, but turns out were alright games. The worst is reviews that say this game is good, but turns out to be trash.

A good example of this is Dark Souls for PC. God damn is the port done so badly, but the game so good. I got the game and put it away for a while, cause I couldn't deal with the controls, but kept hearing from word of mouth on how good it is. So I got some mods that increase the texture quality setting, and fixed the controls so the mouse didn't feel like a joystick. Well worth the trouble to install those mods to fix this badly ported PC game. The reviews for the PC version should have done more research on the mods, cause it does make the game playable.
Give me a demo instead of a review. That way I can be my own judge.
This, so much of this. I know game companies are afraid that I'll find out it's a terrible game, which means they'll lose out in a sale. It doesn't really matter, cause I will find out.

Firstly, I'll always assume it's a bad game first. I need convincing that it's any good. Which only works against you anyway, cause I usually just wait for other people to play it, and if they find the game is awesome, then I may look to buy it. By that time, the game would have dropped enough in price, which again works for me. Rarely do I buy games above $30. The last time I did that was Diablo 3, and that was a huge mistake on my end. Which sadly, that game is still $60.

With a demo, if I find the game truly good, then I might just buy it fresh on the store shelf for $60.
 
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